"Abstraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allegorically taken, its subject is man, according as by his good or ill deserts he renders himself liable to the reward or punishment of Justice." It is the allegory of human life; and not of human life as an abstraction, but of the individual life; and herein, as Mr. Lowell, whose phrase I borrow, has said, "lie its profound meaning and its permanent force." [1] And herein too lie its perennial freshness of interest, and the actuality which makes it contemporaneous with every ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... already familiar to her, bored him to distraction, and they had been in France but a few days before she discovered his indifference to the wonders which seemed of such importance to her. On the way over she had noticed his spells of abstraction. She had seen how quickly the shadows descended upon her husband's face when it was in repose. With an intuition characteristically feminine, she concluded rightly that Frederick's interest was not in her, that his attention was really concentrated ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... his desk in intense abstraction; but he soon observed me standing before him, and quickly arose with a hearty welcome, such as he alone ...
— Money Island • Andrew Jackson Howell, Jr.
... member was a little discouraged. He had the illusion that the two hospitals run in France for French soldiers by the Lechford Committee were an illusion, that they did not really exist, that the committee was discussing an abstraction. Nevertheless, each problem as it was presented—the drains (postponed), the repairs to the motor-ambulances, the ordering of a new X-ray apparatus, the dilatoriness of a French Minister in dealing with correspondence, the cost per day per patient, ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... up for it by smiling and looking pleased when I observed that they were laughing at some witticism which I had failed to detect. I was also very fond of inquiring into the nature of things and their causes, and often fell into fits of abstraction while thus engaged in my mind. But in all this I saw nothing that did not seem to be exceedingly natural, and could by no means understand why my comrades should ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... that sort of thing I think there is in Doctor V———-," pursued Churchill: "a touch of absence of mind, giving the idea of high abstraction, becomes a learned man well enough; but then it should only be slight, as a soupcon of rouge, which may become a pretty woman; all depends on the measure, the taste, with which these things ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... is not merely more consciousness, or more thinking; it is thinking of a radically different kind. The nonsapient mind deals exclusively with crude sensory material. The sapient mind translates sense impressions into ideas, and then forms ideas of ideas, in ascending orders of abstraction, almost without limit. ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... Lingua," the "Adore Te," the "Sacris Solemniis," the "Verbum Supernum," and above all the "Lauda Sion," that pure masterpiece of Latin poetry and scholasticism, that hymn so precise, so lucid in its abstraction, so firm in its rhymed words, round which is rolled the melody perhaps the most enthusiastic, the most ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... at us from his momentary abstraction, "for the first part of General Clinton's letter I must be brief with you and very frank. There are no recruits to be had in this vicinity for Colonel Morgan's Rifles. Riflemen are of the elite; and our best characters and best shots are all enlisted—or dead or in prison——" He made a significant ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... things, in a quiet, unexcited way, as if discussing some abstraction of the schools, not murder, was too wan and wasted, too shrunken and despairing, to afford a guess as to what manner of man he might have been, and too unkempt and ragged for any inference concerning his rank, having neither jacket, cap, nor shoes, matted hair and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... phantom-church: had he been himself pursuing anything better? He had been fighting for the truth: had he then gained her? where was she? what was she if not a living thing in the heart? Would the wielding of the sword in its name ever embody an abstraction, call it from the vasty deep of metaphysics up into self-conscious existence in the essence of a man's own vitality? Was not the question still, how, of all loves, to grasp the thing his soul ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... near the point of separation. There were mutual exchanges of surprises, but no one was pressed for explanations. A strange self-abstraction seemed to control all. Without many words, the four went together to the place where they had left Sir Donald. The party was soon on the lake, sailing homeward. Finding the carriage in waiting, they reached the Northfield ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... intellectual operation in man consists in an abstraction from sensible phantasms, wherefore the more a man's intellect is freed from those phantasms, the more thoroughly will it be able to consider things intelligible, and to set in order all things sensible. Thus Anaxagoras stated that the intellect ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... of all the evidence in the case, the General continued in the same position as before, and remained for some time apparently lost in abstraction. I shall never forget the singular expression on his face. I had been accustomed to see him in a storm of passion at any instance of oppression or flagrant injustice; but on this occasion he was too deeply affected to obtain relief in the usual way. His whole air was one of dejection, almost listlessness; ...
— Incidents of the War: Humorous, Pathetic, and Descriptive • Alf Burnett
... are living as happily as birds, in an absurd villa, and the former has taken to smoking. Otherwise he is unchanged—except, perhaps, there are moments when, alert and full of feminine unselfishness as the Major is by nature, he falls into a trance of abstraction. Then his wife recognizes with a concealed smile, by the blind look in his blue eyes, that he is wondering what were the title-deeds, and why he was not allowed to mention jackals. But, like so many old soldiers, Brown is religious, ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... latter descended to the forecastle, and walked aft, his hands behind his back, and his head inclining downward. Every one he met made way for him, as a matter of course. In that mood, he moved among the throng of a ship of war as a man tabooed. Even Winchester respected his commander's abstraction, although he had a serious request to make, which it is time ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... married, but lived with his maiden sister. Often have I seen the two walking arm in arm upon the streets and in the parks of the city. Neander's habit of abstraction and short-sightedness rendered it necessary for him to have some one to guide the way whenever he left his study for a walk or to go to his lecture room. Generally, a student walked with him to the University, and just before it was time for his lecture to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... throughout the Tuscan states, and the jealousy of the government of all who bore the mark of Ghibelline extraction, forbade the chance of successful exertion and honourable reward; his days were spent in moody abstraction, his nights in feverish dreams; his misfortunes, his accomplishments and his virtues failed to excite affection in the breast of his kinsman, who, jealous of the youth and personal attractions of the man apparently destined to be his heir, grew uneasy at the thought of benefitting a person ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... the sun is not common to many in reality, but only in idea; for the nature of the sun can be understood as existing in many subjects; and the reason is because the mind understands the nature of every species by abstraction from the singular. Hence to be in one singular subject or in many is outside the idea of the nature of the species. So, given the idea of a species, it can be understood as existing in many. But the singular, from the fact that it is singular, is divided off from all ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... followed by the dog. She went slowly—as if irresolute both as to the act and the direction. In both, the horse appeared to have his will: the reins rested loosely upon his withers; while his rider seemed wrapped in a silent abstraction. I was hastening towards my Arab, with the design of joining her, when I saw that I was anticipated. Another had conceived a similar intention. ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... world with glowing bits of color. Harry looked at them with a sort of pity. The magnified emotions of youth had suddenly made him feel very old and very responsible. When a snowball struck him under the ear he paid no attention to it, a mark of great abstraction in him. ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... manacle, you fetter, you log-chain the frantic impulse to write a pulverizing answer. You will wait a day or die. But in the mean time what do you do? Why, if it is about dinner- time, you sit at table in a deep abstraction all through the meal; you try to throw it off and help do the talking; you get a start three or four times, but conversation dies on your lips every time —your mind isn't on it; your heart isn't in it. You give up, and subside into a bottomless deep of silence, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... loveliness before him," are quite certainly a product of Grey's fancy, for Polynesians, as we have seen, do not speak of the "heart" in that sense, and such a word as "emotions" is entirely beyond their powers of abstraction and conception. Grey tells us that he collected different portions of his legends from different natives, in very distant parts of the country, at long intervals, and afterward rearranged and rewrote them. In this way he succeeded in giving us some interesting legends, but a phonographic record ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... mind and heart and soul I watched to see if she shrank from me. She was passive, yet tender as she smoothed my pillow and moved my head. A dark abstraction hung over her, and it was so strange, so foreign to her nature. No sensitiveness on earth could have equaled mine at that moment. And I saw and felt and knew that she did not shrink from me. Thought and feeling ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... in the arts, even when his mood may be heavy or disturbed; just as (to take their parallel in wines) strong Beaune will always rouse a man. But that which is cousin to the immortal spirit, and which has, so to speak, no colour but mere light, that needs for its recognition so serene an air of abstraction and of content as makes its pleasure seem rare in this troubled life, and causes us to recall it like a descent ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... however, that the whole thing was a pre-arranged episode, intended to dazzle me, though what earthly object he could have in taking me in was past my comprehension. When I looked at him he had finished reading the note, and his eyes had assumed the vacant, lack-lustre expression which showed mental abstraction. ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... chapter is forced to record. However, it could not have been all due to my health, for as my wise little notebook sententiously remarked, "In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off abstraction utterly separated ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... scruple to claim from the reader, occasionally, a higher consideration. At times, the narrative rises into a far higher key. Most of all it does so at a period of the writer's life where, of necessity, a severe abstraction takes place from all that could invest him with any alien interest; no display that might dazzle the reader, nor ambition that could carry his eye forward with curiosity to the future, nor successes, fixing his eye on the present; nothing on the stage but a solitary infant, and its solitary ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... means so much to him," said Lady Tynemouth. Yet she had seen the note of abstraction too, and it had made her wonder what ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... fortunes of the illustrious Garibaldi, I think that some of his compatriots would have been found equally inconsistent. Let no man believe that the noblest cause is fought out alone by the unerring motives of duty and devotion. The masses are never so constant. They cannot appreciate an abstraction, however divine. Any of the gentlemen in question would have preferred their biscuit and fat pork before the political enfranchisement of the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... of speculative abstraction I must have taken the wrong turning, for I presently found myself in a long, narrow passage. I did not remember. I was retracing my steps when there came the sound of rapid footfalls upon stone flags; a little door flew open in the wall close to me, and a small, thick-set man, huddled in the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the pot on the brazier, and seemed to sink into a reverie, with his enigmatic eyes, that took all and gave nothing, fixed on the burning coals. Mrs. Armine was motionless, watching him, but he never looked at her. There was something animal in his abstraction. Presently there came from the pot a murmur. Instantly Hamza stretched out his hand, took the pot from the brazier and the bowl of coffee from the ground, let some of the coffee slip into the water, stirred it with a silver spoon which he produced from a carefully folded square of linen, and set ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the live face of the girl. The picture hurt him. He kept it, he always remembered it, but he could scarcely bear to see it. There was a hurt to his soul in the clear, fearless face that was touched with abstraction. Its abstraction was certainly away ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... read through the "Cid" and "Rodogune." My impression is still a mixed and confused one. There is much disenchantment in my admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my enthusiasm. What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish tone of the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of listening to gigantic marionettes, perorating through a trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power in it, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... imperfection. The student knows that in the history of the doctrine of attributes, the recognition of negative attributes marks a great advance in philosophic reasoning. Maimonides holds that the conception of the Deity as a pure abstraction is the only one truly philosophic. His evidences for the existence, the immateriality, and the unity of God, are conceived in the same spirit. In offering them he follows Aristotle's reasoning closely, adding only one other proof, the cosmological, ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... excursions, flashed past, while the wonder of the club house, the links, and the work he would have loved to do developed, he shivered and cried in his tormented little soul: "Gee, how will I ever keep Lily warm?" Douglas noticed his abstraction and wondered. He had expected more appreciation of what Mickey was seeing and doing; he was coming to the realization that he would find out what was in the boy's heart in his own time and way. On the home run, when Douglas reached his rooms, he told ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter
... and eminently fruitful because, in subsuming a life under the general laws of relativity, it meets fate with simple sincerity and labours in accordance with the conditions imposed. Since man, though capable of abstraction and impartiality, is rooted like a vegetable to one point in space and time, and exists by limitation, piety belongs to the equilibrium of his being. It resides, so to speak, at his centre of gravity, at the heart and magnetic focus of his complex endowment. It exercises ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... or drink should not be taken very cold. If a considerable quantity of very cold food or liquid be taken immediately into the stomach, the health will be endangered, and the tone of the system will be impaired, from the sudden abstraction of heat from the coats of the stomach, and from surrounding organs, to impart warmth to the cold food or drink. This arrests the digestive process, and the food is retained in the stomach too long, ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... Iuppiter. How comes it then that he is not, and apparently never was, a god in the true sense among the Indian Aryans? Because, I think, his name has always betrayed him. To call a deity "Sky-father" is to label him as a mere abstraction. No mystery, no possibility of human personality, can gather round those two plain prose words. So long as a deity is known by the name of the physical agency that he represents, so long will he be unable ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett
... a witness of the performance of the magical art, and of the metamorphosis of Pamphile, I remained for some time in a stupefied state of astonishment. . . . At last, after I had rubbed my eyes some time, had recovered a little from the amazement and abstraction of mind, and begun to feel a consciousness of the reality of things about me, I took hold of the hand of Fotis and said,—'Sweet damsel, bring me, I beseech thee, a portion of the ointment with which thy mistress hath just now anointed, and when thou hast made me a bird, I will be thy slave, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... divine light of Mount Thabor, a memorable question which consummates the religious follies of the Greeks. The fakirs of India, [39] and the monks of the Oriental church, were alike persuaded, that in the total abstraction of the faculties of the mind and body, the purer spirit may ascend to the enjoyment and vision of the Deity. The opinion and practice of the monasteries of Mount Athos [40] will be best represented in the words of an abbot, who flourished ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... knowing her for a courtesan—talks of her purity in burning words, that seem to glow and enhance his love from his convictions of her virtue; then suddenly falls into silent abstraction, looking like a man whose eyes are filled with visions of Paradise. No pains takes she to deceive him; for he supersedes the chance by deceiving himself beyond measure. He either listens not at all to ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... to proceed in his table of goods, from the more abstract to the less abstract; from the subjective to the objective; until at the lower end of the scale we fairly descend into the region of human action and feeling. To him, the greater the abstraction the greater the truth, and he is always tending to see abstractions within abstractions; which, like the ideas in the Parmenides, are always appearing one behind another. Hence we find a difficulty in following him ...
— Philebus • Plato
... time to make it appear that he knew nothing of the abstraction of the gold from the cavern, but Tim would have none of it, and gave him the choice of conducting them to the place where it was concealed or of undergoing "capital punishment." Like the poltroon that he was, Hardman insisted that his companion, Victor Herzog, was the ...
— Klondike Nuggets - and How Two Boys Secured Them • E. S. Ellis
... discussion. He produced his stores of entertaining gossip, and prolonged his stay until all threatening symptoms of the excitement seemed to be allayed. The old man returned to his ordinary mood, and listened, and made his gruff comments, but with temporary fits of abstraction. After the Doctor's departure, he scarcely spoke at all, for the ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... amid all this acclamation of whole cities rushing out to meet him, eager to serve as his escort, under these arches of triumph which were erected to him sometimes even at the entrance of an obscure village, his abstraction was deeper than ever, and his heart more oppressed with care; for his thoughts were from this time filled with the expedition to Russia. And perhaps into this amenity of manner, this friendliness, and these acts of benevolence, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to the elderly clerk, who had been leaning against the shelves ranged with packages of cereal, surmounted by a flaming row of picture advertisements, regarding them and listening with a curious abstraction, which almost gave the impression of stupidity. This man had lived boy and man in one groove of the grocer business, until he needed prodding to shift him momentarily into ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... utterance has been quoted as a text for the anxious inquirer, and preachers have gravely set themselves to answer it. Jesus did nothing of the kind. Evidently it was not a serious inquiry. Pilate flung off the very idea of truth—a mere abstraction, nothing to a practical Roman. Still, though he was not seeking any answer to his question, by the very tone of it he suggested that he did not possess that gem which those who hold it prize above all things. "The Scepticism of Pilate" is the title of one of Robertson's ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... from the liquid to the vaporous form. It is, of course, well known that such a change can only be brought about by the acquirement of heat; and for the purpose of refrigeration (by which must be understood the abstraction of heat at temperatures below the normal) it is obvious that, other things being equal, that liquid is the best which has the highest heat of vaporization, because with it the least quantity has to be dealt with in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... form a part of the soil. If the animal should fall into the sea he may become food for fishes, and our atom of nitrogen may form a part of a fish. That fish may be eaten by a larger one, or at death may become food for the whale, through the marine insect, on which it feeds. After the abstraction of the oil from the whale, the nitrogen may, by the putrefaction of his remains, be united to hydrogen, form ammonia, and escape into the atmosphere. From here it may be brought to the soil by rains, and enter into the composition of a plant, from which, could its parts speak as it ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... in what doesn't sound so Utopian since we have experimented with it, that favourite dogma of the near-Socialists, the Government ownership of railroads. His main theory, however, appears to be some far-fetched abstraction which he calls the humanizing of industry—you've heard that before! Mere bombast, you see, but the kind of thing that is dangerous in a crowd. It is the catchpenny politics that has been the curse of ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... a minute after his titled friend had bowed himself out, Blake stood glowering at the door. The sharp crackle of a blueprint under the thrumming fingers of Griffith caused him to start from his abstraction and cross to the desk, where he dropped ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... infinite Spirit in which is found their reason for existing? We see thus appear philosophies noble in their commencement, but which soon descend a fatal slope. The divine, so-called, is spoken of still; but the divine is an abstraction, and apart from God has no real existence. If truth, beauty, holiness are not the attributes of an eternal mind, but the simple expression of the tendencies of our soul, man may render at first a sort of worship to these lofty manifestations of his own nature; but ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... pedantry creeping back over the ardent youth who had thrown it off so defiantly (as if Love himself went in for a degree at the University) Bruno developes, under the mask of amorous verse, all the various stages of abstraction, by which, as the last step of a long ladder, the mind attains actual "union." For, as with the purely religious mystics, union, the mystic union of souls with each other and their Lord, nothing less than union between the contemplator and the contemplated—the ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... read men. Quickly he put together the bits he had gathered from Harmony on the staircase, added to them Peter's despondent attitude, his strained face, the abstraction which required a touch on the arm from his companion when they reached their destination, recalled Peter outside the door of Harmony's room in the Pension Schwarz—and built him a little story that was not far ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Philosophy! Hail, thou poetical personification of wisdom! Hail, thou logical abstraction of all experimental knowledge! I hail thee, as thou art represented in the geniuses of Pythagoras, Thales, Aristotle, Archimedes, Ptolemy, Columbus, Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Euler, Buffon, Franklin, Beccaria, Priestley, Lavoisier, Cavendish, ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... "The world is made up of individuals. What is called "society" is only a lot of individuals. Therefore the individual is the only real being and society a mere abstraction, a name. As an individual I know myself, but I know nothing of society; I know my own interests, but I know nothing of what you call the interests of society." On the other hand, the Socialist says that "no man liveth unto himself," ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... organization of society which should fit it to be the container of this heavenly spirit. Did he think to "put new wine into old bottles"? Must not the spirit of Christianity create unto itself a body? It is a fruitless abstraction until it does. And this, if we read the signs aright, is the demand of this age. This is the tendency of all social movements. The material basis of our life, our social and industrial system, is entirely incompatible with the moral conviction and duties of this age. Our ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... and passed one of them to Romola. She accepted it with an air of abstraction and puffed slowly, blowing out a thin stream ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... tender interest that he had for all that grew out of the earth—worshipping, I used to think, at the shrine of life—or as he sat rapt in thought in church, or as he strode beside me along the uplands, or as he came and went in a hurried abstraction, or as he argued and discussed, with his great animated smile and his quick little gestures. I felt how his personality had filled our lives to the brim, as a spring whose waters fail not. It was not that ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a handsome, open lad, the Countess acknowledged. Aloud she said: "I dare say every woman loves to have a man fight for her. I do my own fighting, usually, but it's nice to have a champion." Her gaze wandered back to the hotel, then up the pine-flanked valley toward the Chilkoot; her abstraction returned; she appeared to weigh some intricate ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... stomach. It was filled with hieroglyphics, and was his own betting book. As for his brown-study, that was caused by his owing L100 in the ring, and not knowing how to get it. To be sure, he could rob Mr. Bartley. He had done it again and again by false accounts, and even by abstraction of coin, for he had false keys to his employer's safe, cash-box, drawers, and desk. But in his opinion he had played this game often enough, and was afraid to venture it again so soon and on ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... enough to Sylvia to touch her when her presence broke down his abstraction and drew his eyes away from whatever object they had been ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... lady yet, you know, Roger," Tip reminded him gently at last, and Roger, coming out of his abstraction with a quick smile, stepped to the foot of the stairs and called, ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... much attended to by every gay scamp who came near her. Oh no; of course not. But then, if that brawny negro in white had only known over whose arm and mutilated hand he was pouring light wine in his abstraction, he would have crammed that heavy cut decanter in powdered glass splinters down the chieftain's throat. There would have been claret of a different color spilled then—quantities of it. You needn't ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... to be satisfied on this point, made short work of rousing him from his abstraction. With a few leading questions he secured his attention and then without preamble or apology asked him with what purpose he had come to America and why he had been so anxious to visit the museum that he hastened directly to it from the steamer ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... child! Oh, forgive her, Eros! Why, love is of all passions the most essential! It is the embodiment of purity, the abstraction of refinement! It is the one unselfish emotion in ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... would as unquestionably entitle Ricardo to this honor as it would Malthus in that of the increase of population, spite of the fact that Ricardo may not have succeeded in finding the best possible form of the abstraction, and although Malthus even, in a one-sided reaction against a former still greater one-sidedness, was not always able to steer clear of positive and negative errors. Recent science has endeavored, and successfully, to examine the facts which contradict ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... nervous, looking at his watch every few minutes, and he ate almost nothing. He asked twice during the meal on what train Mr. Jamieson and the other detective were coming, and had long periods of abstraction during which he dug his fork into my damask cloth and did not hear when he was spoken to. He refused dessert, and left the table early, excusing himself on the ground that he wanted ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... awaited him on his old pillow. It was at first delightful to escape from the restraint upon his reverie which he had lately experienced. He leant for an hour over his empty fireplace in mute abstraction. The cold, however, in time drove him to bed, but he could not sleep; his eyes indeed were closed, but the vision of Henrietta Temple was not less apparent to him. He recalled every feature of her countenance, every trait ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... The abstraction of mind practised at La Trappe, and the prevention of all external communication with the world is such, that few but the superior know any thing of what is passing in it. It has been related, that so little information of ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... attributes, such as infinite wisdom, goodness, redness, hardness, &c.[4] He thinks that Sir W. Hamilton has made out his case against the first, but not against the last; that the first is really 'an unmeaning and senseless abstraction,' a fasciculus of negations, unknowable and inconceivable, but not the last. We think that Mr Mill makes more of this distinction than the case warrants; that the first is not unmeaning, but an intelligible abstraction, only a higher reach of abstraction than the ...
— Review of the Work of Mr John Stuart Mill Entitled, 'Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy.' • George Grote
... something to see Faith read that letter—or would have been, if anybody had been there to look. She leaned over it in a sort of breathless abstraction, catching her breath a little sometimes in a way that told of the interest at work. The interest was not merely what would have belonged to the letter for any reader,—it was not merely the interest that ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... Presbyterian or Congregational churches, next the Methodist, then the Baptist, and finally, the venom spread so widely, its influence separated other churches. What has the moral influence of this power done? It has made the abstraction of our slaves a virtue. Societies have been formed for that very purpose, inciting their members and others, by the vilest motives, to steal our slaves, to ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... transcends, for that purpose, what the proudest day can do.) Now, indeed, if never before, the heavens declared the glory of God. It was to the full sky of the Bible, of Arabia, of the prophets, and of the oldest poems. There, in abstraction and stillness, (I had gone off by myself to absorb the scene, to have the spell unbroken,) the copiousness, the removedness, vitality, loose-clear-crowdedness, of that stellar concave spreading overhead, softly absorb'd into me, rising so free, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... well-known Stock Exchange house were having a dinner conference at an uptown hotel. One of them appeared worried during the progress of the meal, and finally he was queried as to the cause of his fit of abstraction. ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... the angels are in peace." Round her image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged itself in awful order—and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction, but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari—no figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... ill, that she could contribute very little to his relief[798]. He, however, had none of that unsocial shyness which we commonly see in people afflicted with sickness. He did not hide his head from the world, in solitary abstraction; he did not deny himself to the visits of his friends and acquaintances; but at all times, when he was not overcome by sleep, was ready for conversation as in his ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the effects produced by abstraction of heat, we direct attention to the abstraction of moisture, we shall find that antiseptic or preservative results are easily obtainable. All kinds of bacon and smoked meats belong to the class here indicated. The watery particles are nearly ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... beyond her talents, for reasons either fortuitous or intrinsic. Let us take, for example, a woman whose relative navetete makes the process clearly apparent, to wit, a simple shop-girl. Her absolute first choice, perhaps, is not a living man at all, but a supernatural abstraction in a book, say, one of the heroes of Hall Caine, Ethel M. Dell, or Marie Corelli. After him comes a moving-picture actor. Then another moving-picture actor. Then, perhaps, many more—ten or fifteen head. Then a sebaceous young clergyman. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... He carried his abstraction a little too far, however, for the good lady soon perceived, from his wandering looks and vague replies, that she was not holding his attention. So she pettishly released him after following the direction of his eyes, and said, "There, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... Through his abstraction Balder felt on his hand a touch soft as the flowing of a breath, yet pregnant of indefinite apprehension. When two clouds meet, there is a hush and calm; but the first seeming-trifling lightning-flash brings on the storm whereby earth's face is altered. So Balder, full-charged ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... region of the soul. Consequently, the effect must appear to us as an average effect, as expressing an average of mankind. And, like all averages, this one is obtained by bringing together scattered data, by comparing analogous cases and extracting their essence, in short by a process of abstraction and generalisation similar to that which the physicist brings to bear upon facts with the object of grouping them under laws. In a word, method and object are here of the same nature as in the inductive sciences, in that observation ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... been so essentially her own that any departure from it only made her look still more altered. All this undercurrent of annoyance and distress added continually to the change in her face: gradually its expression grew more grave; she smiled less frequently; had fits of abstraction and reverie, which she had never been ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... aided so little in the search for her present habitation? The young girl could not reconcile such apparent contradictions, and while she sat perplexing herself by futile efforts to unravel these mysteries, M. de Bois was equally puzzled to rightly interpret her silence and abstraction. ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... elucidation of that mystery which hung about her birth, grew more needful day by day. At last, one summer evening, when they had managed a quiet walk upon the sands under the Beacon cliff, Charles said abruptly, after some moments of abstraction, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... it come about that alongside of the idea of ponderable matter, which is derived by abstraction from everyday life, the physicists set the idea of the existence of another kind of matter, the ether? The explanation is probably to be sought in those phenomena which have given rise to the theory of action at a distance, and in the properties of light which ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... young man I told you about who played my accompaniment the other night. We had got to the coffee, and the servants were gone, and the Graf had lit a cigar and was gazing in deep abstraction at the tablecloth while the Grafin assured me of his keen interest in music and its interpretation by the young and promising, and Helena's eyes were resting on a spot there is on my only really nice blouse,—I ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... long article (pp. 114, 115) on the meaning of Samadhi, which is one of the seven sections of wisdom (bodhyanga). Hardy defines it as meaning "perfect tranquillity;" Turnour, as "meditative abstraction;" Burnouf, as "self-control;" and Edkins, as "ecstatic reverie." "Samadhi," says Eitel, "signifies the highest pitch of abstract, ecstatic meditation; a state of absolute indifference to all influences from within or without; a state of torpor of both the material and spiritual ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... of the conflict. Is it not true, that there is in the very substance of the English mind, that which naturally predisposes us to sympathy with the Drama, and this though we are perhaps the most untheatrical of all people? The love of action, the impatience of abstraction, the equity which leads us to desire that every one may have a fair hearing, the reserve which had rather detect personal experience than have it announced— tendencies all easily perverted to evil, often leading to results the most contradictory, yet capable of the ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... and he was perhaps the truest patriot of any soldier in Miguel Lopez's band; for liberty, to him, was not a mere abstraction or a principle, but something real, tangible, alive—something worthy of the highest sacrifice. In his person all the wrongs of Cuba burned perpetually. It mattered not that he himself had never suffered—his spirit was the spirit of his country, pure, exalted, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... has become their new Gospel: liberty is henceforth the religion of the people. In this shock of opposing interests, all sentiments have become extreme—opinions have assumed the accent of enthusiasm. The country is no longer an abstraction, but a real being, to which we are attached by the happiness it promises to us, and the sacrifices we have made for it. To what point will this patriotism be exalted at the moment now imminent, when the enemies' forces ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... dead? I had heard of "the King" of course, but what it was I had never thought of. To me it represented strength and omnipotent protection, but it was an abstraction only; an undefined something of awful portent; and that it could die was very mysterious, and set me wondering what we should ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... at his neighbour and then in a shocked sort of way at every one else, for no one could quite make out who had uttered the word, and each wondered if, in a fit of abstraction, he could have done it himself. It unmistakably had been the voice of a woman, but whose? Hetty knew, but not by the slightest sign did she betray the fact that the woman who sat beside her was the one to utter the brief but scathing estimate of ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... and wiser than the rest of the world. Does not every Englishman feel this to be true of his own countrymen? It is consequently not absurd that Frenchmen should think the same of themselves. The French are intensely patriotic—country with them is no abstraction. They moan over its ruin as though it were a human being, and far then be it from me to laugh at them for doing so. When, however, I find persons dressing themselves up in all the paraphernalia of war, visiting tombs and statues in order to register with due solemnity that they intend ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... mean that it will reduce him to an abstraction of perfection, as ill-judged worshipers of George Washington attempted to do with him. Theodore Roosevelt was so vastly human, that no worshiper can make him abstract and retain recognizable features. We have reached the time when we will not suffer anybody to turn our great ones ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... is as low as ever, if not lower. The East End of London is an everspreading pool of stagnant misery and desolation, of starvation when out of work, and degradation, physical and moral, when in work. And so in all other large towns—abstraction made of the privileged minority of the workers; and so in the smaller towns and in the agricultural districts. The law which reduces the value of labour-power to the value of the necessary means of subsistence, and the other law which reduces its average price, as a rule, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... many readers because of its great divergence from the usual psychological treatment. The child's mind is considered as having four primary processes, namely: (1) Sense Impressions, (2) Recollections of Sense Impressions, (3) Association Channels (4) Abstraction Processes. As the child grows older these are elaborated into Imagination, Reasoning, and Expression. Attention is of three kinds: (1) Homogeneous Attention or concentrating, which consists in attending to one thing for a period of time; (2) Simultaneous ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... please our pride with the effects of our influence thus weakly exerted, and fancy ourselves placed in a higher orb, for which we regulate subordinate agents by a slight and distant superintendance. But, whatever vanity or abstraction may suggest, no man can safely do that by others which might be done by himself; he that indulges negligence will quickly become ignorant of his own affairs; and he that trusts without reserve will at ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... again, I had not a word to say, and for a moment we rode in silence. Observing, however, that this last turn had brought us far on the way home, I called the King's attention to this; but he had sunk into a fit of gloomy abstraction, and rode along with his eyes on the ground. We proceeded thus until the slender path we followed brought up into the great road that leads through the forest to the kennels ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... Buds pursued their art studies that afternoon with a certain abstraction. Peachy worked with her left wrist poised, so that she could obtain a perpetual view of the new gold watch that had arrived by post that morning; Delia frittered her time shamelessly; Esther was guilty of writing surreptitious messages to Joan ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... attributes of a beneficent Creator and Governor of the world. The first and original Being, in whom, or by whom, the universe exists, is denominated in the writings of Zoroaster, Time without bounds; [1001] but it must be confessed, that this infinite substance seems rather a metaphysical, abstraction of the mind, than a real object endowed with self-consciousness, or possessed of moral perfections. From either the blind or the intelligent operation of this infinite Time, which bears but too near an affinity with the chaos of the Greeks, the two secondary but active ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... quarter of an hour of my walk, I must have been unconsciously retracing my steps towards the house of Margaret's aunt. I came in sight of it again, just as the sound of the neighbouring church clocks, striking eleven, roused me from my abstraction. More cabs were in the street; more people were gathered about the door, by this time. Was all this bustle, the bustle of arrival or of departure? Was the party about to break up, at an hour when parties usually begin? I determined to go nearer to the house, and ascertain whether the ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... critically and turned up his eyes for greater abstraction. The wine was pleasant to the palate, ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... appeal to those who should know most about it. It is all those animals or plants which have descended from a single pair of parents; it is the smallest distinctly definable group of living organisms; it is an eternal and immutable entity; it is a mere abstraction of the human intellect having no existence in nature. Such are a few of the significations attached to this simple word which may be culled from authoritative sources; and if, leaving terms and theoretical subtleties aside, we turn to facts and endeavour to gather a meaning for ourselves, ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... she whispered blithely to the wife, who sat in a dull abstraction, oblivious of the hospital flurry. "And it's going to be all right, I just know. Dr. Sommers is so clever, he'd save a dead man. You had better go now. No use to see him to-night, for he won't come out of the opiate until ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... assumption of the divinity of the heavenly bodies which was common to the Academics, Peripatetics, and Stoics is really in principle an acknowledgement of the popular faith, whose conception of the gods was actually borrowed and applied, not to some philosophical abstraction, but to individual and concrete natural objects. The anthropomorphic gods of the Epicureans point in the same direction. In spite of their profound difference from the beings that were worshipped and believed in by the ordinary Greek, they are in complete ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... perfectly!" Harriet assumed an air of abstraction, of pleasant unconcern. Her red lips were firm, and closed firmly after the brief answer. The smoky blue eyes regarded Madame Carter with innocent expectancy. The girl was amazingly handsome, thought the old ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... stranger near the spring, she was seated alone in her bed-chamber. During the entire day she had endeavored to assist her sister-in law, in the various domestic duties, with her usual activity; which however it must be confessed, was mingled with much pensive abstraction. But after the tea service was removed, she had retired to her chamber, that she might in solitude commune with ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... shouted the announcement of her presence in the shop and finally startled the other girl out of her abstraction. The latter looked up, winked her eyes very fast, and began to roll up her work in a clean towel. Betty noticed that her eyes were very blue and were shaded ...
— Betty Gordon at Mountain Camp • Alice B. Emerson
... confounds our lukewarmness in His service. One of these was Sister Juana de Jesus, a native of the village of Binangonan de Lampon, [142] an oblate nun of our order, who elevated herself with the steps of a giant, even to the greatest and most complete purification of her spirit, by her abstraction from worldly affairs, by her heroic practice of all the virtues, by her fervent daily communion, and by the most lofty contemplation and the most clear vision that God vouchsafed her of the mysteries of our ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... can be no interposition of lofty abstractions which Men call principles and appeal to as they would appeal to a just God, Himself. No one but Mr. Bennett seems to realise that the relation between a man and his wife necessarily transcends every abstraction, brushes aside every ideal of "right" and "wrong." Mr. Bennett, in the course of the amazing discoveries of an amazing lifetime, has made the greatest discovery possible to mortals of this planet. He has discovered that marriage occurs when a man and a woman take the law into their ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... for though not evolved out of natural religion, but rather coming to it as a deliverance, Christianity is the crown and fulfilment and corroboration of the good and the true in natural religion. It is not a question of clear separation and abstraction, but of distinction, emphasis, and proportion. I believe that things not characteristically Christian have acquired a disproportionate place in our religion as handed ...
— Thoughts on religion at the front • Neville Stuart Talbot
... spirits had carried it off, as entirely reasonable and satisfactory. A good-natured Irishman, servant to Miss Turligood, who had come with a lantern to see her home, at length discovered this missing bit of apparel upon Miss Branly's foot,—that medium, as it appeared, having in a fit of abstraction appropriated three. Finally the lantern glimmered down the gravel-walk, and Mr. Stellato, with a lady upon each arm, was persuaded to follow it. It was waking from a nightmare ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... for the power that possessed the boy. A letter came to Bobby every other day. The spelling was not above reproach, but the sentiments must have been most satisfactory, for on receipt Bobby's eyes softened marvellously, and he was wont to fall into a tender abstraction for a while ere, shaking his cropped head, he charged into ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... his limbs shook; he sank once more on his seat, and closed his eyes: muttering, for the first time, perhaps, since his childhood, words of penitence and prayer. He was roused from this bitter self-abstraction by a deep groan. It seemed to come from the bed. Did his ears deceive him? Had the dead found a voice? He started up in an agony of dread, and saw opposite to him the livid countenance of Philip Morton: the Son of the Corpse had replaced the Son of ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... employing general conceptions.—This being granted, we are able to verify all our ideas, for, through reflection, we can revive and reconstruct the ideas we had formed without any reflection. No abstract definitions exist at the outset; abstraction is ulterior and derivative; foremost in each science must be placed examples, experiences, evident facts; from these we derive our general idea. In the same way we derive from several general ideas of the same degree another general idea, and so on successively, step by step, always proceeding ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... appears to me, that question has not been and is not a practically material one, and that any discussion of it could have no effect other than the mischievous one of dividing friends. As yet, whatever it may become, the question is bad as the basis of a controversy—a merely pernicious abstraction. We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union, and that the sole object of the Government is to get them back into their proper practical ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... were reckless. Physically they exhibited no indication of their past lives and character. The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blonde hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the coolest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice and an embarrassed, timid manner. The term "roughs" applied to them was a distinction rather than a definition. Perhaps in ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Robinson's Ferry, where he was to await the coming of the Summit coach. His mind, lifted only temporarily out of its denumbed condition during his interview with the manager, again fell back into its dull abstraction. Fully embarked upon his dangerous journey, accepting all the meaning of the trust imposed upon him, he was yet vaguely conscious that he did not realize its full importance. He had neither the dread ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... with a feeling of painful emotion that I stood on the deck, gazing with an air of abstraction at the preparations for the long voyage which were actively going on around me. Once more I was alone among a crowd of people, with nothing to depend on but my trust in Providence. No friendly sympathetic being ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... of sullenness, during which for days at a time she hardly spoke to me, and seemed lost in dark and evil abstraction, she once more, and somewhat suddenly, recovered her spirits, and grew quite friendly. Her gaieties and friendliness were not reassuring, and in my mind presaged approaching mischief and treachery. The days were shortening ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... exultation at his acquired and still-increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. He enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of analogy and of God—in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... 1st from you). You have made all your conclusions so admirably clear, that it would be no use at all to be a botanist (sneer No. 2). By Jove, it would do harm to affix any idea to the long names of outlandish orders. One can look at your conclusions with the philosophic abstraction with which a mathematician looks at his a times x the square root of z squared, etc. etc. I hardly know which parts have interested me most; for over and over again I exclaimed, "this beats all." The general comparison ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... the primary cause of his premature end. Emerging from some such fit of abstraction he became aware that it was after twelve. Convivial spirit that he was, he hurried to join his colleagues at their dinner, displaying remarkable agility as he descended the scaffold. But the effort caused him to perspire, and he took a chill, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... easily in their snare? Have you imagined that when I sent for Diego Martinez to come to me at Turruegano and instructed him touching the surrender of those two chests of documents, that I did not also instruct him carefully touching the abstraction in the first instance of a few serviceable papers and the renewal of the seals that should conceal the fact that he had tampered with the chests? If you have thought that, you have done me less than justice. There had been so much correspondence between Philip and myself, so many ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... not always be staring in abstraction at nothing in particular as it passed to and fro on the sidewalk in front of the Cafe des Exiles; one could not often or for long at a time succeed in reading a book held open in one's lap, below the level of the cashier's desk, Mama ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... the heavens and it flashed upon him that all things were one; the tumult of sense abated, and the mind found repose in the thought which former generations had been striving to realize. The first expression of this was some element, rarefied by degrees into a pure abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense. Soon an inner world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, which to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to pale before them, retaining ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... be unreasonable not to recognize within us the existence of a gigantic power, the effects of which are so incommensurable that the known generations of men have never yet been able to classify them. I do not speak of man's faculty of abstraction, of constraining Nature to confine itself within the Word,—a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as little as it does on the nature of Motion, but which, nevertheless, has led the Indian theosophists ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... aft to point it out to the skipper before it should vanish again. He looked in the direction toward which I was pointing, but was unable to see anything, his eyes being dazzled in consequence of his having been staring, in a fit of abstraction, at the illuminated compass-card in the binnacle. Neither could Lovell see anything; and while I was still endeavouring to direct their gaze to it, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... like the rest of us, to think mainly of the house. Now that all the living members of the family were plunged in irremediable sorrow, it was strange how we turned to that conjoint abstraction of the family itself, and sought to bolster up the airy nothing of its reputation: not the Duries only, but ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through the woods, and now and then between blueberry-fields or open spaces of meadow, with green water-lines and shadows purple with violets in the hollows. Red cows in the meadows stared at him as he passed, with their mysterious abstraction from all reflection, then grazed again, moving in one direction from the sun. The blueberry-patches spread a pale green glimmer of blossoms, like a sheen of satin in a high light; young ferns curled beside the road like a baby's fingers grasping at life; the trees, which were late in leafing, also ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a condition of profound melancholy or stupor, which arises from sudden mental shock, the mind being, as it were, arrested and fixed in abstraction on the event. ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... felt hat and clumsy, iron-bound boots: his clothes were dingy from long exposure to the weather. He had close-set, insignificant eyes, much wrinkled, and stubbly eyebrows streaked with grey. His mouth was close-shaven, and drawn by his abstraction into hard and taciturn lines; beneath his chin bristled an unkempt fringe of ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... lost the first part of Barker's speech completely, in her fit of abstraction, had some vague idea that he was asking her advice about ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... full glory of host and hostess too, for by a tacit agreement he had roused himself from his habitual abstraction, and had assumed many of Margaret's little household duties. While he moved about he was deep in conversation with the young sailor, trying to extract from him any circumstances connected with the natural history of the ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... species of horrified abstraction, from which I was recalled by some of our men running to the side of the vessel. They were about to lower the steam-launch. It was to be sent out as a torpedo-boat, and young Firebrand, whom I now observed for the first time, ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... exerted herself, as usual, to captivate him, and bring him to her feet. She sang—she played—she liberally displayed the graces of her person, and the charms of her accomplished mind, but still in vain.—There he sat, with folded arms, in deep abstraction, gazing at the elaborate ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... Galaxy On the pinions of Abstraction, I did quite forget to ax 'e, Whether you have an objaction, With us to swill 'e and to swell 'e And make a pig-stie of your belly. A lovely limb most dainty Of a ci-devant Mud-raker, I makes bold to acquaint 'e We've trusted to the Baker: And underneath it satis Of the subterrene ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... writer and illustrator. Larcher had observed an increase of the strange indifference which had appeared through all the artist's loquacity at their first interview. This loquacity was sometimes repeated, but more often Davenport's way was of silence. His apathy, or it might have been abstraction, usually wore the outer look ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... set out en grande tenue to demand his niece from the Duke de Quinet. This, however, was not till spring was advancing; for the pedlar had not been able to take a direct route back to Nid-de-Merle, since his first measure had necessarily been to escape into a province where the abstraction of a Huguenot nobleman's despatches would be considered as a meritorious action. Winter weather, and the practice of his profession likewise, delayed Ercole so much that it was nearly Easter before he brought his ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... entries, been defrauded within the four years next preceding March, 1853, of the sum of $198,000. The great difficulty with which the detection of these frauds has been attended, in consequence of the abstraction of books and papers by the retiring officers, and the facility with which similar frauds in the public service may be perpetrated render the necessity of new legal enactments in the respects above referred to quite obvious. For other material modifications of the revenue laws which seem ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... affairs were in progress, Napoleon, in Paris, was consecrating his energies with almost miraculous power, in developing all the resources of the majestic empire under his control. He possessed the power of abstraction to a degree which has probably never been equaled. He could concentrate all his attention for any length of time upon one subject, and then, laying that aside entirely, without expending any energies in unavailing anxiety, could turn to another, with ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... at full length in the chair, his eyes fixed in dreamy abstraction upon the ceiling. As I came towards him, he drew at the cigarette between his fingers, glanced at me, looked away again, and expelled another mouthful of smoke. He was ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... traces of such high faculties as abstraction, general conception, self-consciousness, mental individuality. There can be no doubt, if the mental faculties of an animal can be improved, that the higher complex faculties such as abstraction and self-consciousness have developed from a combination of the simpler ones; this seems to be well illustrated in the young child, as such faculties are developed by imperceptible degrees. These high faculties are very sparingly possessed by the savage; ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... indebted in kitchen, chamber, drawing-room, counting-house; at home and abroad, by day and by night, for gratification of the bodily and aesthetic taste. They were the almoners of science. Practical men would have no tools to work with if they did not receive them from those who, in abstraction, wrought in the secluded heights of scientific investigation. It is base to be ungrateful to the studious recluses who are the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... the actions of the organism, and of the outside world as well, from within. With the development of the special organs of sense, memory, and consequent ability to compare present experiences with past, with inhibition or the ability to decline to act on a stimulus, and, finally, with abstraction or the power of separating general from particular aspects, we have a condition where the organism sits still, as it were, and picks and chooses its reactions to the outer world; and, by working in certain lines to the exclusion of others, ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... of its disadvantages. It tends much to purge the understanding, to render it close in its investigations, and sure in its decisions. It introduces more easily and intelligibly than mathematical science, that most difficult of all the mental operations, abstraction. It imperceptibly enlarges our conceptions, and generalises ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... monasteries, the weak and timorous may be happily sheltered, the weary may repose, and the penitent may meditate. Those retreats of prayer and contemplation have something so congenial to the mind of man, that, perhaps, there is scarcely one that does not propose to close his life in pious abstraction with a few associates, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... shell thus left on her hands was no slight perplexity. Should she, as eldest daughter left in charge, demand the desk, Barbara would produce her reasons for its abstraction, and for this Janet was not prepared. Unless something else was wanted from it, so as to put Babie in the wrong, Janet saw no alternative but to secure the book in her own bureau, and watch for a chance of smuggling ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as Toby,'" said Letitia with a look half of inquiry, half of anxious abstraction. What Letitia could find out herself she ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... said the Earl; "very true, indeed." He spoke, however, as if in a state of abstraction. "Norton!—Norton. Do you know, John, who he is? Anything of his ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... in question was thinking thoughts as widely diverse from these attributed to him as one could easily imagine. Of himself, and his position, scarcely at all. And when he thought, he smiled; but the gravity, the abstraction into which he repeatedly lapsed, seemed to say for him that freedom was to him more than he knew what to do with. No volubility of joy, no laughter, no manifested exultation in deliverance from bondage: 't was a rare case; must ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various |
