"Conceive of" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to conceive of a life more suitable to the fostering of the imagination than that which little Hans was leading. Besides the play-house, and the scraps of dramas read to him by his father, himself a strange and dreamy man, we catch sight of an old grandmother, she who resided in the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... As soon as April 2, she writes, "Our school continues to prosper, and I love the children exceedingly. Do pray that God will bless this incipient step to enlighten the women of this country. You cannot conceive of their deplorable ignorance. I feel it more and more every day. Their energies are expended in outward adorning of plaiting the hair and gold and pearls and costly array, literally so. I close with one request, that you will pray for a ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... into her eyes, her hand still in mine, conscious that her cheeks were flushing. It was impossible for me to conceive of ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with them. He was so simply and naturally humble—if he can be called humble who never aspires—that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the responsibility on itself, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... highest and noblest of all human ideals. I cannot conceive of a good man who does not recognise that when he once understands it. The Anarchical Communists simply seek that men should live in peace and concord, of their own better nature, without being forced, doing harm to none, and being harmed by ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... Conceive of an old woman, broken and dying, supporting herself and four children, and paying three shillings per week rent, by making match boxes at 2.25d. per gross. Twelve dozen boxes for 2.25d., and, in addition, finding her own paste and thread! She never knew a clay off, either for sickness, rest, ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... monkey go through his grotesque manoeuvres, under the direction of a tutor who ground out music from a wheezing hand-organ, and have been willing to undergo the penance of hearing the music of the master, for the sake of witnessing the genius of the pupil. I can conceive of nothing more excessively ludicrous than many of these exhibitions. But I must not detain the reader from ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... said my Teacher, "how little your words have done. So far as the Monarch understands them at all, he accepts them as his own—for he cannot conceive of any other except himself—and plumes himself upon the variety of 'Its Thought' as an instance of creative Power. Let us leave this God of Pointland to the ignorant fruition of his omnipresence and omniscience: nothing that you or I can do can ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... temperament, or a wariness uncongenial to generous youth. Such an old man of the world is slow to believe in innocence at all, and it is very likely that to him who knew her so well it was impossible to conceive of Mary as an example of weak but spotless virtue. The Principal of St. Leonard's went over to Edinburgh a few days after the completion of that tragic chapter, when Mary had been consigned to Lochleven, and Murray had assumed the Regency. The city was still agitated by much discussion ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... powerful maker, in so wonderful a work as the human machine. I readily confess, that the human machine appears to me surprising. But as man exists in nature, I am not authorized to say that his formation, is above the power of nature. But I can much less conceive of this formation, when to explain it, I am told, that a pure spirit, who has neither eyes, feet, hands, head, lungs, mouth nor breath, made man by taking a little clay, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... for an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that Miss Vard might, after all, come to the studio at the appointed hour. Why should she? I could conceive of no reason; but the mere thought of what, if she did come, my absence would imply to her, sent me bolting back to Twelfth Street. It was a presentiment, if you like, for she ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... some men whose characters have been so wonderfully adapted to the peculiar crisis in which they appeared, that they seem to have been specially designed for it by Providence. Such was Washington, in our own country, and Gasca in Peru. We can conceive of individuals with higher qualities, at least with higher intellectual qualities, than belonged to either of these great men. But it was the wonderful conformity of their characters to the exigencies of their situation, the perfect adaptation of ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... welfare and that of his family from the welfare of his country; as, on the other hand, mostly happens when the monarch is elected, as, for instance, in the States of the Church.[1] The Chinese can conceive of a monarchical government only; what a republic is they utterly fail to understand. When a Dutch legation was in China in the year 1658, it was obliged to represent that the Prince of Orange was their king, as otherwise the Chinese would have been inclined to ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... some little Time fixed in our Seats, and sat with that Dislike which People not too good-natured usually conceive of each other at first Sight. The Coach jumbled us insensibly into some sort of Familiarity: and we had not moved above two Miles, when the Widow asked the Captain what Success he had in his Recruiting? The Officer, with a Frankness he believed ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... realize, in our imagination, the glacier of the mountain-valley crushing and marking the bed in which it moves, or even the plain on which it discharges itself; but it is impossible to conceive of a glacier upon the bare top of a mountain, without walls to restrain it or direct its flow, or higher ice accumulations ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... revelation. The young pilot could not conceive of a completely enclosed world with inhabitants forever shut off from the light of the sun by day and from the beauties of the heavens by night. Yet here it was, drawing ever nearer, a colossal monument to the ingenuity and handiwork of a highly intelligent civilization who had ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... it is not that; I could n't conceive of you doing anything so outrageously unjust. Could anything be more unfair,' I asked him, 'than to make me share all the animosities that Felix Page has engendered? Why, he is scarcely better than a stranger to me; my profound ignorance of his affairs is the ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely coalesce. But the consideration of the atomic constitution being now taken away, the nature of the mass inevitably glides into what we conceive of spirit. It is clear, however, that it is as fully matter as before. The truth is, it is impossible to conceive spirit, since it is impossible to imagine what is not. When we flatter ourselves that we have formed its conception, we have merely deceived our understanding ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... case. With fuller knowledge they have sinned scarcely less. Strict justice will be meted out by God to all, the Jew coming first and then the Gentile. The Gentile will not escape, for the Gentiles, whom we conceive of as having no law, have a law in that moral sense which makes them instinctively put in practice the precepts of the Law, and their inward thoughts accuse or defend them (ii. 1-16). The Jew may boast of his Law and his knowledge of revelation, but he is no better in practice than a Gentile. And ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... so quaint and so retiring, will nevermore see that calm which has ever been the yearning of your patriot sons! Many evils are now before you, but, of all the great calamities that might befall you, I can conceive of none greater than an attempt to convert you into ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... appreciable arts or sciences, it was barbaric. That outside waste of sparse and very inferior tribes was something of a menace upon the frontiers, or, to speak more accurately, something of an irritation. But that menace or irritation was never conceived of as we conceive of the menace of a foreign power. It was merely the trouble of preventing a fringe of imperfect, predatory, and small barbaric communities outside the boundaries from doing harm to a vast, rich, thickly populated, and ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... professional brethren the enviable title of "Machiavelli Junior." This performance, in fact, was the one now uppermost in the minds of the club members, having been the most recent of the series; and it had been prophesied by many men whose judgment was unassailable that no man, not even I, could ever conceive of anything that could surpass it. Disposed at first to question the accuracy of a prophecy to the effect that I was, like most others of my kind, possessed of limitations, I came finally to believe that perhaps, after all, these ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... his work. In another sense, our author himself in his concluding chapter betrays his anthropomorphism; for he attributes to the Divine Being wisdom and beneficence and forethought, which are conceptions derived by man from the study of himself. Indeed, I do not see how it is possible to conceive of Deity except through some sort of anthropomorphism in this wider sense of the term, and certainly our author has not disengaged himself ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... went to war against the Philippines rather than deceive them, because the Filipinos, who repeatedly had been tricked by Spain with unfulfilled promises, insisted on pledges which he had not the power to give. They knew nothing of what was meant by the rule of the people, and could not conceive of a government whose head was the servant and not the master. Nor did they realize that even the voters might not promise for the future, since republicanism requires that the government of any period shall rule only during the period that it is in the majority. In that war ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... all natty and jaunty and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em; Over-ornament ruins both poem and prose, Just conceive of a Muse with a ring in her nose! His prose had a natural grace of its own, And enough of it, too, if he'd let it alone; But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired, And is forced to forgive where one might have admired; 690 Yet whenever it ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... suspicion that it was not always the same game, and that it in any way resembled our game is not to be imagined. Base- ball in its mildest form is essentially a robust game, and it would require an elastic imagination to conceive of little girls possessed of physical powers ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... to conceive of the market-place at Athens as bearing any resemblance to the bare, undecorated spaces appropriated to business in our modern towns; but rather as a magnificent public square, closed in by grand historic buildings, of the highest style of architecture; planted with palm-trees in ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... I cannot conceive of a case where even the greatest intellect can conceive a story of crime covering years of duration, with constantly shifting scenes and changing characters, and maintain that story with circumstantial detail as to times, places, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the love which they are discussing is a personal love, which might expand in a rarefied form to embrace a man's native country, but which disappears before it can embrace an artificial state such as Austria, England, or Turkey, and which we cannot even conceive of in relation to all humanity, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... then in this way conceive of transparency in a solid without any necessity that the ethereal matter which serves for light should pass through it, or that it should find pores in which to insinuate itself. But the truth is that this matter not only ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... realized, what could be the nature of a secret that destroyed our happiness and could not be confided to me? What! to conceal it from me! And yet I could not find it in my heart to suspect her. The appearance of suspicion revolted me and filled me with horror. On the other hand, how could I conceive of inconstancy or of caprice in that woman, as I knew her? I was lost in an abyss of doubt, and I could not discover a gleam of light, the smallest point, on ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... in specie, by the association which issues them, on demand, and if not so paid will be redeemable at the Treasury of the United States from the proceeds of the bonds pledged in security." The secretary thought it would be "difficult to conceive of a note circulation which will combine higher local and general credit than this. After a few years no other circulation would be used, nor could the issues of the national circulation be easily increased beyond ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... they would at once give their adherence to the statement made many years since in his opening lectures in Oxford by the present Regius Professor of Medicine (as far as I can recollect approximately, in these terms)—that "it is quite as logical, and far more easy, to conceive of original anima as adapting itself to forms of substance, than of original substance as adapting to itself modes ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Carrigan thought of her in that way his muscles grew tighter, and he cursed St. Pierre. Marie-Anne might be hurt, she might guess that her husband's eyes and thoughts were too frequently upon another's face—but in the glory of her womanhood it was impossible for her to conceive of a crime such as he had witnessed through the cabin window. ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... do? I could not conceive of a wrong like this going unpunished. But my brain refused to plan, to think out what was best to do. I did not know the community well enough, nor enough of the laws to make a decision by myself. I decided that I must consult with Reverdy. I hurried away from Zoe, telling her on no account ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... great policy of conservation, for example; and I do not conceive of conservation in any narrow sense. There are forests to conserve, there are great water powers to conserve, there are mines whose wealth should be deemed exhaustible, not inexhaustible, and whose resources should be safeguarded and preserved for future generations. But there is ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... "that little lump of dust is going to pull us across a distance that our imaginations can't conceive of. And we'll be darned happy to see that pale globe swinging in space when we get back—provided, of course, that we ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... appearance of gods, as in Sappho's invocation to Aphrodite, must not be taken as poetic licence . they are frequently hallucinations. We conceive of a great many things, including the will to die, ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... window was softly closed. I had just begun to get over the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,—the clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of. It was not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and sometimes, I thought, of passionate ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... horror and by others with contempt. One of the most enlightened statesmen in Spain once said to me, "The provision for freedom of worship in the constitution is a mere abstract proposition,—it can never have any practical value except for foreigners. I cannot conceive of a Spaniard being anything but a Catholic." And so powerful was this impression in the minds of the deputies that the article only accords freedom of worship to foreigners in Spain, and adds, hypothetically, that if any ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... expressed a hope that we should hereafter know more of the brilliant stars around us, Mr. Adams replied: "I trust so. I cannot conceive of a world where the stars are not visible, and, if there is one, I trust I shall never be sent to it. Nothing conveys to my mind the idea of eternity so forcibly as the grand spectacle of the ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... cause remains a mystery, and it is frightful so long as the cause does remain a mystery, if the child lives to be a hundred years old. During a thunder-storm children will picture to themselves a battle going on above. Some think of the sky cracking or the moon bursting, or conceive of the firmament as a dome of metal over which balls ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... philosopher, occultist, or theologian. The Absolute could not have sprung from Nothing, and there was no other cause outside of itself from which it could have emanated. And there can be no cause outside of itself which can terminate its being. And we cannot conceive of Infinite Life, or Absolute Life, dying. So the Absolute must be Eternal—such is the report ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... chlorine, it is difficult to conceive that there should not be some relation of the three in the resulting molecule analogous to fixed position, the one particle of metal being perhaps symmetrically placed in relation to the two of chlorine: and, it is not difficult to conceive of such particles that they could not assume that position dependent both on their polarity and the relation of their elements, which appears to be the first step in the process of ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... nature looking intently 'before and after,' looking above, around, beneath, and finding silence and mystery to all his questionings of the Infinite, cannot but conceive of existence as a boundless problem, perhaps an inevitable darkness between the limitations of man and the incomprehensibility of God. A nature that so reflects, that carries into this sublime and boundless obscurity 'the large discourse of Reason,' will not narrow its concern in the solution ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... heights of wealth. Profits are always a justified return for productive labor; interest the payment for the use of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the middleman distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did not, or could not, conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at present. He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort. His natural order ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... out, by what does that rod, in the bent portion, take shear? Could it be severed at the bend, and still perform its office? The writer can conceive of an inclined rod taking the shear of a beam if it were anchored at each end, or long enough somehow to have a grip in the concrete from the centroid of compression up and from the center of the steel down. This latter is a practical impossibility. A rod curved ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... my entering, I opened the door of M. Thierry's office and walked in. All that despair, anger against injustice, and fury against falseness could inspire me with I let him have, in a stream of eloquence only interrupted by my sobs. The manager gazed at me in bewilderment. He could not conceive of such daring and such violence in a ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... not the recipient of the full support of the men of Pennsylvania. They cannot conceive of a man changing his views so thoroughly as you have. But this lack ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... like the child: that he is simply and altogether our friend, our father—our more than friend, father, and mother—our infinite love-perfect God. Grand and strong beyond all that human imagination can conceive of poet-thinking and kingly action, he is delicate beyond all that human tenderness can conceive of husband or wife, homely beyond all that human heart can conceive of father or mother. He has not two thoughts about us. With him all ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... cultivates blossoms of the soul, but manufactures objects of barter. Now is the happy literary epoch, when to be intellectual and omniscient is the public and private duty of every man. To read newspapers by the billion and books by the million is now the common law. We can conceive of Disraeli moaning that the Titan interests of the earth have overthrown the celestial hierarchy,—that the realm of genius has been stormed by worldly workers,—that literature, like the angels, has fallen from its first estate,—and that authors, no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... and dust—that it is difficult to trace any permanent markings on it, and thus ascertain how long it takes to rotate on its axis. Many astronomers believe that they have succeeded, and that the planet always turns the same face to the sun. If it does, we can hardly conceive of life on its surface, in spite ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... unhappy boy's arrest. Joey is trying to raise means with which to employ capable counsel for him. I have sent him a check for a thousand dollars, with the understanding that my name is not to be mentioned as a donor. Your father says he cannot conceive of Dick committing a murder. Nor can I. I have a strange feeling that he did not do it, but, of course, that is silly in the face of all that has come out. I am sorry for Dick. If David can find it convenient ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... been positively demonstrated, we are not entitled to reject it with any positive assurance. Even if we accept it, however, it must remain, for the present, an inexplicable fact; the modus operandi we can scarcely even guess at. General influences from the mother on the child we can easily conceive of as conveyed by the mother's blood; we can even suppose that the modified blood might act specifically on one particular kind of tissue. We can, again, as suggested by Fere, very well believe that the maternal emotions act upon the womb and produce various kinds and degrees of pressure on ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... house-to-house visitation by some government officer, with powers to enter every dwelling, to drain it, and ventilate it; and not only that, but to regulate the clothes and the diet of every inhabitant, and that among all ranks. I can conceive of nothing short of that, which would be absurd and impossible, and would also be most harmful morally, which would stop the present amount of disease and death which I see around me, without some such private exertion on the part of women, above ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... the matter or chaos eternal, it then follows, that either this supposed matter did fit itself to God, or God accommodate Himself to the matter. For the first, it is impossible, that things without sense could proportion themselves to the workman's will. For the second: it were horrible to conceive of God, that as an artificer He applied himself, according to the proportion of matter which He ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... habit Professor Bush, my principal at the Cedar Valley Seminary) received his seedy visitor with a kindly smile. I liked him and trusted him at once. He was tall and very thin, with dark eyes and a long gray beard. His face was absolutely without suspicion or guile. It was impossible to conceive of his doing an unkind or hasty act, and he afterward said that I had the pallor of a man who had been living in a cellar. "I was genuinely ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... before him at times, and also water to drink. It is a poor, weak human god after all, a dying, dead man. How different the Creator of the ends of the earth, Who fainteth not neither is weary! The Chinese have no conception of the true God. They cannot conceive of the beauty and power and compassion of Jesus Christ until they are brought into the light of the Gospel. But what is Chinese theology? What do they teach about the origin of the world and man and his destiny. The scholars tell us that ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... clearly exposed. As it is, he has not given us a large variety of characters; and Hester, Zenobia, and Miriam bear a certain general likeness one to another. Phoebe, however, is quite at the opposite pole of womanhood; Hilda is as unlike any of them as it is easy to conceive of her being; and Priscilla, again, is a feminine nature of unique calibre, as weird but not so warm as Goethe's Mignon, and at the same time a distinctly American type, in her nervous yet captivating fragility. In Priscilla and Phoebe are embodied two widely opposed classes of New ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... about it in advance, but what would impel or restrain him at the crucial hour. She put no faith in her own arts: she was too sure of having none! And if some beneficent enchanter had bestowed them on her, she knew now that she would have rejected the gift. She could hardly conceive of wanting the kind of love that was a state one could ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... equal in amount in opposite directions'; but this definition, though much quoted and circulated, teaches us nothing regarding the current. An 'axis' here can only mean a direction; and what we want to be able to conceive of is, not the axis along which the power acts, but the nature and mode of action of the power itself. He objects to the vagueness of De la Rive; but the fact is, that both he and De la Rive labour under ...
— Faraday As A Discoverer • John Tyndall
... Charlotte far beyond its apparent importance. She could conceive of no possible reason for Julius interfering in Harry's life, and she had the feeling of a person facing a danger in the dark. Julius was also annoyed at her discovery. "It precipitates matters," he said to Sophia, "and is apparently an unlucky chance. But chance is destiny, and this last letter of ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... which was curiosity based upon a strong belief in its own superiority. He did not know how he knew, but Shann was certain that the creature out of the sea was still entirely confident, that it made no fight because it did not conceive of any possible danger from him. And again, oddly enough, he was not irritated by this unconscious arrogance; rather ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... conceivable use this waste can be made to subserve. Before the railroad, that question had but a single answer,—the inculcation of contentment, by contrast with the most disagreeable surroundings in which one might anywhere else be placed. Perhaps it is over-sanguine to conceive of a further answer even now. If there be any, it is this: In its crudest state the alkaline earth of the Desert is sufficiently pure to make violent effervesence with acids. No elaborate process is required to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... had not been heard of in the annals of Roman society, and many ancient wisdom-mongers severely censured the course he had pursued. Could anything be more abominably unnatural? Was it possible to conceive of the hard-heartedness of a man who could stand quietly and see his son risk his ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... upbraided her though she deserved it not, hours of penitence could not blot out from his own remembrance the act of weakness and injustice: he pondered upon it long after the gentle girl had forgotten that ever unkind word had passed between them. Beings of a gross and fettered nature cannot conceive of a love so pure as that which Barbara felt for the mis-shapen Robin—so perfectly devoid of earthly passion, yet so faithful—so exalted—so devoted—so engrossing! She had looked so long on his deformities, that she had ceased to perceive them; and often paused and wondered ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... she stayed here, whereat he shook his head and replied, he supposed because of the "curse," since he could conceive of no other reason. He informed me also that her moods varied very much. Sometimes she was fierce and active and at others by comparison mild and low-spirited. Just now she was passing through one of the latter stages, perhaps because of the Rezu trouble, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... all stained with earth and with moss upon one side from shoulder to hem. He stood in the shadow of an oak staring at her with parted lips, for this woman seemed to him to be the most beautiful and graceful creature that mind could conceive of. Such had he imagined the angels, and such he had tried to paint them in the Beaulieu missals; but here there was something human, were it only in the battered hawk and discolored dress, which sent a tingle and thrill through his ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... while in that condition, if he was tempted to drift into actual wrong-doing, I should imagine that self-loathing and remorse would afterwards be a worse punishment for him than you could possibly conceive of. This is presuming he has done anything to be ashamed of. In that case, I could not be harsh. Love always ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... and their wives and their babies ate twice each day. He had said that they should continue to eat twice each day, and therefore his departure was a matter of no moment. They knew only that he had gone southward with the man of the soldier-police. This was doubtless as he had commanded. They could conceive of MacNair only as commanding. Therefore the soldier-policeman had obeyed and accompanied ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... pierced your heart, cold as a sword-blade: "Come, come!" says Robert, striving to drag Isabella away, ... and that simple word was made frantic, breathless, by the accent accompanying it. No one who has not heard Delsarte utter the word rival can conceive of all the mysteries of hate and pain contained in ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was prolonged till September, 1829, was the most fruitful period in his life, and of considerable consequence to literature. It is not easy to overestimate the debt of Americans to the man who first opened to them the fascinating domain of early Spanish history and romance. We can conceive of it by reflecting upon the blank that would exist without "The Alhambra," "The Conquest of Granada," "The Legends of the Conquest of Spain," and I may add the popular loss if we had not "The Lives of Columbus and his Companions." Irving had the ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... odours of the incense, with a satisfaction that never tires. I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination? If they who strip the worship of God of its factious grace, earnestly presented themselves in the garb of moral humility, rendering their familiar professions conformable to their general ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... a literary ambition which aims at falling just outside it. It is quite right to invent subtle analyses and detached criticisms, but it is unreasonable to expect them to be punctuated with roars of popular applause. It is possible to conceive of a mob shouting any central and simple sentiment, good or bad, but it is impossible to think of a mob shouting a distinction in terms. In the matter of eloquence, the whole question is one of the immediate effect of greatness, such as is produced even by fine bombast. It ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... theory of a lawsuit is the recovery of some material benefit, the lay mind is apt to conceive of great sums of money being awarded to a complainant by way of damages upon a favorable decision in an important patent case. It might, therefore, be natural to ask how far Edison or his companies have benefited pecuniarily by reason ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the fact that she didn't believe he would take the Sangraal that bothered him: it was the fact that she couldn't conceive of him taking it. She could be convinced that black was white, perhaps, and that white was black, and that fiends hung out in empty caves and castles; but she could never be convinced that a "knight" of the qualities she imputed to Mallory could ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... having weight equal to 152 lbs. avoirdupois. Such masses of pyrites are by no means uncommon in our drifts or the beds of our mountain streams. Thus we find that no straining of the imagination is required to conceive of this mode of formation for the huge masses of gold found in Australia in particular, such as the Welcome Nugget, 184 lbs. 9 oz.; the Welcome Stranger, a surface nugget, 190 lbs. after smelting; the Braidwood specimen nugget, 350 lbs., two-thirds ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... Judge Draper writes of the graded schools only. Could you conceive of a more stinging rebuke to an institution from a man who is making it his business to know ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this", what a bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... of the afternoon fresh in mind, Larcher had promptly identified this big-talking vulgarian. Hot from several affronts, which were equally galling, whether ignorant or intended, he could conceive of nothing more sweet than ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... not conceive of the force of will shaping out my ways," said the schoolmaster. "I walk gently along and take the path that ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 17 And no tongue can speak, neither can there be written by any man, neither can the hearts of men conceive so great and marvelous things as we both saw and heard Jesus speak; and no one can conceive of the joy which filled our souls at the time we heard him pray for us ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... can they exist, unless God has created them? And how can He create anything so wholly unlike Himself and foreign to His nature? An evil material mind, so-called, can conceive of God only as like itself, and knowing both evil and good; but a purely good and spiritual consciousness has no sense whereby to cognize evil. Mortal mind is the opposite of immortal Mind, and sin the opposite of goodness. I am the infinite All. From me proceedeth all Mind, all consciousness, all ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy
... this verse in this way—He is called Purusha, because of the attribute of fulness eternal, because he has neither beginning nor end; immutable, because there is no change in him; undeteriorating, because he has no body that may be subject to decay; immeasurable, because the mind cannot conceive of him in ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... the scene of pleasant memories. It seemed as if those deeds of the previous night, that long fight against fate, those dismal forebodings, the tragedy of the Prince, were all separated from us by a gulf of years. It was almost impossible to conceive of them as belonging to our immediate precedent past and as colouring our present and our future. And as my gaze swept the horizon for the orient towards the west it landed upon nothing ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... man of ordinary capacity soon develops efficiency for kinds of work which he would never have attempted in a city, simply because a city tempts him at every point to delegate his own proper toil to others. I can conceive of few things that would do more to create a genuine pride of home than to insist that no man should possess a house except by building it for himself, after the old primitive principle of the earliest social communities. To build thus ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... AEgospotamos. In no other like interval of time, and in no other community of like dimensions, has so much work been accomplished of which we can say with truth that it is [Greek: ktaema es aei],—an eternal possession. It is impossible to conceive of a day so distant, or an era of culture so exalted, that the lessons taught by Athens shall cease to be of value, or that the writings of her great thinkers shall cease to be read with fresh profit and delight. We understand these ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske
... better than myself endured. We were hastening to preserve from destruction the accursed viper who was to sting us to death. Thus, Heaven ordained it should be, and its ways are dark and intricate, beyond my comprehension, for surely it is against all the rules one can conceive of justice that a virtuous action should be thus rewarded. Perhaps you will say that His ways are inscrutable, and, that as we have neither the power, nor have we the right to attempt to read them, so we should not venture to cavil at His ordinances, but humbly believe ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... whole universe so far as it is cognizable by our senses. But we cannot conceive of force as acting, without at the same time conceiving of something on which that force acts. That something, whatever it may be, we designate "matter." We have not the slightest idea of what matter really is—no man has ever yet succeeded in separating it from its combination with force. ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... polytheism was that it saw something divine in nature. By dividing God into numberless deities, it was able to conceive of some divine power in all earthly objects. Hence Wordsworth, complaining that we can see little of this divinity now ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... smiled back at her, ambiguously; and Rudolph Musgrave laughed. "I perceive," said he, "you are a follower of Epicurus. For my part, I must have fetched my ideals from the tub of the Stoic. I can conceive of no nobler life than one devoted to furthering ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... or remote mountainous valley at a period when mankind had already existed for thousands of years. It is in vain that we direct our thoughts to the solution of the great problem of the first origin, since man is too intimately associated with his own race and with the relations of time to conceive of the existence of an individual independently of a preceding generation and age. A solution of those difficult questions, which can not be determined by inductive reasoning or by experience—whether the belief in this presumed traditional condition be actually ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... theatre the following evening. This delay would give the fugitives a start of twenty hours, or even more, and practically assure their safety. Besides, in the light of Waite's application to the sheriff for assistance, it was comparatively easy to conceive of a valid reason why Hawley should vanish, and desire, likewise, to take Miss Maclaire with him. But there was no apparent occasion for his forcible abduction of Hope. Of course, he might have done so from a suddenly aroused fit of anger at some ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... malignant, violence with which men preach, and lead on crusades, against special vices, proves them ignorant of, or indifferent to, the significance of virtue as a whole. It does not enter into their hearts to conceive of the beauty of that growth in grace which results in the complete stature of a man,—that is, of an angel. In their haste to produce great growth in some particular direction, they overlook the fact, that ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... possibilities of existence, I can conceive of no greater joy, I crave no higher destiny than vibrating in harmonious association in one sweet chord of love, with a companion whose nature is in all respects complimentary to ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... music,' she resumed later, building a little tent on the side of her plate with the debris of fish. 'There's Bartlett Browning, telling me the other evening a melancholy story of some melodious fishes, off the coast of—Weiss nicht wo; oysters, I suppose; conceive of it! the most phlegmatic of creatures. I suppose some poor fisherman heard a merlady singing in her green halls, and fancied it the death song of some of his shells. But that's nothing to some of Bartlett Browning's musical tales. The man's a perfect ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... must we not conceive of the industry and civilization of a people who erected those celebrated monuments, anterior to the annals of history, to the accounts even of tradition, those pyramids which have unalterably withstood all ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... impossible, in the cold light of the day after the passing excitement of battle, to conceive of troops successfully storming such intrenched positions But this is just what the Germans did, or thought they did, for their officers did not realize that the giving way of the French at this point was ...
— The Boy Allies in the Trenches - Midst Shot and Shell Along the Aisne • Clair Wallace Hayes
... savage districts in the Highlands of Scotland, there is a certain wild and romantic glen, called Eddernahulish. In the picturesqueness of this glen, however, neither wood nor rock has any share; and, although it may be difficult to conceive of any place possessing that character without these ordinary adjuncts, it is, nevertheless, true, that Eddernahulish, with neither tree nor precipice, is yet strikingly picturesque. The wide sweep of the heath-clad hills whose gradual descents form the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... presentiment.—On the other hand, by dint of living under this social system, we have become accustomed to it; it no longer excites our wonder; however artificial it may be it seems to us natural. We can scarcely conceive of another that is healthier; and what is much worse, it is repugnant to us to do so. For, such a conception would soon lead to comparisons and hence to a judgment and, on many points, to an unfavorable judgment, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... conceive of any modern activity which contributes more to the necessities and conveniences of life than transportation. Without it our present agricultural production and practically all of our commerce would be completely prostrated. One of the large ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge
... should be invited to go to the root of the word. The true meaning of "populus," from which we get the word "people," was in the time of ancient Rome the "armed body." The pure-blooded Roman in the days of the Republic could not conceive of a citizen who was not a warrior. It was the arms which a Roman's possession of land enabled him to get that qualified him to participate in the affairs of state. He had no political rights until he had fought. He was not of the people; they were of ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... out into the larval form. The free swimming larva is known as a trochosphere, and I am positive that that is what we see; but look at the size of the thing! Man alive, if that ever developed, I can't conceive of its dimensions!" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... suggested the plan of putting the Indian Bureau under a commission of several men, to be appointed for long terms or for life, free of political considerations. I can scarcely conceive of wholly non-partisan appointments in this age, but length of service would be a great advantage, and it does seem to me this experiment would be worth trying. Such a commission should have full authority to deal with all Indian ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... rest, M. Liebig confesses that it is IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE MIND to conceive of particles absolutely indivisible; he recognizes, further, that the FACT of this indivisibility is not proved; but he adds that science cannot dispense with this hypothesis: so that, by the confession ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... I'd forgotten our expedition was but a stunt initiated by the Daily Intelligencer to rebound to its greater publicity. Here in this isolate cup it was difficult to conceive of an anterior existence; I thought of myself, as in some strange manner indigenous to and part of the weed. To recall now that we were here purposefully, that others were concerned with our venture, and that we ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit. In fact, it comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we could not conceive of even an angelic spirit confined in a body thus disordered as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim makes on others are as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... even in the lowest forms of life there is more than one condition in respect of which the organism must be supposed sensitive, and there are as many directions in which variations may be favourable as there are conditions of the environment that affect the organism. We cannot conceive of a living form as having a power of adaptation limited to one direction only; the elasticity which admits of a not being "extreme to mark that which is done amiss" in one direction will commonly admit of it in as many directions as there are ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... mythopoetic way. For purposes of poetry, Britain is an unwieldy subject, and if you are to allow to a river no other characters than those of mud and ooze, swiftness or slowness, why, you will relate of it little but its rise, length and fall. Drayton's weakness is that he can conceive of no other relation than a sex-relation, and in so describing the relations of every river in England, he very naturally becomes tedious. Satiety is the bane of the amorist, and of worse than he. Casanova had that in front of him when he set out to be immoral, on ne peut plus, in seven ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... have a fragrance, felt by subtler senses than we mortals own. But, at least, if they must now appear as mute, we may yet hope that in a more spiritual existence we shall behold their very doubles, gifted with a novel charm, a captivating perfume, we cannot conceive of here. For in the vast harmony of the universe one cannot believe there can be any floral instruments whose strings are never to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... functional differentiation began, and kept on without abatement as the needs of the government required. There was a time when an Englishman had no conception of a prime minister. (Hume.) In this age we cannot conceive of government without such a functionary, whether administered in the name of king or president. With the development of new interests arose new branches in the administration of government. The constant rise of new industrial elements; the increasing demand ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... probability. He had told me he was going to Austria. He too belonged to the knights of death, as an Italian comrade had named a certain section of the Anarchists; and he was working out his inevitable destiny. I wondered now how I had ever allowed myself to conceive of him otherwise. I had always known it was impossible, and I felt that it was only an impulse of rebellion against fate which had led ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... notice of the passers-by, as did the other men who shouted so continually and vehemently at the hurrying crowds. He did not know what might happen if he failed to sell one of his statues; it was a possibility so awful that he did not dare conceive of its punishment. But he could do nothing, and so stood silent, dumbly presenting his tray to ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... his paste-pot. He looked up at her strangely. The closed door seemed to open a little way. "I can't conceive of 'minding' anything you might say to me, Miss Noah,"—he had called her Miss Noah ever since she, by mistake, had one day called ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... mind there was no difficulty in believing in the existence of consciousness apart from material organism; though he could not readily conceive of pure mind, or pure spirit, apart from some kind of substantial envelope or substratum. Many of the views suggested in "Man's Place in the Universe" as to man's spiritual progress hereafter, the reason or ultimate purpose for which he was brought into existence, were enlarged upon, later, in ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... said of this young gentleman, and the natural admiration the reader will immediately conceive of his character, it may perhaps be inferred that he is to be the hero of the work which we shall presently begin. To set this point at rest, for once and for ever, we hasten to undeceive them, ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... invents; and he produces something which is natural only under conditions prescribed by his own mind. He shapes, disposes, penetrates, colors, and contrives everything, and the whole action, is a series of events which could have occurred only in his own brain, and which it is difficult to conceive of as actually "happening." And yet in none of his other works does he evince a shrewder insight into real life, and a clearer perception and knowledge of what is called "the world." The book is, indeed, an artistic creation, and not a mere succession of humorous and pathetic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... conceive of a more hopeful task than hunting up and down a large French town for tidings of a strolling player who, for one night only, played the ghost in Hamlet twenty years ago. But Roger, as, early in the year, he stepped ashore at Boulogne with Armstrong ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... was sleeping a-bed dreaming and drowned in slumber behold, he heard a Voice (without seeing any form) which said to him, 'O Mihrjan the Sage, and O King of the Age, arouse thee this moment and go to thy wife and lie with her and know her carnally, for she shall indeed conceive of thee at this very hour and bear thee a child which, an it be a boy shall become thine aider in all thine affairs but will, an it prove a girl, cause thy ruin and thy destruction and the uprooting of thy traces.' When Al-Mihrjan heard from the Speaker these words and such sayings, he left his couch ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... has weight but no thrust, such as blocks of ice piled vertically. In this case Mr. Goodrich can readily see that there will be no arching action over the structure, and that the required thickness of key would be infinite. As to the other case, it is somewhat difficult to conceive of a solid with an angle of repose of zero; aqueous material does not fulfill this condition, as it is either a liquid or a combination of water and solid material. The best illustration, perhaps, would be to assume a material composed of iron filings, into ...
— Pressure, Resistance, and Stability of Earth • J. C. Meem
... one of that country's teeming millions. From the grossest form of religious superstition, and crudest form of ceremony and worship, up to the most refined idealism and beautiful symbolisms, runs the gamut of the Hindu Religions. Many people are unable to conceive of an abstract, ideal Universal Being, such as the Brahman of the Hindu Philosophy, and consequently that Being has been personified as an Anthropomorphic Deity, and human attributes bestowed upon him to suit the popular fancy. In India, as in ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... every theatre, and of which Philadelphia and New-York have exhibited some striking instances. I mean the practice of certain meanspirited wretches, who bear malice towards particular performers, and make parties to hiss them off the stage. It is not easy to conceive of a greater degree of baseness, turpitude, and cowardice, than is manifested by this conduct. The object of their malice is unable to defend himself from their attacks. This, to a generous mind, would be an aegis, and protect the person who could make such a plea, as completely as her ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various
... We can conceive of no possible stretch of hygienic laws which admits the use of pork; so we shall give it and its products no consideration ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... even a sentiment, it is an unhappy necessity, which is midway between the needs of the body and those of the soul. But siding for a moment with your youthful thoughts, let us try to reason upon this social malady. I suppose that you can only conceive of love as either ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... I wound you, but indeed I could conceive of no other solution of the mystery of your self-sacrifice; for it is utterly incredible that unless some indissoluble tie bound you, that cowardly knave could command your allegiance. It maddens me to think that you, so far beyond all other women, can ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... believe her. I was not in the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to. Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... white metal, branching into antlers, and these headdresses were covered with loose, jangling, metallic strips. The men had their faces, limbs, and bodies painted in white arabesques, which, against the dark skins, effectually destroyed any likeness to human beings. It would be difficult to conceive of anything more uncanny and less human than the appearance of these Devil Dancers as they stood against a background of palms in the black night, their painted faces lit up by the flickering glare of smoky torches. As soon ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... before the gleaming copper cylinders were finished. During this time Crane added to their already complete equipment every article he could conceive of their having any use for, while Seaton raged up and down the plant in a black fury of impatience. Just before the bars were ready, they made another reading on the object-compass. Their faces grew tense and drawn and their hearts turned sick as second followed second and minute followed ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... criticized. But there is one phase of the subject that I have never seen commented upon—and that is that a mother's love for her offspring bears a certain ratio to the love she bore their father. Had Madame Guyon ever carried in her arms a love-child, I can not conceive of her allowing this child to be cared for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... with dim, indistinct apprehensions, with a constantly shifting experience, with shallow feelings and ever diversified emotions, in fine, with all the variety of pleasure and pain, of ignorance and knowledge, that pertains to this imperfect and probationary life,—it is because mankind thus conceive of the final state, that it exerts no more influence over them. But such is not its true idea. There is a marked difference between the present and the future life, in respect to uniformity and clearness of knowledge. "Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known." The ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... that the claim to ascendancy of the Indian over the white, in respect of sagacity and cunning and craft, which this condition of things presupposes, is not satisfactorily made out. And I can readily conceive of the application of that astuteness, that distinguishes the Indian in his present trading relations with the white, to the wider field for its display, which would arise from the extended intercourse and more frequent ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... conceive of my amazement when I found it to be your mother's will, properly signed, sealed ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... enough to us that this Torment of the Devil is represented to us by Fire, it being impossible for our confin'd Thoughts to conceive of Torment by any Thing in the World more exquisite; whence I conclude, that Devils shall at last receive a Punishment suitable to their Spirituous Nature, and as exquisitely Tormenting as a burning Fire would be ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... Rigaud had as yet been no more than an indistinct glimmering, so far from it did he live and so dulled was he by his sufferings. It promised him no immortal joys, for how was he to conceive of heaven except as a cessation of weariness, starvation, and pain? Not till Angelique had come, in the vision did he gain certainty that in heaven she would smile on him always from the mild Mother's arms. As days and weeks passed without that dream's return, his imagination was ever the more ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... the oysters to the beach and sells them to the highest bidders in lots of one thousand. Can you conceive of a prettier game of chance than this! Imagine the natives at work opening the rough shells, expecting at every turn to find a ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another's mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... statesmen. About the Ides of December I shall hold a levee and sit in state as the characters of history file by. I shall be able to call them all by name, to tell of the things they did and why they did them, and to connect their deeds with the world as it now is. I can't conceive of any picture-show equal to that, and all through my year with Shakespeare I shall be looking forward eagerly to my year with the historians. I plainly see that the neighbors will not need to bring in any playthings to amuse ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... Wandering Jew," said he, "or, I should say, I despise the thin film of a tradition from which he was constructed. There never was a Wandering Jew. There could not have been; it is impossible to conceive of a human being sent forth to wander in wretchedness forever. Moreover, suppose there had been such a man, what a poor, modern creature he would be compared with me! Even now he would be less than two thousand years ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... a strange sight to see you feeling out of place?" she asked, gaily. "Marion, I can't conceive of a place to which you wouldn't ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... religion, so-called, should have been grounded upon the miraculous; but the passage of the Red Sea, the raising of Lazarus and kindred wonders are not readily accepted in an enlightened era, and are utilized by scoffers to bring all religion into contempt. We can scarce conceive of God being reduced to the necessity of violating his own laws to demonstrate his presence and power. While it were presumption to ask any church to abate one jot or tittle of its dogma, it seems to me that all would gain by relying less upon the "evidential value ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... ELEMENTS IN THE IRRATIONAL WILL.—The actual social will, as revealed in custom, law and public opinion, often appears, thus, highly irrational, and we may be justified in distinguishing between it and the real will which we conceive of as struggling to get itself expressed. Nevertheless, in justice to custom, law and public opinion, we must look below the surface of things. Even where the decisions of the community seem most irrational, and where there appears to be little consciousness of the ends pursued ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... species, or give an intelligible account of the most ordinary and often-seen denizens of the sea. Whalers are especially to be blamed for their blindness. "Eyes and no Eyes; or the Art of Seeing" has evidently been little heard of among them. To this day I can conceive of no more delightful journey for a naturalist to take than a voyage in a southern whaler, especially if he were allowed to examine at his leisure such creatures as were caught. But on board the CACHALOT I could get no information at all upon the habits of the strange creatures we met ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... mind) has fled. Spirit is used especially in contradistinction from matter; it may in many cases be substituted for soul, but soul has commonly a fuller and more determinate meaning; we can conceive of spirits as having no moral nature; the fairies, elves, and brownies of mythology might be termed spirits, but not souls. In the figurative sense, spirit denotes animation, excitability, perhaps impatience; as, a lad ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... consulting, though I should, perhaps, except Marryatt's novels and Tom Cringle's Log. But of matters connected with the shore Mr. Brewster is as ignorant as a child unborn. He holds all landsmen but ship-builders, owners, and riggers, in supreme contempt, and can hardly conceive of the existence of happiness, in places so far inland that the sea breeze does not blow. A severe and exacting officer is he, but yet a favorite with the men—for he is always first in any emergency or danger, his lion-like voice sounding loud above the roar of the elements, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... to be condensed or thinned, If all the parts of fire did still preserve But fire's own nature, seen before in gross. The heat were keener with the parts compressed, Milder, again, when severed or dispersed— And more than this thou canst conceive of naught That from such causes could become; much less Might earth's variety of things be born From any fires soever, dense or rare. This too: if they suppose a void in things, Then fires can be condensed and still left rare; But ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... begins its universal aspect. If we consider the magnitude of the change, and the difficulties of training and prejudice which it had to encounter in the Church itself, we shall not wonder at the abundance of supernatural occurrences which attended it. Without some such impulse, it is difficult to conceive of its having ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... For this purpose you must picture Canada as a highly organized military Power, its policies directed by an aggressive, predacious and unscrupulous government, and with a population larger than that of the United States. You will conceive of the State of Vermont as a Canadian province under military control: a wedge driven into the heart of manufacturing New England, and threatening the teeming valleys of the Connecticut and the Hudson. You must imagine this province ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... experience, so much a child in some things, so much a woman in others; and Ruth in turn, it must be confessed, probing Alice sometimes with her serious grey eyes, wondered what her object in life was, and whether she had any purpose beyond living as she now saw her. For she could scarcely conceive of a life that should not be devoted to the accomplishment of some definite work, and she had-no doubt that in her own case everything else would yield to the professional career ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the actresses, smiling at him as she moved across the stage. How horrible actors and actresses in their make-up looked close to! He could not conceive of himself kissing that woman while she had so much paint on her face.... He turned to walk off the stage, and found that walking was very difficult. He was trembling so that his knees were almost knocking together and when he moved, ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... and Ostitis, for the reason that in actual practice it is rare for one of these affections to occur without the other. The periosteum and the bone are so intimately connected that it is difficult to conceive of disease of the one failing to communicate itself in some degree to the other. Pathologically, however, and for purposes of description, it is more convenient to describe separately the abnormal changes occurring in ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... its possibility is no more non-being than is reality. For that reason every existence is a realized possibility. Thus matter is to Aristotle a much more positive substratum than to Plato, who declares it to be pure non-being. And thereby it becomes plain how Aristotle could conceive of matter in its opposition to form as ...
— Master Olof - A Drama in Five Acts • August Strindberg
... the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them. However elevated their minds may be, their bodies at least (which is much the major part of most) are liable to the worst infirmities, and subject to the vilest offices ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... the feelings than the stateliest mansion unprotected from the sun. Who would care to live by the side of the purest stream or body of water, if it were not fringed with trees? Were it not for trees, would there be any beauty in mountain, hill, or valley,—for who can conceive of a beautiful landscape scene devoid ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... everything; it will be sufficient to say that the want of men, clothes, money, and the want of time, deprives me of all hopes as to this excursion. If it may begin again in the month of June, by the east, I cannot venture to assure; but for the present moment such is the idea I conceive of the famous incursion, as far as I may be informed, in a so ...
— Memoirs, Correspondence and Manuscripts of General Lafayette • Lafayette
... of Kind and the Sense of Difference.—Doctor Giddings declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and responding thereto in like behaviour, ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... differences by peaceful methods, and thus inaugurate an ethical movement in industry greatly to the advantage of all parties. Or progress may be achieved by the slow process of education. The average church has been accustomed to conceive of its functions as pertaining to the individual rather than to the whole social order. It cannot be compelled to change by governmental action, for the church is free and democratic in America. It cannot easily be persuaded to change its methods in favor of a social ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... as you call it, simply is Flavia. Who could conceive of her without it? I don't know where it's all going to end, I'm sure, and I'm equally sure that, if it were not for Arthur, I shouldn't care," declared Miss Broadwood, drawing ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... what he had heard, but not for long. He could not bring his mind into such attitude towards the witch-tales as to conceive of belief in them as an actual part of normal human experience. Insanity, or the love of making a good story out of notions which have never been seriously entertained, must compose the warp and woof of the fabric of such strange imaginings. ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... Irish Home Rule has to contend with is the difficulty which men bred in a united monarchy and under an omnipotent Parliament experience in grasping what I may call the federal idea. The influence of association on their minds is so strong that they can hardly conceive of a central power, worthy of the name of a government, standing by and witnessing disorders or failures of justice in any place within its borders, without stepping in to set matters right, no matter what the Constitution may say. They remind me often of an ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... is no sort of perfection possible to man. I do not know how for a moment to imagine an Omniscient Being who is not Almighty, or an Almighty who is not All-Righteous. So neither do I know how to conceive of Perfect Holiness anywhere but in ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... schoolboys were to dictate to their masters alterations in the traditional time-table, or to insist on a modified curriculum.... These worthy people [officials] confuse manly independence with disloyalty; they cannot conceive of natives except either as rebels or ...
— The Case For India • Annie Besant
... illuminating silence, then Thorpe spoke again. He told Araminta of a love so vast and deep that it could not be measured by finite standards; of infinite pity and infinite pardon. This love was everywhere; it was impossible to conceive of a place where it was not—it enveloped not only the whole world, but all the shining worlds beyond. And this love, in itself and of ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... abusing Emancipation among us, in the hope that if some turn of Fortune's wheel should separate the South, they may again rise to power as its agents and representatives! GOD help them! It is hard to conceive of men sunk so low! Nobody wants them now—but a time may come. They are in New-York—there is a peculiarly contemptible clique of them in Boston, and the Philadelphia Bulletin informs us that there is exactly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... to conceive of the amoral man as also the anti-economical man, or to make of morality an element of coherence in the acts of life, and therefore of economicity. Nothing prevents us from conceiving (an hypothesis which is verified at least during certain periods and moments, if not during whole lifetimes) a man ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... another segment should be included, making a total of seven in the head. The head has thus been formed by drawing forward segments from the trunk, and fusing them successively with the first or primitive head segment. This is difficult to conceive of in the fully developed insect, where the boundary between head and thorax is very sharp. But the ancestors of insects looked more like thousand-legs or centipedes, and here head and thorax are much less ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... Republican party may have been right or may have been wrong; but surely it will not be argued that any political party elected to power by a majority should follow the policy of a minority, lest that minority should rebel. I can conceive of no government more lowly placed than one which deserts the policy of the majority which supports it, fearing either the tongues or arms ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... so inspired by a new spirit that his feeling would be, not that all music has been written, but that no music has yet been written. It was a memorable saying. In every field that is the perpetual proclamation of genius: Behold! I create all things new. And in this field of love we can conceive of no age in which to the inspired seer it will not be possible to feel: There has yet been ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... how marvelously the Christian communities founded by the apostles and their fellow-missionaries multiplied until, by the middle of the third century, writers like Cyprian came to conceive of a "Catholic," or all-embracing, Church. We have seen how Constantine first made Christianity legal, and how his successors worked in the interest of the new religion; how carefully the Theodosian Code safeguarded the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson |
