"Definable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eclipse the effect was grand beyond description: a well-defined, narrow circle, of the most brilliant crimson colour, surrounded for a few moments the darkened orb, which then seemed to diverge into a glorious halo composed of equal rays: but only for a minute was this clearly definable; the rays quickly faded from the side of the luminary once more given to view; and again a soft daylight, like the gradual spreading of a fine dawn, chased away the night shadows that had thus prematurely usurped ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... papers was not a story, not an essay, not a confession, not a diary. It was—nothing definable. It went into no conceivable covers. It was just, White decided, a proliferation. A vast proliferation. It wanted even a title. There were signs that Benham had intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that he ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Power.—Because the police power of a State is the least limitable of the exercises of government, such limitations as are applicable thereto are not readily definable. Being neither susceptible of circumstantial precision, nor discoverable by any formula, these limitations can be determined only through appropriate regard to the subject matter of the exercise of that power.[105] "It is settled ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... accidental elements which are so deeply imbedded in it. Another consideration is that no philosophic writer, however ardently his words may have been treasured and followed by the people of his own time, can well be cherished by succeeding generations, unless his name is associated through some definable and positive contribution with the central march of European thought and feeling. In other words, there is a difference between living in the history of literature or belief, and living in literature itself and in the minds ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... complement of the angle, and between an angle and two right angles the supplement of the angle. The generalized view of angles and their measurement is treated in the article TRIGONOMETRY. A solid angle is definable as the space contained by three or more planes intersecting in a common point; it is familiarly represented by a corner. The angle between two planes is termed dihedral, between three trihedral, between any number more than three ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... whatever lines the world may be framed, there must be distinction, difference, a higher and a lower; and the lower, relatively to the higher, must always be an evil. The scale upon which the higher and lower both are makes no difference. The supremest bliss would not be bliss if it were not definable bliss—that is to say, in the sense that it has limits, marking it out from something else not so supreme. Perfectly uninterrupted, infinite light, without shadow, is a physical absurdity. I see a thing because it is lighted, ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... sort of poisonous hopelessness to be found along some more heavily populated and industrialized American rivers, and on the Potomac its spread is already being slowed. Water shortages loom, but have not yet seriously materialized. Floods threaten, but only at certain definable spots. Human beings boom outward from the Washington metropolis and the other centers of population in search of a fuller life, and the consumptive sprawl and sameness of the communities built to receive them often deny it to them. But in modern terms there are ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... were valid to the theologian, even if they were not so to his own mind. How completely we have placed Religion and Science upon the same level is evident from our author's statement that "a religious creed is definable as a theory of original causation" and from the fact that a self-existent Universe is one of the three possible hypotheses which he ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... roar was started in the heavens, and it became a growl that increased in volume until even the shouting voices could no longer be heard. Then the crisscrossing lights struck metal, glancing off the gleaming body of a descending object. Larger and larger the object grew, until it assumed the definable shape of a squat silver funnel, falling in a perfect straight line towards the center of the light-ringed area. When it hit, a dust cloud ...
— The Delegate from Venus • Henry Slesar
... temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden conversion when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says; for "the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms of HOW IT HAPPENS, but something ethical, definable only in terms ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... species of British brambles are good species will cease. Systematists will have only to decide (not that this will be easy) whether any form be sufficiently constant and distinct from other forms, to be capable of definition; and if definable, whether the differences be sufficiently important to deserve a specific name. This latter point will become a far more essential consideration than it is at present; for differences, however slight, between any two ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... makes him the slave of others, and of the training of the individual so as to become a law to himself, and in possession, therefore, of the right to the control of all his vital interests, the project definable as an insane attempt to realise a social system on the basis of absolute ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that it is "a cross between the song of the chewink and that of dickcissel," and I shall stand by that assertion until I find good reason to disown it—should that time ever come. The opening syllabication is like dickcissel's; then follows a trill of no specially definable character. There are times when he sings with more than his wonted force, and it is then that his tune bears the strongest likeness to the eastern towhee's. But his alarm-call! It is no "chewink" at ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... the Timbuctoo of luxury, or the Timbuctoo of material security, or the Timbuctoo of hale health, or the Timbuctoo of knowledge, or the Timbuctoo of power, or even the Timbuctoo of a good conscience. It is anyhow a recognizable and definable Timbuctoo. And the path leading to it is a straight, wide thoroughfare, clearly visible for a long ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... system of measurement (or metric system) furnishes tone material with all the details of division, proportion and comparison; but this, alone, is not rhythm. The metric system affords the basis for rational and definable rhythm, but "rhythm" itself does not enter into the proposition until differentiated factors are associated and ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... sympathy with a contemporaneous tendency in which I profoundly believe, and yet I have to talk like a professor to you who are not students. Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind! I have heard friends and colleagues try to popularize philosophy in this very hall, but they soon grew dry, and then technical, and the results ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... Affection and discord, fretfulness, and quietness, feebleness and firmness, luxury and purity, pride and modesty, and all other such habits, and every conceivable modification and mingling of them, may be illustrated, with mathematical exactness, by conditions of line and color; and not merely these definable vices and virtues, but also every conceivable shade of human character and passion, from the righteous or unrighteous majesty of the king to the innocent or faultful ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... I think I don't. I think I'd rather hold him in my mind as he is here: a happy eremite; no, a restrained pagan. Oh, it's foolish to seek definitions for him. He isn't definable. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Freeman's tact did not rescue him from the temptation into which Mr. Van Doren's industry led him inevitably—the temptation of finding in Peacock's mature work definable traces of childish memories and impressions. Still more surprising is it that, when both have quoted much that is worthless, neither should have printed the one significant document amongst the surviving fragments of his boyhood. This is a letter in ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... well known there was extensive Protestantism once in those countries. Prior to the Thirty-Years War, the fair chance was, Austria too would all become Protestant; an extensive minority among all ranks of men in Austria too, definable as the serious intelligence of mankind in those countries, having clearly adopted it, whom the others were sure to follow. In all ranks of men; only not in the highest rank, which was pleased rather to continue Official and Papal. Highest rank had its ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... hitherto been erroneously described as written in blank verse; an error which I can only attribute to the prevalence of a groundless assumption that whatever is neither prose nor rhyme must of necessity be definable as blank verse. But the measure, I must repeat, which was adopted by the authors of Gorboduc is by no means so definable. Blank it certainly is; but verse it assuredly is not. There can be no verse where ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... form and universal matter must be thought of as a stamping of the form upon the matter. Matter has in itself no actual or definable existence. It serves merely as a tabula rasa, as a potential background, as an empty receptacle, as a reflecting mirror for form to be written, filled out, impressed or reflected therein or upon. ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... characteristics which are already quiescent, those which are active, and those which are not yet definable. ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... round him. The chamber had an aspect of freshness and tidiness that made it almost gay—until he looked at the object in the smoothed and rectified bed. He nodded to his father, who merely gazed at him. There was no definite, definable change in the old man's face, but his bearing, even as he lay, was appreciably more melancholy and impotent. The mere sight of a man so broken and so sad was humiliating to the humanity which ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... chance of cooeperating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with his whole soul that it is; that it is good, and alone good! This is the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;—for Islam is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity not been, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all, to be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh-and-blood; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know that we know nothing; that ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... personal influence, or directly attributed to his hand, possess at least this psychological interest, that about their religiousness there can be no question. Their work is to be looked for mainly in and about the two sub-alpine towns of Brescia and Bergamo; in the former of which it becomes definable as a school—the school of Moretto, in whom the perfected art of the later Renaissance is to be seen in union with a catholicism as convinced, towards the middle of the sixteenth century, as ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... plain truth, a truth lying at the very door, has all the while escaped him,—that which was incidentally stated in the preceding chapter,—namely, that the difference between great and mean art lies, not in definable methods of handling, or styles of representation, or choices of subjects, but wholly in the nobleness of the end to which the effort of the painter is addressed. We cannot say that a painter is great because he paints boldly, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... begetting in her a nervous fear of doing anything definable as unladylike, had operated thus curiously in keeping them unknown to each other at a critical moment. Much might have resulted from recognition—at the least a query on either side in one and the selfsame form: What could he or she possibly be ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... according to the plan of Nature; but whether they counted such children as God's reward for service or Nature's premium on sanity, they always left the reward to God or the premium to Nature, as a less definable thing. The only person (and this is the point) towards whom one could have precise duties was the partner in the process. Directly considering the partner's claims was the nearest one could get to indirectly considering the claims of posterity. If the women of the harem sang ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... though it be conceded that he influenced far more than he was influenced?[6] There is undoubtedly in his personal development of the Giorgionesque a superadded element of something much nearer to the everyday world than is to be found in the work of his prototype, and this not easily definable element is peculiar also to Palma's art, in which, indeed, it endures to the end. Thus there is a singular resemblance between the type of his fairly fashioned Eve in the important Adam and Eve of his earlier time in the Brunswick Gallery—once, ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... was altogether another proposition to sit there and wait for the man she had admired for four or five years with a constancy that surprised even herself. Her reflections at this specific hour were scarcely definable. Chief among them was a doubt—this doubt: Would Harry Green remember her? It seemed such an absurd doubt that she laughed at it—and yet ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Appearance of Man and his work, is but the vesture, the embodiment that renders it visible. This divine mystery is in all times and in all places; veritably is. In most times and places it is greatly overlooked; and the Universe, definable always in one or the other dialect, as the realized Thought of God, is considered a trivial, inert, commonplace matter,—as if, says the Satirist, it were a dead thing, which some upholsterer had put together! It could do no good, at present, to speak much about this; but it ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... it thus: "Every operation, or process, whereby bodies are made to pass from the fluid to the solid state, and to assume certain fixed, mathematically definable, regular forms." It would be folly for me to attempt to criticise Fresenius, but I give you both definitions, and you can take your choice. The definition of Fresenius, however, will not suit ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... fatigue but on the other hand without passionate eagerness, about a hundred pages before the thought occurred suddenly to me: 'I do not remember having yet come across one single ready-made phrase in this story.' Such was my first definable thought concerning Frank Swinnerton. I hate ready-made phrases, which in my view—and in that of Schopenhauer—are the sure mark of a mediocre writer. I began to be interested. I soon said to myself: 'This fellow ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... certain forms arbitrary, but it followed the plain indications written on every particle of matter. What we call brute matter is whatever is means only, not showing any individuality, or end within itself. A handful of earth is definable only by its chemical or physical properties, which do not distinguish it, but confound it with other things. By itself it is only so much phosphate or silicate, and can come to be something only in a foreign organism, a plant or an animal. In form is seen the dawning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... removal from home. The boys of the several houses were no longer locally separated, nor in the same immediate contact with their housemasters; they were restrained by few bolt-and-bar securities, "lock-up" being for the most part impracticable, and were allowed a larger liberty in many less definable ways. At the same time they were exposed to no little discomfort, and during the rainy months to much monotony, the very conditions which promote bullying and other mischief. Further, the same causes which ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... arithmetical proportions of the dinner bill. After a short cessation of hostilities, during which our commercial friends despatched their London letters, and Bob and the English Spy, to escape the suspicion of not having any definable pursuit, emigrated to the High Street; we returned to our quarters, and found the whole party debating upon a proposition of the bon vivants, to have another bottle, and make a night of it by going to the theatre ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... exception when I said that a lyric was a poem where the pure poetic energy was not notably associated with other energies. When a poet writes a poem of corresponding lines and stanzas or in a form of which the structural outline is decided by a definable law—as in the sonnet—he is in effect obeying the impulse of the co-ordinating energy, and the use of rhyme is another sign of obedience to the same impulse. It so happens that this energy, next to the poetic energy, is the most impressive ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... European nationalities, I should find a race more simple, youthful, and less sophisticated than the one I had left behind me. Yet this was my impression. We have lost immensely in some things, and what we have gained is not yet so obvious or so definable. We have lost in reverence, in homeliness, in heart and conscience,—in virtue, using the word in its proper sense. To some, the difference which I note may appear a difference in favor of the great cuteness, wideawakeness, and enterprise of the American, but it is simply a difference expressive ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... of grotesque and fantastic shapes. Sometimes it spreads out its branches horizontally, forming a perfectly flat top, as if it had grown under a platform; again it forms an irregular pyramid, most commonly leaning from an upright position. It has usually no definable shape, often sending out one or two branches greatly beyond the rest, some directed obliquely downwards, others twisted and horizontal. This tree, if it had no other merit, would be prized for its eccentricities; but it is not without beauty. It possesses ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... relations—that is the one and all, the most wonderful and yet the simplest, the simplest and yet the highest. The universe itself is only a toy of the Definite and the Indefinite; and the real definition of the definable is an allegorical miniature of the life and activity ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... these two senses, or aspects, of "species"—the one as morphological, the other as physiological. Regarded from the former point of view, a species is nothing more than a kind of animal or plant, which is distinctly definable from all others, by certain constant, and not merely sexual, morphological peculiarities. Thus horses form a species, because the group of animals to which that name is applied is distinguished from all others in the world by the following constantly associated ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... in short, that a natural-history class is not capable of being defined—that the class Rosaceae, for instance, or the class of Fishes, is not accurately and absolutely definable, inasmuch as its members will present exceptions to every possible definition; and that the members of the class are united together only by the circumstance that they are all more like some imaginary average rose or average fish, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... there is no room whatever either for indistinctness the effect of avidya, or for its cessation. If it does not previously exist, then Release discloses itself as something to be effected, and therefore non- eternal.—And that such non-knowledge is impossible because there is no definable substrate for it we have shown above.—He, moreover, who holds the theory of error resting on a non-real defect, will find it difficult to prove the impossibility of error being without any substrate; for, if the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... different from one another in individual characteristics, and all had the unmistakable mark of the habit of good society; as difficult to locate, and as easy to recognise, as the sense of freshness which some ladies have the secret of diffusing around themselves; no definable sweetness, nothing in particular, but making a ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... have thought rather a La Valliere," Blunt dropped with an indifference of which one did not know what to make. He may have begun to be bored with the subject. But it may have been put on, for the whole personality was not clearly definable. I, however, was not indifferent. A woman is always an interesting subject and I was thoroughly awake to that interest. Mills pondered for a while with a sort ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... true being found no longer consistent with what we have been accustomed to call beauty, the latter would cease to be an object of desire, though something widely alien to it might usurp its name. If beauty be devoid of independent right to be, and definable only as an attribute of truth, then undoubtedly the cynosure to- day may be the scarecrow of to-morrow, and vice versa, according to our varying conception ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... that a man's character is indicated by his daily habits, nor that his intellectual tendency is definable by the qualities of his temper or by his personal tastes. Carlyle was one instance of the contrary; Lincoln was another; Bismarck was a great third, with his iron head and his delicate feminine hands. All men who direct, control or influence the many ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... God a concept or idea, which expresses the essence of the human body (last Prop.), which, therefore, is necessarily something appertaining to the essence of the human mind (II. xiii.). But we have not assigned to the human mind any duration, definable by time, except in so far as it expresses the actual existence of the body, which is explained through duration, and may be defined by time—that is (II. viii. Coroll.), we do not assign to it duration, except while the body endures. Yet, as there is something, notwithstanding, ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... New Views on Ether and Matter: Insufficiency of Larmor's view—Ether definable by electric and magnetic fields—Is matter all electrons? Atom probably positive centre surrounded by negative electrons—Ignorance concerning positive particles—Successive transformations of matter probable ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... the existence of something we call 'warmth' or 'heat' is due to a particular sense of warmth which modern research has recognized as a clearly definable sense. Naturally, seen from the spectator-standpoint, the experiences of this sense appear to be of purely subjective value and therefore useless for obtaining an objective insight into the nature of warmth and its effects in the physical ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... morning at breakfast to obtain the same advantage over her sister. She flushed with a mixture of emotions and tried in a resentful silence to think of some definable cause for her accusation against Rankin's manners. Finally, "Well, I gave him a bunch of grapes, and he never so much as said thank you. He just took them ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... he would have liked to read again, but forbore. Must not the separation from her child be hard? If he saw the poor little mortal, how would the sight affect him? At moments he felt a longing perhaps definable as the instinct of paternity; but he was not the man to grow sentimental over babies, his own or other people's. Irony and sarcasm—very agreeable to a certain class of newspaper readers—were just now his stock-in-trade, and he could not afford to indulge any ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... you must take the bad with the good, for whether you get the good or not you are sure of the bad, but only very exceptionally are you sure of the bad only. It was a pleasure not easily definable to find our hotel managed by a mother and two daughters, who gave the orders obeyed by the men-servants, and did not rebuke them for joining in the assurance that when we got used to going so abruptly ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... "good" labor union ought to conform are more easily definable than the conditions to which a "good" trust ought to conform. In the first place the union should have the right to demand a minimum wage and a minimum working day. This minimum would vary, of course, in different trades, in different branches of ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... reckoned the main conditions which gave a peculiar but not easily definable complexion of languor, melancholy, and dwindling vitality to nearly every manifestation of Italian genius in the second half of the sixteenth century, and which well nigh sterilized that genius during the two succeeding centuries. In common with the rest of Europe, and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... development with higher stages, if there be not some actual promise of the later in the earlier, or some element which endures throughout. It is unavoidable, then, to assume that in dealing with religion we are dealing with a specific and definable experience. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... now that "the tumult and the shouting dies," and civilian life has dropped back into something like its usual routine, are naturally less definable than at the outset. One of the most evident is the spirit in which all kinds of privations are accepted. No one who has come in contact with the work-people and small shop-keepers of Paris in the last year can fail to be struck by the extreme dignity and grace with which doing without ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... must be clearly understood, Empathy deals not directly with mood and emotion, but with dynamic conditions which enter into moods and emotions and take their names from them. Be this as it may, and definable or not in terms of human feeling, these various and variously combined (into coordinate scenes and acts) dramas enacted by lines and curves and angles, take place not in the marble or pigment embodying those contemplated shapes, but solely in ourselves, ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... recall whence we came, nor tell how we began to be. We know approximately how far back we can remember, but have no idea how far back we may not have forgotten. Certainly we knew once much that we have forgotten now. My own earliest definable memory is of a great funeral of one of the Dukes of Gordon, when I was between two and three years of age. Surely my first knowledge was not of death. I must have known much and many things before, although that seems my earliest memory. As in what we foolishly call ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... God as the Intelligent, Animated, Living Infinite. He is not, for them, either the aggregate of existences, or existence in the abstract, or a being philosophically definable. He is in all, distinct from all, and greater than all. His name even is ineffable; and yet this name only expresses the human ideal of His divinity. What God is in Himself, it is not given ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the thought required for their work, however brilliant, is not so great as that required by the first inventor of the method. There are in science immense numbers of different methods, appropriate to different classes of problems; but over and above them all, there is something not easily definable, which may be called the method of science. It was formerly customary to identify this with the inductive method, and to associate it with the name of Bacon. But the true inductive method was not discovered ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... different from one another in individual characteristics, and all had the unmistakable mark of the habit of good society; as difficult to locate and as easy to recognize as the sense of freshness which some ladies have the secret of diffusing around themselves;—no definable sweetness, nothing in particular, but making a ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... not consider things definable, or in modern language abstract ideas, as the only universals, but prior to these he established those principles productive of science which essentially reside in the soul, as is evident from his Phaedrus and Phaedo. In the 10th book of the Republic too, he venerates those separate forms which ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... seemed to realize, like himself, the glamour of the past and to steep the mind in it. This was a woman. Her age was perhaps twenty-five, in her bearing was that subtle, scarcely definable, sureness of self which marks off womanhood from girlhood. She climbed from tier to tier of the amphitheatre with firm confident step; stood gazing down on her dream pictures of the scene in the arena; moved ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the proprietors, for the use of the passengers,—and at last to our beds. It could not be denied that we were nervous. With all the smoothness and beauty of our running, there was a sensation, an uncertain quivering motion, not at first noticed and not at all definable, about our craft, that constantly, suggested the idea that we were standing on nothing, or, at best, nothing better than dissolving quicksands, which were liable at any moment wholly to slide away and leave us; and it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... pecuniary profit and loss to be taken account of in any appraisal of the projected Imperial regime. There should evidently be little ground to apprehend that its installation would entail a net loss or a net increase of pecuniary burdens. There is, of course, the ill-defined and scarcely definable item of expenditure under the general head of Gentility, Dignity, Distinction, Magnificence, or whatever term may seem suitable to designate that consumption of goods and services that goes to maintain the high repute of the Court and to ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... comparing the amounts which A possesses of various traits with the amounts which B possesses of the same traits. In intellect and character, differences of kind between one individual and another turn out to be definable, if defined at all, as compound ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... first—partly because the nature of the track compelled them to advance in single file, and partly because each was in the worst possible humour of which his nature was capable, while each felt indignant at the other, although neither could have said that his friend had been guilty of any definable sin. ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... our faculties cannot enter into the knowledge of any Being, not so much as of our own, should be able to find out by them, that supreme nature, which we cannot otherwise define than by saying it is infinite; as if infinite were definable, or infinity a subject for our narrow understanding. They who would prove religion by reason, do but weaken the cause which they endeavour to support: it is to take away the pillars from our faith, and to prop it only with a twig; it is to design a tower like that of Babel, which, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... fire still held its green and red color, although its light was much less intense. It held its characteristic shape. Though clearly definable, under the rays of the sun it became quite transparent. Looking through it, I could see plainly the crowd of people on the farther side of the field. The effect was similar to looking through a faintly tinted glass, except that now I noticed that the light had a sort of crawling ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... they had successfully got around Upi's camp. Once or twice when their eyes happened to meet he caught in Blake's face a contemptuous coolness, almost a sneering exultation which the other could not quite conceal. It filled him with a scarcely definable uneasiness. He was positive that Blake realized he would carry out his threat at the least sign of treachery or the appearance of an enemy, and yet he could not free himself from the uncomfortable oppression that ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... usually throw two together. These, with swimming, climbing, leaping, were the then admirable Fine Arts of the North; in all which Tryggveson appears to have been the Raphael and the Michael Angelo at once. Essentially definable, too, if we look well into him, as a wild bit of real heroism, in such rude guise and environment; a high, true, and great human soul. A jovial burst of laughter in him, withal; a bright, airy, wise way of speech; dressed beautifully and with care; a ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... of the party until dinner, for each one lunched as he or she pleased, it was clear that the Countess and Claudius would not be brought together until the evening. Margaret was glad of this for various reasons, some definable and others vague. She felt that she must have misjudged Claudius a little, and she was glad to see that her exhibition of displeasure on the previous night had been sufficient to keep him away. Had he been as tactless as she had at first thought, he would surely have sought an ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... boundary question to this study is better understood when it is recognized that the so-called Fair Play system of government in lands beyond the Provincial limits must have a definable locale. It is this writer's firm conviction that Fair Play territory extended from Lycoming Creek, on the north side of the West Branch of the Susquehanna, to the Great Island, some five miles west of Pine Creek. The foundation for the establishment of Lycoming Creek as the Tiadaghton, ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... who limit our acceptation of words to that in which they were originally employed, and suppose that all the complicated, yet often definable, associations which the gradual progress of language and intellect has connected with words, are to be reduced to the standard of our forefathers; appear not to have sufficiently attended to the changes which this principle of association actually produces. As language is transmitted ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... chalk sea existed during an extremely long period, though we may not be prepared to give a precise estimate of the length of that period in years. The relative duration is clear, though the absolute duration may not be definable. The attempt to affix any precise date to the period at which the chalk sea began, or ended, its existence, is baffled by difficulties of the same kind. But the relative age of the cretaceous epoch may be determined with as ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... came within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of Bothwell, the longest of the three plays—indeed, the longest play in existence, Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... given itself up to the disputation, Lady Sunderbund, an actress, a dancer—though she, it is true, did not say very much—a novelist, a mechanical expert of some sort, a railway peer, geniuses, hairy and Celtic, people of no clearly definable position, but all quite unequal to the task of maintaining that air of reverent vagueness, that tenderness of touch, which is by all Anglican standards imperative in so deep, so mysterious, and, nowadays, in mixed society at least, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... long, was unaffectedly untidy. It was a manifest if melancholy truth that the architect was an artist. But the artistic temperament was far from explaining him; there was something else about him that was not definable, but which some even felt to be dangerous. Despite his dreaminess, he would sometimes surprise his friends with arts and even sports apart from his ordinary life, like memories of some previous existence. On this occasion, nevertheless, he ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... position is characteristic and easily definable. If it is not quite defensible on the strictest principles of plain speaking, it is also certain that we could not condemn him without condemning many of the best and most catholic-spirited of men. The dogmatic ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... Although this or that singular may not be definable, yet what belongs to the general idea of singularity can be defined; and so the Philosopher (De Praedic., cap. De substantia) gives a definition of first substance; and in this way Boethius ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... suddenly, and happening to one with whom I had been in any respect at variance—the appalling vacancy in the room he had occupied so lately, where his chair and table seemed to wait for him, and his handwriting of yesterday was like a ghost—the in—definable impossibility of separating him from the place, and feeling, when the door opened, as if he might come in—the lazy hush and rest there was in the office, and the insatiable relish with which our people talked about it, and other people came in and out all day, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... lofty ideas and ideals are incalculable. Man grows by the deepening of consciousness and the acquirement of wisdom. All study, subjective and objective, is a Tapashya or Austerity directed to the acquirement of wisdom. It is the worship of Saraswati—the Goddess of Wisdom. This worship is definable as perfect emotional solitude, close study, absolute chastity and celibacy, and at last the merging of the personal into the impersonal. This austere life is the secret of all greatness. You know how Archimedes when threatened with death by the vandalistic ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... D, emerges from the abdomen and becomes definable through the fibres of the sheathing tendon of the external oblique muscle, H, at a point midway between the extremities of the ilio-pubic line or fold. In some cases, this place, whereat the cord first manifests itself ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... to the party from the yacht, was a small table laid for one. It was unoccupied until they had half finished dinner; then heads began suddenly to turn toward the door; people whispered, there was a perceptible, though scarcely definable thrill of interest, and a tall woman in sequined black tulle, glittering with diamonds, came slowly up the room. She must have known that all eyes were upon her, yet she appeared unconscious. Her lashes were cast down as she moved toward a chair held obsequiously ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... silence that followed his dismissal of the subject, Kent became aware of a vague prompting which was urging him to cut his visit short. There was no definable reason for his going. He had finally brought himself to the point of speaking openly to Elinor of her engagement, and they were, as he fondly believed, safely beyond the danger point in that field. Moreover, Penelope was stirring in her hammock and the perilous privacy was at ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... with a feeling of vexation not very easily definable. His repetition of questions about questions which society has so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... of the brain, formed by the ganglion of the first primary segment; also termed ocular lobe, froth part it innervates. Process: a prolongation of the surface, margin, or an appendage: any prominent portion of the body not otherwise definable. ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... early history of British dioceses, territorial boundaries were so vague as to be scarcely definable, but one of the earliest of the bishops holding office prior to the landing of Augustine was one Dubric, son of Brychan, who established a sort of college at Hentland, near Ross, and later on removed to another spot ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Hereford, A Description - Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • A. Hugh Fisher
... realm of the mind, correspond of course to nothing that is humanly feasible. The shackles of the flesh are upon us and there is no way to get rid of them. It is only an ideal, a poet's dream. Nevertheless the subject has a practical aspect which is definable in plain prose. It is found in the following ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... saying: "Matter must be deprived of its properties in order to draw out its soul." The properties of substances are everything to the modern chemist—indeed, such words as iron, copper, water, and gold are to him merely convenient expressions for certain definable groups of properties—but the phlogisteans regarded the properties of things, including mass, as of secondary importance; they were still trying to get beneath the properties of a thing, to its hypothetical essence, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... turn now to the attribute of "intuition." Intuition is a thing more clearly definable and more easily analysed than almost any other of the aspects of the soul. Intuition is the feminine counterpart of imagination; and, as compared with instinct, it is a power which acts in clearly denned, isolated, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... the irresistible waves of Hunnish, Mongolic, and Tartaric invaders. And, with all this, people at the latter end of the nineteenth century venture to speak, for instance, of pure Norman blood as something definite or definable, forgetting how the ancient Norsemen carried their wives away from the coasts of Germany or Russia, from Sicily or from the very Piraeus; while others married whatever wives they could find in the North of France, whether of Gallic, Roman, or German extraction, and then settled in England, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... underlying all the phenomena of life and nature, is not in itself affected by time; but that, on the other hand, time is necessary for the objectification of the will, for the will as presented in the passing phenomena of the world. Time is thus definable as the condition of change, and the present time as the only point of contact ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... else that is vital, is rather a tendency than a strictly definable body of doctrine. A definition of Socialism is sure either to include some views which many would regard as not Socialistic, or to exclude others which claim to be included. But I think we shall come nearest to the essence of Socialism by defining it as the advocacy of communal ownership of ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... insisting that it differs in origin and hence in kind from similar expressions of the human spirit. It hesitates to rely on the normal and the intelligible sources of ministerial power, to confess the relatively definable origin and understandable methods of our work. It fears ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... hill is steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... influenced the idiosyncrasies of each as hardly any other writer's influence has done in other times; while his technical shortcomings had unquestionably a fatal effect on the weaker members of the school. But there is also noticeable in them a separate and hardly definable influence which circumscribes their class even more distinctly. They were, as I take it, the last set of poets anywhere in Europe to exhibit, in that most fertile department of poetry which seeks its inspiration in the ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... shown so far that of the triad declared by the Bauddhas to be devoid of all positive characteristics, and therefore non-definable, two (viz. prati-sa/m/khyavirodha and aprati) cannot be shown to be such; we now proceed to show the same with ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... the world certainly lies in intelligence. Certainly, there is no hope anywhere else. I cannot look to anything so remotely definable as God for aid, nor do I ever regret not ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... ago, Dr. Draper published a bulky volume entitled "A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe," in which his professed purpose was to show that nations or races pass through certain definable epochs of development, analogous to the periods of infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, and old age in individuals. But while announced with due formality, the carrying out of the argument was left for the most part to the headings and running-titles of the several chapters, while ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... in vacuo. He's himself and his world. He's a surface of contact, a system of adaptations, between his essential self and his surroundings. Well, our surroundings have become—how shall I put it?—a landslide. The war which seemed such a definable catastrophe in 1914 was, after all, only the first loud crack and smash of the collapse. The war is over and—nothing is over. This peace is a farce, reconstruction an exploded phrase. The slide goes on,—it ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... say wherein exactly his superiority lies. Or, to put it another way, he may have a strong conviction that he stands high in the scale of morally deserving persons, and yet be unable to define his position more nearly. Commonly, the conviction seems to be only definable as an assurance of a superlative of which the positive and comparative are suppressed. At most, his idea of his moral altitude resolves itself into the proposition, "I am a good deal better than Mr. A. or Mr. B." Now, it is plain that in these intuitive judgments ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... indeterminable, though exquisitely successful. His stupendous drawings in the British Museum (I can justly use no other term than "stupendous," of their consummately decisive power) furnish finer instances of this treatment than any at Basle; but it would be very difficult to reduce them to a definable law. Venetian outlines are rare, except preparations on canvas, often shaded before coloring;—while Raphael's, if not shaded, are quite loose, and useless as examples to a beginner: so that we are ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of the royal breast were during the perusal of this extraordinary dialogue of birds, which has come to him through St. Mary Axe—? Manifold probably: manifold, questionable; but not tragical, or not immediately so. Certainly it is definable as the paltriest babble; no treason visible in it, nor constructive treason; but it painfully indicates, were his Majesty candid, That his Majesty is subject to spies in his own House; nay that certain parties do seem to fancy they have got his Majesty by the nose, and are piping tunes ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle |
