"Disproportionately" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and looked down at the familiar forecastle and teeming upper-deck, thirty feet below. Seen thus from above, the grey, sloping shields of the turrets, each with its great twin guns, looked like gigantic mythical tortoises with two heads and disproportionately long necks. It was the dinner hour, and men were moving about, walking up and down, or sitting about in little groups smoking. Some were playing cards in places sheltered from the wind and spray; near the blacksmith's forge a man was stooping ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... called "naughtiness." Think of the mother who drags her child along with her; he has to run while she walks; his legs are short, while hers are long; weak, while hers are strong, he has to bear the weight of his body and his disproportionately large head, while the mother has a head and body which are proportionally lighter and smaller. The child is tired and stands and cries, and the mother exclaims, "Come on, you naughty little thing! I won't have any ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... parish constable; and their cardinal principle was disunion, because they were convinced that within the Union the position of slavery was impregnable. In spite of the proverb, great effects do not follow from small causes,—that is, disproportionately small,—but from adequate causes acting under certain required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had paid all costs from its slender strong-box, ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... trees with noble limbs, cottages, and cottage gardens, very unlike poor Coombe Prior; Markham's house—a perfect little snuggery covered all over with choice climbing plants, the smart plastered doctor's house, the Morville Arms, looking honest and venerable, the church, with its disproportionately high tower, the parsonage rather hidden behind it; and, on the opposite side of the road, the park-wall and the gate, where old Sarah stood, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pre-eminence, he drew an argument for the general inferiority of the French poetry. The French drama, he argued, was confessedly exalted amongst the French themselves beyond any other section of their literature. But why? Why was this? If the drama had prospered disproportionately under public favour, what caused that favour? It was, said Voltaire, the social nature of the French, with their consequent interest in whatever assumed the attire of conversation or dialogue; and, secondly, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... humanoid, Earth had never seen creatures just like him. His seven foot high figure seemed a bit ungainly by Terrestrial standards, and his strangely white, hairless flesh, suggesting unbaked dough, somehow gave the impression of near-transparency. His eyes were disproportionately large, and the black disc of pupil in the white corneas was intensified by contrast. Yet perhaps his race better deserved the designation homo sapiens than Terrestrians do, for it was wise with the accumulated wisdom of ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... the ears. There is a scanty moustache and a thin tuft under the lower lip. A stiff and wide collar, projecting horizontally, conceals the neck. The coat is closely buttoned and elaborately bordered, especially at the shoulders. The dimensions of the head and face are disproportionately large as compared with those of the body. In the unique proof copy which belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps (now with his collection in America) the tone is clearer than in the ordinary copies, and the shadows are less darkened by cross-hatching and coarse ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... him who inherits a place amongst the British nobility, than to him whose prospects have been clouded originally by the doubts and fears of poverty. And, at all events, the libation of blood in the course of the last war was, we must repeat, on the part of the high aristocracy, disproportionately large. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... entire subordination of the latter to the former. Their feelings, furthermore, express themselves in an abnormal manner, both as regards their intensity and duration. The emotional reaction is either excessively strong or, on the other hand, disproportionately weak compared with the stimulus, and in spite of the extravagance of the expression it quickly passes over or remains with an excessive obduracy for a disproportionately long time. Notwithstanding the apparent intensity of the outbreak in the former and its tediousness ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... veritable community, says Plato, is not that this or that member of it should be disproportionately at ease, but that the whole should flourish; though indeed such general welfare might come round again to the loyal unit therein, and rest with him, as a privilege of his individual being after all. The social type he preferred, as we know, was conservative Sparta and its ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... every side by insects, he was becoming rather pathetic in his discomfort and indignity. His small eyes, set in red fat, stared with uncomprehending protest; his fat busy hands were not agile enough to defend him. He felt unsuccessful and foolish, and very near the ground. He wished quite disproportionately to be at home with his admiring ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... 21st. Each side claimed that sanguinary day as a victory; the Garibaldians remained masters of the ground, but the Austrians, in retiring, took with them a large number of prisoners. The losses of the volunteers on this and other occasions when they were engaged were disproportionately heavy. They were spendthrift of their lives, but in war, and especially in mountain warfare, caution is as needful as courage, and in caution they were so deficient that they were always being surprised. General ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... have thought sometimes that it was the disposition of her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature. He is small for his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large. His whole life appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to be his one idea of amusement, and he shows quite remarkable talent in planning the ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was covered with crimson, and which encircled the court entirely, save for the apertures of the two entrances. Demetrios was of burly person, which he by ordinary, as to-day, adorned resplendently; of a stature little above the common size, and disproportionately broad as to his chest and shoulders. It was rumoured that he could bore an apple through with his forefinger and had once killed a refractory horse with a blow of his naked fist; nor looking on the man, ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... one of the passenger pigeon. His eye, with its red circle, the shape of his head, and his motions on alighting and taking flight, quickly suggest the resemblance; though in grace and speed, when on the wing, he is far inferior. His tail seems disproportionately long, like that of the red thrush, and his flight among the trees is very still, contrasting strongly with the honest clatter of the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... She had been awake at the early hour of deadly pale dawn when a swift, long-barreled car had drawn up under the porte-cochere and Arnold had been taken away under the guard of a short, broad, brawny man with disproportionately long arms. She was not able to swallow a ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... extinct crater of Mount Herradura until Figueroa's rurales had been all but routed. In the battle that followed, General Huerta succeeded in driving the rebels out of their strong position, but the losses of the federals, owing to their belated arrival and hastily taken positions, were disproportionately heavy. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... began alarmingly to resemble a necessity of shooting foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain, and were, therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists assert, but still to a notable ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... smells a flower, perhaps as a preservative against infection. Behind the physician stands a man leaning on a staff; he is wounded in the left leg, which is bandaged. By his side stands a dwarfish figure with disproportionately large head, whose body exhibits deformities typical of the developmental disease now known as Achondroplasia; in addition to these deformities we note that his body is hairy and the bridge of his nose sunken; on his back he carries a hare which is almost as tall as ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... scarcely ambiguous ambiguity. But the use of the word "Survival" should have sufficed to indicate that the real point of application of the force by which Nature modifies species and raises the average in any quality, lies not in selective breeding, but in the disproportionately numerous deaths of the individuals below the average. And even the methods of the breeder of cattle, if they are to produce a permanent alteration in the species of cattle, must consist not only in breeding the desirable but in either killing the undesirable, ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... course, and perhaps he was overtired and overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest seemed to him so offensive—so disproportionately offensive—that he hardly noticed the concluding sentence. He recalled the old bitterness and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... the first time, I experienced the unpleasant sensations of having a secret to keep. I fancy the pain of this solitary liability was disproportionately acute in my case, for I was naturally very open and very nervous. I was always on the point of betraying it apropos des bottes—always reproaching myself for my duplicity; and in constant terror ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... prevention is procured by the heightening of slave prices at such a rate as to keep the cost of freedom always greater than the generality of the slaves can pay with their own accumulated savings or peculia. Slave prices in fact, whether in ancient Rome or in modern America, advanced disproportionately to the advantage which the owners could derive from the ownership. "This shows that an element of speculation enters into the valuation of the slave, or that there is a hypervaluation of the slave. This is the central phenomenon of slavery; and it is to this far more than to ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... those who have watched the vital process may be comparatively few in number and therefore unlikely to be jaded by the truisms of these pages, a few words in explanation may not be resented. The seed of the durian is roughly cordate, about an inch and a quarter long. In the form of a disproportionately stout and blundering worm the sprout of my seed issued from the soil, peered vaguely into daylight, groped hesitatingly and arched over to bury its apex in the soil, and from this point the delicately white primal leaves sprang, and the growth ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... unnaturally large head and dangerous looking tusks, that curved above his savage snout like small horns. There was promise of magnificent power in his immense shoulders, while flanks and hams were disproportionately light. He came out to the open leisurely munching his acorns, or amusing himself by ploughing deep furrows with his nose, and not until within ten yards did he appear to note the presence of a stranger. Suddenly ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... itself excellently to delicate artistic handling, and the creation of that subtle influence which Hamsun's countrymen call stemning, poorly rendered by the English "atmosphere." The epilogue is disproportionately long; the portion written as by another hand is all too recognizably in the style of the rest. And with all his chivalrous sacrifice and violent end, Glahn is at best a quixotic hero. Men, as men, ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... by no means been carried out in practice, for, in consequence of the State having failed to make provision for the education and training of idiots and imbeciles, charitable institutions have become disproportionately filled with persons of a different class from that for which they are properly designed, and the difficulty attending admission has acted as a barrier to the latter availing themselves of ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... obliged to you," said Ford with disproportionately sudden choler; "but I don't propose to alter my habits for a ridiculous school-boy whom I have dismissed." The unjust and boyish petulance of his speech instantly flashed upon him, and he felt his cheek ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... woman of forty or thereabouts, with a yellow face, very long and disproportionately large for the frail, sickly body it surmounted, and dressed in an unpretending black gown. She wore a sad, submissive look. Her grey eyes bespoke a contrite and fearful heart, the cheeks were pendulous and the ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... shears. I have seen the bee at work cutting out these pieces. She moves through the leaf like the hand of the tailor through a piece of cloth. When the pattern is detached, she rolls it up, and, embracing it with her legs, flies home with it, often appearing to have a bundle disproportionately large. Each cell is made up of a dozen or more pieces: the larger ones, those that form its walls, like the walls of a paper bag, are oblong, and are turned down at one end, so as to form the bottom; not one thickness ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... are low types of the Negrito stock, and they lead us to the lowest men of all, the Akkas of the West Congo region. It is difficult for us to realize how utterly degenerate and apelike these pygmies are. The jaws are disproportionately large as compared with the cranium or brain-case, and project to a degree which brings the skull very close to that of the higher apes; while in mental respects, in the absence of dwellings, and in many other ways they prove to be the lowest of all mankind,—veritable ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... was not squeamish. She was already old, with a ravaged countenance and a physique curiously hard and stiff. She moved with difficulty—I think she was lame—I seem to remember some story about a malady of the spine. Her Armand was disproportionately young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme. But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... had the honor of an introduction to "His Honor." Imagine a middle-sized man, quite stout, with a head disproportionately large, crowned with one of those immense foreheads eked out with a slight baldness (wonder if, according to the flattering popular superstition, he has thought his hair off) which enchant phrenologists, but which one never sees brooding above the soulful orbs of the great ones of ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... about him. His image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now—a face strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical peculiarity because it was the direct opposite of ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... mutiles; while the frieze, with its rich triglyphs and metopes is altogether omitted. The Corinthian order of the upper story is altogether more worthy of admiration, notwithstanding that some objection has been raised to the "disproportionately slender columns, when contrasted with the massive shafts beneath them." Here, too, the entire frieze, with its emblematical embellishments of the British crown, surrounded with laurel, and alternate leaves of the rose, the thistle and shamrock, is sure to attract the eye of the spectator: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 278, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... leaf of the Calendar, we read, in roman capitals, the following impressive annotation: DEUM TIME, PAUPERES SUSTINE, MEMENTO FINIS. On the reverse of the ensuing leaf, is a large head of Christ, highly coloured: but with the lower part of the face disproportionately short: not unlike a figure of a similar kind, in the Duke of Devonshire's Missal, described on a former occasion.[176] The crucifixon, on the next leaf but one, is full of spirit and effect. Then commence the Drolleries: or a series of subjects most whimsically conceived, but most sweetly ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... marble floor; or else reabsorbed into their limits, contracting still further a crabbed Latin inscription, bringing a fresh touch of fantasy into the arrangement of its curtailed characters, closing together two letters of some word of which the rest were disproportionately scattered. Its windows were never so brilliant as on days when the sun scarcely shone, so that if it was dull outside you might be certain of fine weather in church. One of them was filled from top to bottom by a solitary figure, like the king on a playing-card, who ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... enhancements, of every description, that twinkled and tinkled, that rustled and rumbled with her least movement, she presented a huge, hideous, pleasant face, a featureless desert in a remote quarter of which the disproportionately small eyes might have figured a pair of rash adventurers all but buried in the sand. They reduced themselves when she smiled to barely discernible points—a couple of mere tiny emergent heads—though the foreground of the scene, as if to make up for it, gaped with a vast benevolence. ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... remembered Nicholas's sled, and, looking again at the disproportionately small hands of the men about him, corrected his first impression that they were too feminine to be good ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... northern waters. Only the other day the captain of a patrol boat told me that he had just come over from service on the North Sea, and in his opinion it would be years before those waters could again be fished, owing to the immense numbers of still active mines which would render such an attempt disproportionately hazardous. From this point of view, if from no other more disinterested angle, we owe a great and continuous debt to the splendid people of Britain's oldest colony. It was among these white fishermen that I came out to work primarily, the floating population which every summer, ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... from being hostile to State rights, are almost invariably framed on the principle of giving disproportionately large representation to the smaller States. In the United States and Australia, for example, every State, however small, has an ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... not about farming his property, which he should set about at once. Let him wait until his thirty-sixth year and then build, provided his whole property is under cultivation. So build that neither the villa be disproportionately small in comparison with the farm nor the farm in comparison with the villa. It behooves a slave-owner to have a well-built country house, containing a wine-cellar, a place for storing olive-oil, and casks in such numbers that he may look forward with delight to a time of scarcity ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... was a crusade with bugles and banners and how much a grey, sedentary grind, the charm of which was all at the core. You might have an emotion about it, and an emotion that would be a help, but this was not the sort of thing you could show—the end in view would seem so disproportionately small. Nick put it to her that one really couldn't talk to people about the "responsibility" of what she would see him pottering ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... he was to humour me, however, and disproportionately anxious to amuse me, it was little more than the dry bones of his history, I was ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... subject diverse countries to an identical test, there will not only be rivalry, but what is far more deadly and disastrous, superiority. If we institute a competition between Holland and Switzerland as to the relative grace and agility of their mountain guides, it will be clear that the decision is disproportionately easy; it will also be clear that certain facts about the configuration of Holland have escaped our international eye. If we establish a comparison between them in skill and industry in the art of building dykes against the sea, it will be equally clear that the injustice falls the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... the viceroy was joined by the squadron under Emanuel de Azevedo, the chief design of this large armament being to destroy four English vessels then in that port. The preparations for this purpose seemed disproportionately large, yet the event proved the contrary. Being come in sight of the English, the viceroy ordered the two pinks with the caravel and other smaller vessels to close with one of the English vessels which lay at some distance from the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... hand, it does destroy self-respect; it does leave men psychically disturbed, and for that reason it affects consciousness of the presence of God disproportionately quickly as compared with other sins, and produces the feeling of loss of spiritual power. There are, in fact, abundant reasons for desiring deliverance, though there is ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... performer, but not genius. As I come up under the tree he casts his eye down at me, but continues his song. This bird is said to be quite common in the Northwest, but he is rare in the Eastern districts. His beak is disproportionately large and heavy, like a huge nose, which slightly mars his good looks; but Nature has made it up to him in a blush rose upon his breast, and the most delicate of pink linings to the under side of his wings. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... mullion or central pillar. You will better understand how high they must be, when told that, in the southern tower, the space of the upper row is divided into three distinct tiers; and still the windows do not appear disproportionately short. They also are double, and the interior arches are pointed; but the arches, within which they are placed, are circular. In this circumstance lies the principal anomaly in the front of the cathedral; but there is no appearance of any disparity in point ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... alterations as to be unrecognizable. The former of the two adjoined the site of the martyrdom of St. Peter in the circus of Caligula and Nero; it was five-aisled, 380 feet in length by 212 feet in width. The nave was 80 feet wide and 100 feet high, and the disproportionately high clearstory wall rested on horizontal architraves carried by columns. The impressive dimensions and simple plan of this structure gave it a majesty worthy of its rank as the first church of Christendom. St. Paul beyond the Walls (S.Paolo fuori le mura), built in 386 by Theodosius, resembled ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... contained five grey eggs with green speckles. Then came the little birds, big-headed, with disproportionately large yellow mouths, their bodies covered with down. They chirruped plaintively, stretching their long necks out from the nest, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... the other hand, appears to be based on the theory that men, as a whole, are scarcely fit for rights but must be kept to their duties with a strong hand. Neither belief is entirely true. As Mazzini saw, the French Revolution failed because it emphasized the rights so disproportionately in comparison with the duties of man. Conservatism fails, on the other hand, because its conception of duty inevitably ceases before long to be an ethical conception: duty in the mouth of reactionaries usually means simply obedience to one's "betters." The melancholy sort ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... made to people our earth in its uncouth infancy. Other herons and bitterns have grown smaller and more graceful, with shorter legs and necks, to suit our diminishing rivers and our changed landscape. Quoskh is also, undoubtedly, much smaller than he once was; but still his legs and neck are disproportionately long, when one thinks of the waters he wades and the nest he builds; and the tracks he leaves in the mud are startlingly like those fossilized footprints of giant birds that one finds in the rocks of the Pliocene era, deep under the ...
— Wood Folk at School • William J. Long
... simplicity and the right kind of sophistication, always with generosity and with an unflagging zeal for the rights of human beings, were mixed in him. The reach of any ample-natured man exceeds his grasp. Rhodes was ample-natured, but he cannot be classed as great because his grasp was too often disproportionately short of the long reach. ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... present proceed, so to speak, in interlacing rhythms, or, as I said before, in a rich, complex harmony. In Ghosts this harmony is not so rich as in some later plays, because the drama of the present is disproportionately meagre. None the less, or all the more, is it a conspicuous example of Ibsen's method of raising his curtain, not at the beginning of the crisis, but rather at the beginning of ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... physician of my sort is as ill at ease without his case as he would be without his body; and this little circumstance added disproportionately to my discomfort. With some irritable exclamation on my lips I leaned back in the chair, and once more regarded my environment. It was a rather large room, dim now, and as solitary as a graveyard after twilight. Before me stood the table, an oblong table covered with ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... falling on to the bare shaded ground beneath to make a deep-piled carpet. I do not know whether it is a mango tree at all, for I am no botanist: but anyhow the fruit is rather like that of the mango in external appearance, and in internal still more so, for it has a disproportionately large stone. These stones are cracked, and the kernel taken out. The kernels are spread a short time in the shade to dry; then they are beaten up into a pulp with a wooden pestle, and the pulp put into a basket lined carefully with plantain leaves ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... would be an error to admit this consideration. Indeed, the serpents being animals which, in order to hide themselves, have adopted the habit of gliding directly along the ground, their body has lengthened very considerably and disproportionately to its thickness. Now, elongated legs proving disadvantageous to their necessity of gliding and hiding, very short legs, being only four in number, since they are vertebrate animals, would be incapable of moving their bodies. Thus the habits ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... to delight in discovering the truth, or in love the better to live in conscious harmony. Such a view forgets that all the forces of life work originally and fundamentally a tergo, that experience and reason are not the ground of preference but its result. In order to live men will work disproportionately and eat all manner of filth without pleasure; curiosity as often as not leads to illusion, and argument serves to foster hatred of the truth; finally, love is notoriously a great fountain of bitterness and frequently a prelude to crime and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Mulready, once said that Shelley was too beautiful for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly seem to bear this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he stooped so much as to make him appear undersized. His head was very small-quite disproportionately so; but this was counteracted to the eye by his long and tumbled hair which, when excited, he would rub and twist in a thousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes and mouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet blue, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... more irresistibly ludicrous than its aspect as it slowly raised its small wondering eyes to mine. It was so much taller in its haunches than its shoulders—its fore legs were so disproportionately small—that in walking, its hind feet invariably took precedence. It was perpetually pitching forward over its pointed, inoffensive nose, and recovering itself always, after these involuntary somersaults, ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... possibly be just when the body of each one of us is steeped to the neck in injustice? And from this injustice no man is free, be it to his loss or his gain: there is not one whose efforts are not disproportionately rewarded, receiving too much or too little; not one who is not either advantaged or handicapped. And endeavour as we may to detach our mind from this inveterate injustice, this lingering trace of the sub-human morality needful for primitive races, it is idle to think that our thoughts ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... rebuff and stole a timid glance at the thinker. Espalin was a lean little, dried-up manikin, with legs, arms, and mustaches disproportionately long for his dwarfish body. His black, wiry hair hung in ragged witchlocks; his black pin-point eyes were glittering, cold, and venomous. He looked, thought Pringle, ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... majority have all the votes, the minority none? Is it necessary that the minority should not even be heard? Nothing but habit and old association can reconcile any reasonable being to the needless injustice. In a really equal democracy, every or any section would be represented, not disproportionately, but proportionately. A majority of the electors would always have a majority of the representatives, but a minority of the electors would always have a minority of the representatives. Man for man, they would be as fully represented as ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... these birds is slow, unsteady, and affords but little amusement to the sportsman. From the disproportionately small, convex, thin-quilled, wing,—so thin, that a vacant space, half as broad as a quill appears between each,—the flight may be said to be a sort of fluttering more than any thing else: the bird giving two or three claps of the wings in quick succession, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... there, but of fifty or sixty streets, or of 4000 or 5000 houses, those inhabited by merchants of average incomes, storekeepers not of the wealthiest class, and lawyers. The number of servants kept in such mansions as these would sound disproportionately small to an English ear. Two or three female servants only are required. Breakfast is very early, frequently at seven, seldom later than eight. The families of merchants in business in the lower part of the city often dine at one, and the gentlemen return to a combination ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... massive, masculine fingers and disproportionately small finger-nails in the hands of Professor Weekes, the sculptor. There is scarcely any perceptible tapering at the third joint, and the fingers all exhibit very little prominence of knuckle or contour. It is anything but an artistic hand, and yet its owner was a man of the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... editor of one of the leading magazines in the country. The welcome they met exceeded even his anticipations. By the very next mail, he received a note from his friend, enclosing a check, which to Harley Allen's inexperience of such matters seemed disproportionately large. "Your little Cape Cod girl is a wonder, indeed," wrote the editor. "If she can keep on writing such verse as this, she will make a name for herself. Send us some more: we'll pay her ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... in the central islands of the Pacific Ocean a singular breed of pigs. These are described by the Rev. D. Tyerman and G. Bennett (3/13. 'Journal of Voyages and Travels from 1821 to 1829' volume 1 page 300.) as of small size, hump-backed, with a disproportionately long head, with short ears turned backwards, with a bushy tail not more than two inches in length, placed as if it grew from the back. Within half a century after the introduction of European and Chinese pigs into these islands, the native breed, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... which detracted materially from the supple and undulating beauty which had so captivated Claude de Buxieres. The imprisonment of a tight corset caused undue development of the bust at the expense of her neck and throat, which seemed disproportionately short and thick. Her cheeks had lost their gracious curves and her double chin was more pronounced. All that remained of her former attractions were the caressing glance of her eye, tresses still golden and abundant, especially as seen under the close cap of black net, white teeth, ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... tall, but disproportionately stout for his height. His face was broad, and his loose double chin gave it a flabby appearance. A pallid complexion and black-grey hair, brushed straightly down where he was not bald, produced an impression ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... in bloom, lavender and white, and their perfume stirred memories. The houses in Eden Village were not crowded; for the first quarter of a mile they passed hardly more than a dozen. After that, although they became more neighborly, each held itself well aloof. Then came a small church with a disproportionately tall spire, a watering trough, the Town Hall, and "Prout's Store, Zenas Prout 2nd, Proprietor." Here the gray sidled up to the ancient hitching-post. The boy tossed the reins over the dashboard and jumped out. "You don't need to hold him," he said reassuringly. Presently he ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... huts in Manila, and in most low-lying places, mosquitoes are troublesome, but thanks to an inoffensive kind of lizard with a disproportionately big ugly head called the chacon, and the small house-newt, one is tolerably free from crawling insects. Newts are quite harmless to persons, and are rather encouraged than otherwise. If one attempts to catch a newt by its tail it shakes it off ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... about you that another man dislikes, it disproportionately tinges his entire attitude of mind toward you. On the other hand, if you have one especially likable feature, it tends to lessen the disagreeable impression of things about you that the ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... liable to be defective, and therefore insufficient as a guide to the acquisition of certain knowledge. In the Inductive stage or Method, on the other hand, the Processes thus defectively employed in the former stage, the Hypothetical, are preeminently and disproportionately active, while the Deductive Process is given a very inferior position. The establishment of the just, reciprocal activity of these two Processes in intellectual investigation would secure the perfection of ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... species of gorilla. The creature towered a clear head and shoulders in stature above the natives; it had a comparatively small head with a flat receding forehead, very wide nostrils, a long, enormously muscular body, immensely wide across its massive shoulders, disproportionately short legs, and huge arms so long that even when the brute stood upright its clenched fists reached to within a foot of the ground. As it started to wade ashore its advance was momentarily checked by a terrific volley of stones, hurled ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... other animals of less note, was presented "a quadruped with an amazingly long neck, head like a sheep, bearing two long spiral horns, white as polished ivory, and standing in perpendiculars parallel to each other. Its body was like that of a deer, but its forelegs were most disproportionately long, and its tail, which was very bushy and of a snowy whiteness, curled high over its rump and hung two or three feet by its side. Its colors were bright bay and white, brindled in patches, but of no regular form." This is probably ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... lest I should be betraying what need never be mentioned. Of Viola's adventure, to my surprise, her uncle did not make much, but he had heard of that from the fountain-head, unpolluted by Stympson gossip; and, moreover, Lady Diana had been so disproportionately angry as to produce a reaction in him. Viola was his darling, and he had taken her part when he had found that she knew her brother was at hand. He allowed, too, that she might fairly be inspired with confidence by the voice and countenance ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things. The great danger of all this, and of the evils that come from it, is that society by-and-by will turn as blindly against female intellectual culture as it now advocates it, and, having worked disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... face and head were disproportionately big. Her eyes I can only speak of as enormous. I dare say there are some who would have called them beautiful. In moments of intensity they bored into mine and held them till I ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... stable-yard when he had come upon that sight,—it was long ago—had gone away terrified and aching with pity for the misery he had surprised. Sir Shawn O'Gara had interfered once to save little Patsy from a beating and had been rewarded disproportionately by a silent ardent devotion, at which no one,—he himself least of all,—had ever guessed. Patsy had liked Mr. Terence Comerford too. He was handsomer, the people thought, than Sir Shawn, being golden-haired, blue-eyed and ruddy, and very big and broad-shouldered, with a jolly greeting for every ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... care and strict discipline that would have done credit to a ship of the Royal Navy. There was nothing lumbering or unseemly about the vessel, excepting, perhaps, a boat, which lay on the deck with its keel up between the fore and main masts. It seemed disproportionately large for the schooner; but when I saw that the crew amounted to between thirty and forty men, I concluded that this boat was held in reserve in case of any accident compelling the crew to ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... continental; Mediterranean only on the southern Crimean coast; precipitation disproportionately distributed, highest in west and north, lesser in east and southeast; winters vary from cool along the Black Sea to cold farther inland; summers are warm across the greater part of the country, hot in ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... beset the quartermaster and commissary departments were also encountered by the surgeons. Hospital accommodations were scanty, the quantity of medicines available was very limited, the number of wounded men disproportionately large, and, when sickness was added to the wounds, the small number of surgeons available at the front were not able to give the individual attention and scientific treatment which forms a part of our admirable medical system in time ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... and then reared his majestic form dripping from the lake. He stood upon the 'point.' I never saw so grand an animal; it seemed as though no single ball could kill him, and although his head and carcass were enormous, still his length of leg appeared disproportionately great. With quick, springy paces he advanced directly for his favourite tree and began his process of rubbing, perfectly unaware of the hidden foes so ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Government upon the subject can, in my opinion, remedy the evil. If, as it would be natural to expect, the States which have been least favored in past appropriations should insist on being redressed in those here after to be made, at the expense of the States which have so largely and disproportionately participated, we have, as matters now stand, but little security that the attempt would do more than change the inequality from one quarter ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that, in his presence, Woloda always seemed ashamed of my innocent behaviour, and still more so of my youthfulness. As for Prince Nechludoff, he was in no way handsome, since neither his small grey eyes, his low, projecting forehead, nor his disproportionately long hands and feet could be called good features. The only good points about him were his unusually tall stature, his delicate colouring, and his splendid teeth. Nevertheless, his face was of such an original, energetic character (owing to his narrow, ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... than the general suspicion entertained against anything that passed under the name of enthusiasm. It is not merely that the age was, upon the whole, formal and prosaic, and that in general society serenity and moderation stood disproportionately high in the list of virtues. No doubt zeal was unpopular; but, whatever was the case in the more careless language of conversation, zeal is not what the graver writers of the day usually meant when they inveighed against ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... in his position, of the worthies who had spent their youth within these reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer age. Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in his fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest. The brushings of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs were as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings of each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... her husband, and of Asa Waring. Instinct spoke to him here; he seemed to read in their faces that he failed to strike in them responsive chords. He was drawn to them: the conviction grew upon him that he did not reach them, and it troubled him, as he thought, disproportionately. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a crimson fez. A tunic of the same color, belted tightly to the waist, reached the seat—apparently a box—upon which he sat; his legs and feet were not seen. His left forearm appeared to rest in his lap; he moved his pieces with his right hand, which seemed disproportionately long. ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... Christianity was smiling very sweetly and looking upwards, and in that part of his work the sculptor had been very happy. But the rest of the carving was gruesome and the anatomy was gross and bad, the figure being so disproportionately broad as to convey the ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... sketches we can only add a scene of sea sport off Fort Rotterdam, at Macassar, an island between Java and Borneo; shaped like a huge tarantula, a small body, with four disproportionately long legs, which stretch into the sea in narrow and lengthened peninsulas. The ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... nothing, after all, but a prolonged conundrum. Many of Schiller's lyrical poems—though the best of them find no match in modern verse for rapid energy, the very axles of language kindling with swiftness—seem disproportionately long in parts, and the thought too often has the life wellnigh squeezed out of it in the sevenfold coils of diction, dappled though it ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... the Hare was yoked to the Tortoise. Yoked, figuratively speaking only, for it trailed ignominiously behind at a distance of fifteen yards, and when our little Panhard began bumbling up the hill with its great follower, it resembled nothing so much as a very small comet with a disproportionately big tail. ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... traffic will greatly decrease rail traffic and hence the revenue of the railroad; whether the amount of taxes paid by the railroads of the State, part of which is devoted to the upkeep of public highways used by motor carriers, is disproportionately higher than the amount ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... of removing certain outer sheaths, and I noted that, while quite symmetrical, bilaterally, it was otherwise oddly formed, being disproportionately large and lumpy in the anterior ...
— B-12's Moon Glow • Charles A. Stearns
... other things. She has a most modern and efficient interest in education; and here are gathered what faint, faint beginnings or premonitions of such things as Art Canada can boast (except the French-Canadians, who, it is complained, produce disproportionately much literature, and waste their time on their own unprofitable songs). Most of those few who have begun to paint the landscape of Canada centre there, and a handful of people who know about books. In these things, as in all, ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... engineer, and myself, after which the engineer took me below to arrange for my comfort, and as it was obviously impossible for me to sleep in a very dirty and very small hole, tenanted by cockroaches disproportionately large, and with a temperature of eighty-eight degrees, he took a mattress and pillows upon the bridge, told me his history, and that of his colored wife and sixteen children under seventeen, of his pay of 35 pounds ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... to be numbered among the curiosities of nature. They are characterised by the disproportionately large beak. In some species this is nearly a foot in length. The beak has on the upper mandible an excrescence which in some species is nearly as large as the bill itself. The nesting habits are not less curious than the structure of ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... beginning must present some vital phase of the subject; it should not be merely something attractive attached to the article to catch the reader's notice. In his effort to make the beginning attractive, an inexperienced writer is inclined to linger over it until it becomes disproportionately long. Its length, however, should be proportionate to the importance of that phase of the subject which it presents. As a vital part of the article, the introduction must be so skillfully connected with what follows that a reader is not conscious of the transition. Close coherence ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... juvenile Indians during the warm months of the year, he was dressed in nothing save a mere rag tied round his waist. His body was very brown, extremely round, fat, and wonderfully diminutive, while his little legs and arms were disproportionately small. He was so young as to be barely able to walk, and yet there he stood, his black eyes glittering with excitement, his tiny bow bent to its utmost, and a blunt-headed arrow about to be discharged at a squirrel, whose flight had been suddenly arrested by the unexpected apparition of Charley ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... is one of weighing evidence and balancing probabilities, complete harmony is not to be looked for. These formidable difficulties confront us even in attempting to work out from abundant material a brief chapter in the phylogenetic history of some small and clearly limited group, and they become disproportionately greater, when we extend our view over vast periods of time and undertake to determine the mutual relationships of classes and types. If the evidence were complete and available, we should hardly be able to unravel its infinite complexity, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... an important point of difference between the osprey and other kinds of hawks; and there is a peculiarity of structure about the feet and legs of the osprey, that points to the nature of his food and his mode of procuring it. His legs are disproportionately long and strong. They are without feathers nearly to the knees. The feet and toes are also very long, and the soles are covered with thick, hard scales, like the teeth of a rasp, which enable the bird to hold ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... restriction to house-limits, the heavy limitations of our clothing, and the heavier ones of traditional decorum, have made women disproportionately short-legged. This is a particularly undignified and injurious characteristic, bred in women and inherited by men, most seen among those races which keep their women most closely. Yet when one woman escapes the tendency and appears with a normal length of femur and tibia, a normal ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... were there still, but coupled with pathetic signs of some disintegrating and poisonous influence. The face which once, in its pallid austerity, had not been without beauty, had now coarsened, even in emaciation. The features stood out disproportionately; the hair had receded from the temples; something ugly and feverish had been, as it were, laid bare. And composure had been long undermined. The nurse who had just left ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... secretaries to the Japanese Legation, very small and yellow, with prominent cheek-bones and long, slanting, bloodshot eyes over which the lids blinked incessantly. His body was disproportionately large for his spindle legs, and he turned his toes in as he walked. The skirts of his coat were too wide, there was a multitude of wrinkles in his trousers, his necktie bore visible evidence of an unpractised hand. It was as if a daimio had been taken out of one ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... far beyond the powers of the present age, nevertheless the design was in many parts somewhat rude, and the figure altogether far from being well-proportioned. Some thought the head too big, some too small; some that the body was disproportionately little; others, on the contrary, that it was so much too large that it had the appearance of being dropsical; others maintained that the legs were too weak for the support of the whole, and that they should be rendered more important and prominent ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... been noticed, there seems no great inequality, as to strength or endurance, between the sexes. In migratory tribes, as of birds or buffaloes, the males are not observed to slacken or shorten their journeys from any gallant deference to female weakness, nor are the females found to perish disproportionately through exhaustion. It is the English experience that among coursing-dogs and race-horses there is no serious sexual inequality. Aelian says that Semiramis did not exult when in the chase she captured a lion, but was proud when she ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... magnified. The only way of eating it in comfort is to have a tub of water beside you. It should be eaten in private by any one who wants to retain the admiration of his friends. It has an immense stone, and a disproportionately small pulp. I think it tastes strongly of turpentine at first, but this is ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the general impression of his diminutiveness and fragility, one was struck with the peculiar beauty of his head and forehead, rising disproportionately high over his small wrinkly visage and ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... of a spirit than that of a little human girl, and you would almost have expected it to shine in the dark. When you got used to the light of it, you realised that the radiance poured from singularly, even disproportionately, large blue eyes, set beneath a broad white brow of great purity, and that what at first had seemed rays of light around her head was a mass of sunny gold-brown hair which ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... of window-opening brought an ell of danger. The nave is unusually low and broad, and its buttressed piers are of immense weight, ending severely in a plain, moulded band. On these great piers rest the cross-vaults of the roof and the broad arches of the wall. The north aisle, disproportionately narrow, is a later addition. Behind the altar is a true Provencal apse, shallow and rectangular, and beyond its rounded roof opens the smaller half-dome. Architecturally, this is an interesting interior; but the traveller who has not time to spend in musings will fail to see it ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... an unusual emphasis but India provided terrible deities, like Kali with her attendant fiends, and also the idea that the divine embodies itself in human personalities or special manifestations. Thus Tibetan Buddhism is not so much an amalgam, as a phase of medieval Hindu religion disproportionately developed in some directions. The Lamas have acquired much the same status as the Brahmans. If they could not make themselves a hereditary caste, they at least enforced the principle that they are the necessary intermediaries ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... animals he was convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It is exactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present that scientific men should assert their right to have their material big. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at the Bond Street ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... until an old-fashioned gun was exposed to view; it was coated and scaly with rust to such an extent, that we were unable to form any idea as to its age or nationality. It would most probably have been a twelve or eighteen-pounder howitzer, for it was about four feet in length, and disproportionately large in girth; but one of the trunnions, and the button at the breech, were broken off, the portion that had lain undermost had entirely disappeared, and the remainder was so honeycombed, that beyond ascertaining that it was a piece of ordnance, ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... shape, I may say, of a smallish man, grotesquely pot-bellied, with very thin legs and arms. The eyes were disproportionately large and quite circular, with an expression that was at once both impish and pathetic. The ears were immense, and set at right angles to the head; the rest of the features indefinite. He was dressed rather in the fashion ...
— The Psychical Researcher's Tale - The Sceptical Poltergeist - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • J. D. Beresford
... outwards, and the hair coarse, lank and invariably black. The beard appears late in life, and remains generally scanty. The eyebrows are straight and the iris of the eye is black. The nose is generally short, broad and flat. The hands and feet are disproportionately small, and the body early inclines to obesity. The complexion varies from an almost pale-yellow to a dark-brown, without any red or ruddy tinge. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... Nevertheless, this bargain was annually struck. The poverty-stricken widow always congratulated herself upon its conclusion, and it never occurred to her that the amount of work that Birt did in the tanyard was a disproportionately large return for the few days that the tanner's mule ploughed their ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... somewhere about the size of a large spaniel, but shorter in the body, and longer in the legs; and its hind legs, in particular, though kept partly gathered beneath the body, in readiness for a lightning spring, were so disproportionately long as to give a high, humped-up, rabbity look to the powerful hind quarters. This combined suggestion of the rabbit and the tiger was peculiarly daunting in its effect. The strange beast's head was round and cat-like, but with high, tufted ears, and a curious, back-brushed muffle of whiskers under ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts |
