"Facile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... adventus hostium non ubi oportuit nuntiatus est, PERICULUM illa sua in rebus dubiis audacia facile EVASIT. ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... of Dickens—his reckless contempt for realistic possibility—need not hinder us from enjoying, apart from his revelling humor and his too facile sentiment, those inspired outbursts of inevitable truth, wherein the inmost identity of his queer people stands revealed to us. His world may be a world of goblins and fairies, but there cross it sometimes figures of an arresting appeal and ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... not only a delightful companion, but he was delightful because obviously open-hearted, enthusiastic, and exceedingly affectionate. To such charms Fitzjames was no more obdurate than his fellows. Lord Lytton, it is true, was essentially a man of letters; he was a poet and a writer of facile and brilliant prose; and Fitzjames acknowledged, or rather claimed, a comparative insensibility to excellence of that kind. Upon some faults, often combined with a literary temperament, he was perhaps inclined to ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... them in such a way as to appeal to others, consequently he cannot exert the full force of his intellectuality nor leave the imprint of his character upon his time, whereas many a man but indifferently gifted may wield such a facile pen as to attract attention and win for himself an envious ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... OEuvre, ma foi, ou n'est facile atteindre: Pourtant qu'il faut parfaitement sage etre, Pour le vrai fol bien naivement feindre. EUTRAPEL, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... reason why it should not be the truth. Louis, a facile tool, had always been of his, the stronger, party. If Blondel tampered with any one, he would naturally, if he knew aught of the house, suborn Claude or Anne. And Louis, spying and fleeing, and when overtaken, promising silence, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... ought perhaps to be noticed: it is the accentuation of the Latin. Adverbs, for instance, are generally accented on the last syllable, e.g., doctiu's, facile', qua'm, eo', quo': the rule, however, is by no means regularly kept. But this has evidently nothing to do with the peculiar conditions under which Campion's book was produced, and is to be accounted for by the use of ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion
... than can be imputed to The Prince of Machiavel." But the unaccustomed hyperbole had been hazarded a century before in the obscurity of a Latin dissertation by Feuerlein: "Longe detestabiliores errores apud alios doctores politicos facile invenias, si eidem rigorosae censurae eorum scripta subiicienda essent." What has been, with us, the occasional aphorism of a masterful mind, encountered support abroad in accredited systems, and in a vast and successful political movement. The recovery of Machiavelli ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... to like the music of Bach and Beethoven, but found himself compelled to give them up—they bored him too much. Nor was he more successful with the other great composers; Haydn, for instance, was a sort of Horace, an agreeable, facile man of the world, while Mozart, who must have loved Handel, for he wrote additional accompaniments to the Messiah, failed to move him. It was not that he disputed the greatness of these composers, but he was out of sympathy with them, and never could forgive the last two for having ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... P. Soto accepi litteras Oxonio datas quibus me certiorem facit quid cum duobus illis haereticis egerit qui jam erant damnati, quorum alter ne loqui quidem cum eo voluit: cum altero est locutus sed nihil profecit, ut facile intelligatur a nemine servari posse quos Deus projecerit. Itaque de illis supplicium est sumptum.—Pole to Philip: Epist. Reg. Pol. ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... thought than could be given to it here. The opinion, however, he had formed of the paper placed it beyond the reach of criticism. It was now many years since his attention had been drawn to the name of Denny Lane; and everything that had come from his facile pen conveyed sound scientific conclusions. The paper to which they had just listened was no exception. It was invested with great interest, and would be regarded as a valuable contribution to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... upon his knee. His face did not alter. Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten a little, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... first-rate &c. (important) 642, (excellent) 648; unrivaled peerless, matchless; none such, second to none, sans pareil[Fr]; unparagoned[obs3], unparalleled, unequalled, unapproached[obs3], unsurpassed; superlative, inimitable facile princeps[Lat], incomparable, sovereign, without parallel, nulli secundus[Lat], ne plus ultra[Lat]; beyond compare, beyond comparison; culminating &c. (topmost) 210; transcendent, transcendental;plus royaliste que le Roi[Fr], more catholic than ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... was a particular one. I had no overcoat, at least not one suitable for Sunday, and really it would have been preposterous to have attempted to cut down one of father's for me. That feat was beyond even my mother's facile scissors, and she could effect marvels with them, I knew to my cost. It was a bitter cold winter day, I remember, and my mother, in the kindness of her heart, brought to light one of those long, narrow, fringed, brilliantly colored ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... instructions were given with an air of frankness and good nature that banished every idea of pedantry. In a thousand ways he smoothed for me the path of knowledge and made the most abstruse inquiries clear and facile to my apprehension. My application was at first fluctuating and uncertain; it gained strength as I proceeded and soon became so ardent and eager that the stars often disappeared in the light of morning whilst I was yet ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... with the power of facile adaptation, and he unobtrusively bent his efforts toward convincing his new acquaintances that, although he was alien to their ways, he was sympathetic and to be trusted. Once that assurance was given, the family talk went on much as though ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... monkey face peering out of the curled white locks. Her Excellency desired a palace on the same model as the fine French palazzo? Nothing easier! No? An original design, then, but of that style? Ah! more facile still! Cost? A trifle to so noble and magnificent a prince as Monseigneur Altissimo the Duke of Wirtemberg. One almost expected the vast structure to rise from the ground in a night, so easy did it seem ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... harsh, And twice a day both reckon up the flock, And one withal the kids. But I will stake, Seeing you are so mad, what you yourself Will own more priceless far- two beechen cups By the divine art of Alcimedon Wrought and embossed, whereon a limber vine, Wreathed round them by the graver's facile tool, Twines over clustering ivy-berries pale. Two figures, one Conon, in the midst he set, And one- how call you him, who with his wand Marked out for all men the whole round of heaven, That they who reap, or stoop behind the plough, Might ...
— The Bucolics and Eclogues • Virgil
... Ximenez did not last two years, yet such was the permanent character of his beneficent influence upon the national development, that the memory of his services is still undimmed in Spain. Amongst the statesmen of his times, he was facile princeps and he enjoys the unique distinction of being the only prime-minister in history who was regarded as a saint by ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... direct avec le centre du Gouvernement a Constantinople, ne recevant d'ordres que de la ou toute reclamation possible contre lui et tout appel en derniere instance s'adresserait egalement par les organes diplomatiques des Puissances Chretiennes, repondrait a un besoin qu'il est facile de pressentir des ce jour, et dont l'experience demontrera ou l'utilite, s'il est nomme a tems, ou la necessite si l'on tarde ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf
... roaming over the country in search of it. To such men the profession next in rank after that of the soldier robbing in the service of the sovereign was that of the robber plundering on his own account. 'Materia munificentiae per bella et raptus. Nec arare terram, aut expectare annum, tam facile persuaseris, quam vocare hostes et vulnera mereri; pigrum quinimmo et iners videtur sudore acquirere, quod possis sanguine parare.' 'War and rapine supply the prince with the means of his munificence. You cannot persuade the German to cultivate the fields and wait patiently for the harvest so easily ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... slave, first of capitalism and then of communism, first of the old and then of the novel. It is a peculiarity of women that they are not easily set off by such alarms, that they do not fall readily into such facile tumults and phobias. What starts a male meeting to snuffling and trembling most violently is precisely the thing that would cause a female meeting to sniff. What we need, to ward off mobocracy and safeguard a civilized form of government, is more of this sniffing. What ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... "agma," cujus forma nulla est et vox communis est Graecis et Latinis, ut his verbis: aggulus, aggens, agguilla, iggerunt. In ejusmodi Graeci et Accius noster bina G scribunt, alii N et G, quod in hoc veritatem videre facile non est. ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... than a slight variation of that adopted by the ethnic priests. Dreamers have not had that variety in their follies, that has generally been imagined. That some of these things should be extensively admitted, by no means affords proof of their existence. Nothing appears more facile than to make mankind admit the greatest absurdities, under the imposing name of mysteries; after having imbued him from his infancy with maxims calculated to hoodwink his reason—to lead him astray—to prevent him from examining that which he ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... he was out again that I—and not only myself but others—noticed for the first time that his character was changing. He had always been a laughing, undecided sort of person; he had a facile laugh for everything; he would meet you and begin laughing before there was anything to laugh at. This was certainly harmless, and he had a deserved ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... certain almost jaunty air of self-complacence about the man and his facile promise. What he promised was no more than what Christ requires from each of us, no more than what Christ was infinitely glad to have laid at His feet. And he promised it with absolute sincerity, meaning every word that he said, and believing that he could fulfil it all. What was the fault? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... warm heart, and a purse that was never closed. He was a facile speaker whose eloquence was of a forensic type. His friendships were passionate. While in prison he received news of the death of one of his friends, Gilbert, who had been guillotined at Evreux, and when some one ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... profitoient de l'occasion, et y venoient negocier pour le ciel.... Au reste Tadoussac est un bon port, et on m'a assure que vingt cinq vaisseaux de guerre y pouvoient etre a l'abri de tous les vents, que l'ancrage y est sur, et que l'entree en est facile."—Charlevoix, tom. v., p. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... Like most facile people, Bambi was bored with her masterpiece at the end of a week, and abandoned it without a sigh. She decided that literature was not to be enriched by her. In fact, she never gave a thought to her first-born child until a month after its birth, when a New York magazine fell into her ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... no more, had, however, been fairly established overnight. It was a conclusion to which Mullins, with the facile conviction of his class, had jumped on the slender evidence of the asthma cigarette alone; but before midnight Thrush himself had been forced to admit its extreme probability. There was a medicine cork as well as an asthma cigarette; the ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... actuated the inhabitants of the Highlands and the Hebrides. The plant of loyalty is there in full vigour, and the Brunswick graft now flourishes like a native shoot. To that spirited race of people I may with propriety apply the elegant lines of a modern poet, on the 'facile temper of ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... are equally facile in running into debt. Genius has no necessary connection with prudence or self-restraint, nor does it exercise any influence over the common rules of arithmetic, which are rigid and inflexible. Men of genius are often superior to what ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... the rhyme too often has: the clink that falls at regular intervals as of a stone-breaker's hammer! In the freer kinds of Spanish poetry there are numberless verses that make the smoothest lines and lyrics of our sweetest and most facile singers, from Herrick to Swinburne, seem hard and mechanical by comparison. But there is something more. I doubt, for one thing, if we are justified in the boast we sometimes make that the feeling for Nature is stronger in our poets than in those of ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... abstract disquisition of which each number of the Watchman is made up, we are arrested again and again by some striking metaphor or some weighty sentence which tells us that the writer is no mere wordy wielder of a facile pen. The paper on the slave trade in the seventh number is a vigorous and, in places, a heart-stirring appeal to the humane emotions. There are passages in it which foreshadow Coleridge's more mature literary manner—the manner of the great pulpit orators of the seventeenth century—in ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... always quietly sure of herself. That is why she will not be hurried, but moves through her gradual scheme with so leisured a serenity; why her style, fluent and facile, never forces its natural eloquence; why her humour plays with a diffused light over all her work and seldom needs the advertisement of scintillating epigrams. Judged by almost every standard to which ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... as you were directed for young oaks; only they shall not need above one cutting, where they grow less regular and hopeful. But because this is an experiment of some curiosity, obnoxious to many casualties, and that the producing them from the mother-roots of greater trees is very facile and expeditious (besides the numbers which are to be found in the hedge-rows and woods, of all plantable sizes) I rather advise our forester to furnish himself from ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... regular practice. The rest of the Church feels strongly that the time for this has not arrived yet; that haphazard invitations by individual vicars to ministers of convictions widely different are undesirable. The time has come for conference, but not yet for any facile overpassing of the facts and reasons for historical separations. Nor do we want to run the risks of indiscipline and disorderliness resulting from such individual action. The Church of England can only be of help to the cause of ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... gifted man, who has long filled a distinguished place in the service of his sovereign and the eyes of the world, in whose hands the task of regenerating Sardinia, herculean as it may appear, would be not only a labour of love, but facile comparatively with any others on which it may devolve. I speak of General the Count Alberto di Marmora, known to all Europe by his Topographical Survey, and his able work, the Voyage en Sardaigne, of which two additional volumes have been recently published. But, perhaps, his devotion to the best ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... been already said, has it not?—absolutely cold while he produces his effects. There is a frozen contempt indicated in every line he writes for the poor facile artists "who speak with tears." Yet the moods through which his Annabels and Ligeias and Ulalumes lead us are moods he must surely himself have known. Yes, he knew them; but they were, so to speak, so completely the atmosphere he lived ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... when it can be obtained, only for salmon flies. The brown and fawn check pattern of this feather seems to be peculiarly tempting to trout, especially to the large trout of Thames; and in every river where I have tried the alder, I have found the bustard wing facile princeps among all ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... nostri ordinis mandavit omnibus suae religionis professoribus, ut nullus audeat de auctoritate Pontificis quicquam loqui. Denique Orator Caesareus in talia verba prorupit, quibus facile cognovi ut me a Pontifice vocari studeat et tunc timendum esset saluti meae. Father Omnibow to ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... urged against this illustration: I am only concerned to point out that it illustrates an argument entirely different from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment dig a trap for facile rhetoric. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... important that the process of writing should be slow. It is when the subject has been long tossed about in thought that the mind begins to glow about it; the subject itself gets hot and begins to melt and flash, until at last it can be poured forth in a facile but glowing stream. Style is not something added to the thought from the outside. It is simply the beauty of the truth itself, when you have gone deep enough to find it; and the worst condemnation of a careless and unattractive ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... talk was secular. Mrs. Sutherland was deeply distressed about the boot business. She consoled me by saying that many would be glad to have such feet whatever shoes they had on. Unfortunately, fishers and seafaring men are too facile to be compared with! This looks like enjoyment! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intelligence to which any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject. Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a ponderable something thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will still question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford, to attend to just that, to just that figure or ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... lines on which Shakespeare meant to proceed after the end of Act III. Not knowing what to do, they patched up a piece without any central tragical idea, and hid their want of thought with much effective theatrical invention, pageants, a trial, a coronation, a christening, etc., and with bright, facile, vinous dialogue, of the kind that will hold an uncritical audience. The play, when done, was mounted with extreme splendour at the Globe Theatre. Wadding from the cannons discharged in the first act set fire to the theatre, and burned it to ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... Beddoes is always large, impressive; the greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs. ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... by the notion of Humidum or Wet, so familiar in the physics of antiquity and of the Middle Ages. "Invenietur verbum istud, Humidum, nihil aliud quam nota confusa diversarum actionum, quae nullam constantiam aut reductionem patiuntur. Significat enim, et quod circa aliud corpus facile se circumfundit; et quod in se est indeterminabile, nec consistere potest; et quod facile cedit undique; et quod facile se dividit et dispergit; et quod facile se unit et colligit; et quod facile fluit, et in motu ponitur; ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... haveano, et l'elmo in testa, Due di questi guerrier, de' quali io canto; Ne notte o di, d' appoi ch' entraro in questa Stanza, gl'haveano mai messi da canto; Che facile a portar come la vesta Era lor, perche ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to put himself into the hands of Sindhia was very much increased by the violent conduct of Afrasyab towards one who, whatever his faults, had endeared himself, by long years' association, to the facile monarch. Majad-ud-daulah, the Finance Minister, having attempted to dissuade his Majesty from going to Agra, the haughty Moghul sent Najaf Kuli Khan with a sufficient force to Majad's house, and seizing him, with the whole of his property, kept him in close arrest, ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... the Puritan Colonel's, and she does not adopt the somewhat tiresome "doormat" attitude of wifely adoration towards the subject of her memoir which "Mad Margaret" (as Pepys called her Grace of Newcastle) thought fitting when she took up her fatally facile pen to endow her idolised lord with all the virtues and all the graces and every talent ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... it with atheism (q.v.) in their denunciations, so the callow freethinker—following Tennyson's path of "honest doubt''—classed himself with the agnostics, even while he combined an instinctively Christian theism with a facile rejection of the historical ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... this plan are its complexity, and the usual difficulty of finding a sufficient space of level ground, for its execution. The method given in the following paragraph is incomparably more facile ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... her love to Pierre Philibert. She had given it without stint or measure, and with a depth and strength of devotion of which more facile natures know nothing. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... her lips over the memory of the picture her fancy had painted the night Paula sang his songs, the sentimental notion of Paula's inspiring him with an occasional facile caress to the writing of other love songs. She might have been a boarding-school girl to have thought of that. She smiled, too, though a little more tenderly, over his own attempt—naive he had called it—to go in harness, like a park hack, submissive to ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... facile tongue— That bloodless warfare of the old and young— So seek your adversary to engage That on himself he shall exhaust his rage, And, like a snake that's fastened to the ground, With his own fangs inflict the fatal wound. You ask me how this miracle is done? Adopt his own opinions, one by one, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... he got employment in the Western Union commercial telegraph department at a wage of $60 per month, Edison made the acquaintance of Milton F. Adams, already referred to as facile princeps the typical telegrapher in all his more sociable and brilliant aspects. Speaking of that time, Mr. Adams says: "I can well recall when Edison drifted in to take a job. He was a youth of about eighteen years, decidedly unprepossessing in dress and rather uncouth in manner. ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Facile with phrases of length and Latinity, Like honorificabilitudinity, Where is the maid could resist your vicinity, Wiled by the impudent grace of your plea? Then your vivacity and pertinacity Carry the day with the divil's audacity; No ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... a good Grecian, and the editor, you will remember, of your American Editions, is going to London in August probably, and on to Heidelberg, &c. He means, I believe, to spend two years in Germany, and will come to see you on his way; a man whose too facile and good-natured manners do some injustice to his virtues, to his great industry and real knowledge. He has been corresponding with your Tennyson, and editing his Poems here. My mother, my wife, my two little girls, are ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... us, and that it lives among the glories of language as a published oration. I find, on looking through the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, that in his estimation the Pro Milone was the first in favor of all our author's orations—"facile princeps," if we may collect the critic's ideas on the subject from the number of references made and examples taken. Quintilian's work consists of lessons on oratory, which he supports by quotations from the great ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... A woman tropical, intense In thought and act, in soul and sense, She blended in a like degree The vixen and the devotee, Revealing with each freak or feint The temper of Petruchio's Kate, The raptures of Siena's saint. Her tapering hand and rounded wrist Had facile power to form a fist; The warm, dark languish of her eyes Was never safe from wrath's surprise. Brows saintly calm and lips devout Knew every change of scowl and pout; And the sweet voice had notes more high And shrill for ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... firma et fiducia in Domino, quod idem consecratus utriusque hominis, habitu mutato moribus melioratus praesideret. Probatissimum siquidem tenebatur sedem illam sedem sanctorum esse sanctam recipere aut facere, vel citius et facile indignum abicere, quod et in beato Thoma ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... newspaper "organ" approached their end. Forney's occupation, like Othello's, was gone, for he was nothing if not an organ grinder. Facile with pen and tongue, he seemed a born courtier—a veritable Dalgetty, whose loyal devotion to his knight-at-arms deserved better recognition than the cold and wary Pennsylvania chieftain was willing to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... would waste no wonder on the subject.' Was there ever a passage like this? The sympathy of the writer is wholly with the child, and the child's absolute indifference to his own sufferings. It might have been safely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be free from the facile, maudlin pathos of the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... it matters little whether the name of the author has or has not been discovered. We read, however, in the Histoire litteraire de la France (xxvi. p. 388): "We have ignored anonymous sermons: writings of this facile character are of no importance for literary history when their authors are unknown." Are they of any more importance when we know ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... long without e for a Cambril, as dost, most, ghost, bright, right, sign, design, and short, notwithstanding e Cambril as hence, since, prince, possible, facile, but Prince and Simple proper Names be spoken, with i long, that an unknown Reader mistake not the ...
— Magazine, or Animadversions on the English Spelling (1703) • G. W.
... vague to be crystallized in words. The ready association of thoughts with definite words connotes a relatively high degree of intellectual advancement. Language forms are the short-hand of thought; without facile command of language, thinking is vague, clumsy, and ineffective. Conversely, vague mental ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... be silent that ye may here I've been among the Seseshers, a earnin my daily peck by my legitimit perfeshun, and havn't had no time to weeld my facile quill for "the Grate Komick paper," if you'll allow me to kote from ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 2 • Charles Farrar Browne
... in the Washington (D.C.) Republic: "Mr. Lanman is well known both in England and America as the writer of some of the most delightful descriptive books in the English language. To the facile wielding of his pen he adds an equally adroit and skilful use of the pencil, and his admirable results in these combined pursuits won for him from his friend and brother of the quill, Washington Irving, the apt and deserved ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... to produce a love of beauty, to raise man above the ordinary daily level. The Greeks knew of earlier works of art; but they declined to be seduced, as the Phoenicians and Etruscans were seduced, into a facile imitation of them. They realized, no doubt subconsciously rather than consciously, that they were called to set forth a new and human art, and had in them powers which could produce it. They began a process which developed with ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... told of the Waldenses; calumny is far too facile a weapon not to tempt an adversary at bay. Thus they have been charged with the same indecent promiscuities of which the early Christians were accused. In reality their true strength was in their virtues, which strongly contrasted with the vices ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... second,—thrills to us out of endlessness;—and the force of infinity dwells in its lightest tremor; the weight of eternity presses behind its faintest shudder. To that phantom-Touch, the tinting of a blossom or the dissipation of a universe were equally facile: here it caresses the eye with the charm and illusion of color; there it bestirs into being a cluster of giant suns. All that human mind is capable of conceiving as possible (and how much also that human mind must forever remain incapable of conceiving?) ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... so soon as she was back in her little room, with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement, that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been together. The reminiscence decided her. Theophil could never be hers; but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place. So at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, a lovely fan ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... considered ourselves victorious over the mountain; having only the descent before us, and the valley under our eyes, we felt strong hope that we should force our way down. But this was a case in which the descent was not facile. Still deep fields of snow lay between them, and there was a large intervening space of rough-looking mountains, through which we had yet to wind our way. Carson roused me this morning with an early fire, and we were all up long before day, in order to pass ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... to the earlier system was to be attempted. The men who essayed the task had unquestionably a more perfect knowledge of the causes of the change than can ever be possessed by the student of to-day; but criticism is easier than action, and if it is not to become shamelessly facile, every constraining element in the complicated problem which is at all recoverable (all those elements so clearly seen by the hard-headed and honest Roman reformers, but known by them to possess ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... stimulate an emotion has about it a certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with a blank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasures. Art, so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove a disappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can never sweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mind only by leaving the other half in abeyance. In the mere artist, too, there is always something that falls short of the gentleman and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... addressing himself to his two more facile comrades, "you are fully of the opinion that the man should be got rid of? Let me tell you, then, that this man is ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... if the apartment itself was becoming historic, like those chambers they pointed out to the tourist wherein crowned heads had slept. The manner of the Marquis lent itself charmingly to this illusion. He spoke in a facile, mellifluous voice, and as fluently as if he had been at work for a long time preparing a dissertation on this subject, instead of taking it up now by chance. In his tone, in his gestures, in the sustained ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... excursion from the things before him to the studio where those facile works of art had been produced. The place was imaginary, and the artist not altogether clear, but the features of the second figure which he saw, the visitor at the studio, were well-known to him, and the sentiments of the artist receiving the order to treat a subject in four large ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... The Duke of Milan, Ludovic, the Moor, had by his sagacity and fertile mind, by his taste for arts and sciences and the intelligent patronage he bestowed upon them, by his ability in speaking, and by his facile character, obtained in Italy a position far beyond his real power. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most eminent amongst the noble geniuses of the age, lived on intimate terms with him; but Ludovic was, nevertheless, a turbulent rascal and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... yet is it a pleasing fear to look upon its savage solitudes through the barred nursery-windows in the heart of the sweet, companionable village.—And how the mountains love their children! The sea is of a facile virtue, and will run to kiss the first comer in any port he visits; but the chaste mountains sit apart, and show their faces only in the midst of their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... de tous les maux necessaires, soit relativement a ceux qui l'endurent, soit par rapport a ceux qui sont contraints d'en employer les victimes, existe dans toute l'etendue des deux Louisianes. Il ne seroit pas facile de determiner pendant combien d'annees la partie septentrionale en aura besoin; mais on peut assurer qu'il doit exister bien des siecles encore dans le Midi si le Gouvernement veut y encourager l'agriculture, qui est son unique ressource. Les Negres ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... with the Pledge a Door of Refuge ope To wean my footsteps from the facile Slope, And write me down, fulfilled of Self-esteem, A Prop and Pillar ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... the two men. They stood out in marked contrast, in manner, physique, in everything. Where Fyfe was reserved almost to taciturnity, impassive-featured, save for that whimsical gleam that was never wholly absent from his keen blue eyes, Monohan talked with facile ease, with wonderful expressiveness of face. He was a finished product of courteous generations. Moreover, he had been everywhere, done a little of everything, acquired in his manner something of the versatility of his experience. ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Royal Institution were of some help to me. I attended courses by Owen, Tyndall, Huxley, and Bain. Of these, Huxley was FACILE PRINCEPS, though both Owen and Tyndall were second to no other. Bain was disappointing. I was a careful student of his books, and always admired the logical lucidity of his writing. But to the mixed audience he ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... had never in his life felt such repulsion as toward what seemed to him this facile, theatrical remorse. If Guion was really contrite, if he really wanted to relieve the world of his presence, he could blow his brains out. Ashley had known, or known of, so many who had resorted to this ready remedy for a desperate plight that it seemed simple. His thoughts were too complex, ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... access to the King, which Charles's nonchalance permitted, and knew how to suggest what might be useful to him as a diplomat, in the careless intercourse of the table, and amidst the jests of a carouse at Court. Bristol did his best to aid the Spanish diplomat. Charles's facile temper made him forget Bristol's double-dealing, and Bristol, having regained some of his favour, "had an excellent talent in spreading that gold-leaf very thin, that it might look much more than it was." [Footnote: Life, i. 505.] A whisper in the King's ear might do much ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... scepticism, and thus to refuse in thought to entertain either a probability or an improbability concerning the existence of a God; or else to incline in thought towards an affirmation or a negation of God, according as his previous habits of thought have rendered such an inclination more facile in the one direction than in the other. And although, under such circumstances, I should consider that man the more rational who carefully suspended his judgment, I conclude that if this course is departed from, neither the metaphysical teleologist ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the belly-rail in these German instruments. As to Stein's escapement, his hopper was fixed behind the key; the axis of the hammer rising on a principle which I think is older than Stein, but have not been able to trace to its source, and the position of his hammer is reversed. Stein's light and facile movement with shallow key-fall, resembling Cristofori's in bearing little weight, was gratefully accepted by the German clavichord players, and, reacting, became one of the determining agents of the piano music and style of playing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... evil consequences. Concede that the triumph of the religious moralist, when realized, is more beautiful, more consoling and more radical; at the same time it is not easy to deny that the triumph of economical science is more facile and more certain. ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... were of any use to me. I owe everything to you. My case cannot be defined merely as that of a priest who gave up his religion because a pretty woman came by. He who says that does not try to understand; he merely contents himself with uttering facile commonplace. What he has to learn is the great oneness in Nature. There is but one element, and we but one of its many manifestations. If this were not so, why should your whiteness and colour and gaiety remind me ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... the tears of which they were half ashamed, they continued up the street, happy in the reconciliation, so facile and so complete in childhood, when bygones are bygones, and there is no danger of ghosts, once laid, ever rising up again to give added rancor ...
— Peggy-Alone • Mary Agnes Byrne
... for the sake of her cakes, in water parties with his gay companions—mostly Greek officers who now were all dead and gone or exiles from the country—now did her the honor to come here so soon after his return. Her facile tongue knew no pause as she told him that she and her husband had gone forth with the rest to welcome him at the triumphal arch near Menes' Gate, and Emau with them, and the little one. Yes, Emau was married now, and had called her first child Orion. And when the young ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wish to carry to our numerous English-speaking subscribers on this continent some testimony of your presence in our midst. Therefore we place our columns at your disposal, and will esteem the privilege of presenting to the public any topic your facile pen may write. To this end we will wait upon you or be pleased to see you at our sanctum. With much respect, we are, Madam, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... When Valentine, always facile, had begun to consider this matter, a drawing of the building, as it was to look when restored, was made, in order to stir up his zeal, and make him long for a parish church that would do him and the vicar credit. He beheld it, and forthwith vowed, with uncivil directness, ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... from the excuses and prayers, it was simply that Pierre was no footman but a noted thief—that he had long meditated an attack on the Cardinal's Necklace; had made Lafleur's acquaintance in Paris, corrupted his facile virtue, and, with the aid of forged testimonials, presented himself in the character in which I had first made his acquaintance. The rascals had counted on the duke's preoccupation with Marie Delhasse for their opportunity. The duke smiled to hear it. Pierre listened ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... tepet igne focus, Et teges et cimex et nudi sponda grabati, Et brevis atque eadem nocte dieque toga. O quam magnus homo es, qui faece rubentis aceti Et stipula et nigro pane carere potes. * * * * * Rebus in angustis facile est contemnere vitam: Fortiter ille facit ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... support in the authorities for excluding or strictly limiting judicial review of Commission findings and Mr Baragwanath carefully put the arguments forward. But, as we say, there are reasons why the Court ought not to adopt the facile approach of saying that the function of the Commission was merely to inquire and report and that as the Commission's findings bind no-one they can be disregarded entirely as ...
— Judgments of the Court of Appeal of New Zealand on Proceedings to Review Aspects of the Report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Erebus Aircraft Disaster • Sir Owen Woodhouse, R. B. Cooke, Ivor L. M. Richardson, Duncan
... America in 1892, and who is a violinist of much ability, with a beautiful tone, facile and brilliant technique, but somewhat lacking in elegance and polish, did not come to tour the country as a virtuoso. He was engaged by Mr. Walter Damrosch as concert-master for the New York orchestra, but during his stay in this country he appeared in many of the most important concerts, and was ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian materialism ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... and diverting manner, and withall they are carefull to make choise of none, but such as represent the fairest images: They are no lesse sollicitous to diversifie their words by agreeable modifications, their inflexion hath very little uneasie in it, it is all of it aequally facile and gay; their diminutives are exceedingly rellishing, because there is something more than ordinarily pretty in them, they are rich in derivatives, and compounds, not only because their pronunciation is more harmonious, ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... generally placed it; contributed brilliant fugitive articles to various papers and magazines, and was generally spoken of by the inner circle of the craft as "a rising man," and a man to be afraid of. Henley was full of common-sense, only moderately introspective, facile, and vivacious. He might be trusted to tincture a book with the popular element, and yet not to spoil it; for his literary sense was keen, despite his jocular leaning toward the new humour. He lacked imagination; but his descriptive powers were racy, and he knew instinctively what was ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... mission on which he apparently was sending me. I believe, too, that the consciousness of the incongruity of my attire increased my sense of helplessness, and that, had I been dressed as Englishmen are wont to be, who take their walks abroad, he would not have found in me, on that occasion, the facile instrument which, ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... are those of Shan-tung Hu-nan, Ho-nan, and Shan-si. The last is eminently the coal and iron province of China, and its coal-field, as described by Baron Richthofen, combines, in an extraordinary manner, all the advantages that can enhance the value of such a field except (at present) that of facile export; whilst the quantity available is so great that from Southern Shan-si alone he estimates the whole world could be supplied, at the present rate of consumption, for several thousand years. "Adits, miles in length, could ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... his fashion, a "gentleman". As long as the L80 lasted, he lived in luxury, and by the time it was spent he had established himself in his profession. This profession was a lucrative one. It was that of a swindler. Gifted with a handsome person, facile manner, and ready wit, he had added to these natural advantages some skill at billiards, some knowledge of gambler's legerdemain, and the useful consciousness that he must prey or be preyed on. John Rex was no common swindler; ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... most savoury, best and easiest of digestion; we commend ours: but all is rejected, and unfit for such as lead a resty life, any ways inclined to melancholy, or dry of complexion: Tales (Galen thinks) de facile melancholicis aegritudinibus capiuntur. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... as soon as he saw the Jesuits in the field, thinking they were enough for that time, immediately, with incomparable meekness and humility, renounced his own undertaking. Oh, how blessed are such souls, bold and strong in the undertakings God proposes to them, and withal tractable and facile in giving them up when God so disposes. It is a mark of a most perfect Indifference to leave off doing a good work when God pleases, and to return, our journey half accomplished when God's Will, which is our guide, so ordains."[1] I may tell you, my Sisters, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... harmonized form was not confined to the educated classes. It extended through all walks of life, and while the most elaborate compositions of the famous masters were beyond the powers of the people, the lighter and more facile pieces ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... Italy in the suite of Philip of Burgundy, the ambassador of the Emperor Maximilian to Pope Julius II. in 1508. He settled in Florence, where the chief branch of his family continued to flourish, and had for his second master Piero di Cosimo, that jocund and facile painter and vivid and harmonious colourist, under whose brush the pagan deities came to life again. This Giusto was by no means a mediocre artist, but he consumed all his forces in the vain effort to reconcile his primary ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... never catch a glimpse of her. Miss Ferris called several times on business, but Priscilla always happened to be out. Her name was posted on the bulletin-board for having library books that were overdue. She even wrote a paper for one of the German Club meetings (Georgie was not a facile German scholar, and it had required a whole Saturday); but owing to the fact that she was suddenly called out of town, she did not read it ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster |
