"Generalisation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evolution is no speculation, but a generalisation of certain facts, which may be observed by any one who will take the necessary trouble. These facts are those which are classed by biologists under the heads of Embryology and of Palaeontology. Embryology ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... personalities upon us, was an opposition to all ideas, all generalisations that can be explained and debated. E... fresh from Paris would sometimes say—'We are concerned with nothing but impressions,' but that itself was a generalisation and met but stony silence. Conversation constantly dwindled into 'Do you like so and so's last book?' 'No, I prefer the book before it,' and I think that but for its Irish members, who said whatever came into their heads, the club would not have ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... colour of this Irish society of which Bernard Shaw, with all his individual oddity, is yet an essential type? One generalisation, I think, may at least be made. Ireland has in it a quality which caused it (in the most ascetic age of Christianity) to be called the "Land of Saints"; and which still might give it a claim to be called the ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... seeing the order of that which has already happened; and then, from those known causes, to reason forwards, so as to conceive that which is to come to pass in time. Such would be the philosophy of this earth, formed by the highest generalisation of phenomena, a generalisation which had required the particular ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... be divided into two inconsistent halves. In 1519 his rule is pronounced more suave and gentle than the greatest liberty anywhere else; twenty years later terror is said to reign supreme. It is tempting to sum up his life in one sweeping generalisation, and to say that it exhibits a continuous development of Henry's intellect and deterioration of his character. Yet it is difficult to read the King's speech in Parliament at the close of 1545, without crediting him with some sort of ethical ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... a definite object, in accomplishing which its members have indeed a share, but not a complete and concrete one (calling their whole being into play). Free individuals are sacrificed to the severe demands of the national ends, to which they must surrender themselves in this service of abstract generalisation. The Roman state is not a repetition of such a state of individuals as was the Athenian polis. The geniality and joy of soul that existed there have given place to harsh and rigorous toil. The interest of history ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... kind of people," said Dan, in optimistic generalisation. "You'd like Mrs. Pasmer. She's ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... "spontaneous generation," nor in sudden transformations of lower into higher forms of life. The doctrine, "omne vivum e vivo"—every living thing (in the present condition of our earth) is born from a living thing—is now held by scientific investigators as a reasonable generalisation of experience. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... superseded by a newer Sc{-o}p. His consolation is a well-known one; perhaps the oldest and commonest of all the formul of consolation. Others have been in trouble before him, and have somehow got over it. This is not conveyed as a mere generalisation; it is done poetically through striking examples, of which Weland is the first, and Beadohild the second. After each example ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... has been preserved in very good condition. The purpose of it was, however, not so satisfactory. It is said to have taken place whenever a married woman wished to have a child; and the penalty is lost in the obvious generalisation that not to perform the ceremony is not ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... experience is limited to horses, meets with a zebra for the first time,—will he suppose that this generalisation holds good ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... a hasty generalisation! Helbig will, if he looks, find ghosts enough in the literature of North America while still colonial, and in Australia, a still more newly settled country, sixty years ago Fisher's ghost gave evidence ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... words, though one may develop a theory adequately, one cannot pretend to develop it exhaustively. My book is a simplification. I have tried to make a generalisation about the nature of art that shall be at once true, coherent, and comprehensible. I have sought a theory which should explain the whole of my aesthetic experience and suggest a solution of every problem, but I have not attempted to answer in detail all the questions that proposed ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... warrant me to state that Wordsworth was mistaken in supposing that Mrs. Hemans 'could as easily have managed the spear of Minerva as her needle.' Her brave and beautiful life, and her single-handed upbringing of her many boys worthily, make one deeply regret that such sweeping generalisation from a narrow and hasty observation should have been indulged in. My profound veneration for Wordsworth does not warrant my suppression of the truth in this matter. Be it remembered, too, that ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... and 1633, "The Staple of News," "The New Inn," "The Magnetic Lady," and "The Tale of a Tub," the last doubtless revised from a much earlier comedy. None of these plays met with any marked success, although the scathing generalisation of Dryden that designated them "Jonson's dotages" is unfair to their genuine merits. Thus the idea of an office for the gathering, proper dressing, and promulgation of news (wild flight of the fancy in its time) was ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson
... Laocoon, was a very important contribution. But a true appreciation of these things is possible only in the light of a whole system of such art-casuistries. And it is in the criticism of painting that this truth most needs enforcing, for it is in popular judgments on pictures that that false generalisation of all art into forms of poetry is most prevalent. To suppose that all is mere technical acquirement in delineation or touch, working through and addressing itself to the intelligence, on the one side, or a merely poetical, or what may be called literary interest, addressed also to the pure intelligence, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... of drink never entered my mind. Some of Louis' and my adventures have since given me serious pause when casting sociological generalisations. But it was all good and innocently youthful, and I learned one generalisation, biological rather than sociological, namely, that the "Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... which they may be obtained: measurement, enumeration, valuation, sampling, generalisation—Precautions to be observed in ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... of our bird, we see a sense organ of a very high order. Bright, intelligent, full-circled, of great size compared to the bulk of the skull, protected by three complete eyelids; we realise that this must play an important part in the life of the bird. There are, of course, many exceptions to such a generalisation as this. For instance, many species of sparrows are dull-coloured. We must remember that the voice—the calls and songs of birds—is developed to a high degree, and in many instances renders bright ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... do. It will not change the nature of men, but it will mollify it into much that is exalted, that is noble, and that is good. It almost universally raises individual character; but it can never debase it. The world are too apt to generalise—and this generalisation has done much disservice to the British navy. It forms a notion, creates a beau-ideal—a very absurd one truly—and then tries every character by it. Even the officers of this beautiful service have tacitly given in to the delusion; and, by attempting ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... that evening. I often do when I have been meeting women like Lady Pinkerton, because there is a danger that that kind of woman, so common and in a sense so typical, may get to bulk too large in one's view of women, and lead one into the sin of generalisation. So many women are such very dreadful fools—men too, for that matter, but more women—that one needs to keep in pretty frequent touch with those who aren't, with the women whose brains, by nature and training, grip ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... looked such a fine man, she asked him for money to pay the always overdue household bills, or even to ask whether they would wait dinner for him, he would say something quite just about the untidiness of her hair, follow it up by a generalisation on her unworthiness, and then bang the door, but not too loudly, as if he had good-humouredly administered a sharp rap over the knuckles to a really justifiable piece ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... tree, perhaps of a particular kind of tree (for some savages have no word for tree in general), or even of an individual tree, is sufficiently concrete to supply a basis from which by a gradual process of generalisation the wider idea of a spirit of vegetation might be reached. But this general idea of vegetation would readily be confounded with the season in which it manifests itself; hence the substitution of Spring, Summer, or May for the tree-spirit or ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... weeks to-day since I landed in New York, and, save for forty hours in Philadelphia and four hours in Brooklyn, I have spent all that time in Manhattan Island. Yet, to my shame be it spoken, I am not prepared with any generalisation as to the American character. It has been my good fortune to see a great deal of literary and artistic New York, and, comparing it with literary and artistic London, I am inclined to say "Pompey and Caesar berry much alike—specially Pompey!" The New Yorker is far more cosmopolitan ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... the reasoning of crowds are the association of dissimilar things possessing a merely apparent connection between each other, and the immediate generalisation of particular cases. It is arguments of this kind that are always presented to crowds by those who know how to manage them. They are the only arguments by which crowds are to be influenced. A chain of logical argumentation is totally incomprehensible to crowds, and for this reason it is permissible ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... word," said Nick, "I don't know any one who was fonder of a generalisation than you. You turned them off as the man at ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... was taciturn. It occupied all her energies to conceal the fact that she was suffering a good deal of physical pain. She made no original suggestions. Churchouse, according to his wont, generalised; but it was through a generalisation that they ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... charcoal strokes represented were described with great particularity. And in the first case delight would have been felt at recognising the fulness of detailed information conveyed about the objects drawn—that each drawing represented not a generalisation, but an individual. In the other case the mind would have been repelled by the infatuated insistence on insignificant or negligible details, the absence of their classification and subordination to ideas. The first of these two frames of mind is that of Paul Pry, ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... that breed. That's why you can't keep anything to yourselves, but have to run abut the town tellin' everybody all the secrets you know!" And he charged them with constantly giving each other away. He repeated this generalisation about the Dublin people to John Marsh. "An' I tell you what'll happen to you, young fellow, one of these days. You'll be hanged or shot or transported or somethin', an' half the people of this place'll be runnin' like lightnin' to swear an information against you, as sure ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... existence in another world, but is likewise calculated to make us happy here. We are constantly taught to renounce sensual pleasure and selfish gratifications, to forget our body and sensible organs, to associate our pleasures with mind, to fix our affections upon the great ideal generalisation of intelligence in the one Supreme Being. And that we are capable of forming to ourselves an imperfect idea even of the infinite mind is, I think, a strong presumption of our own immortality, and of the distinct relation which our finite ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Self into activity. Therefore we find our commentator, when dealing with pain, declares that the karmic receptacle the causal body, that in which all the seeds of karma are gathered Up, has for its builder all painful experiences; and along that line of thought we come to the great generalisation: the first function of pain in the universe is to arouse the Self to turn himself to the outer world, to evoke ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... vicinity. And White Fang allowed himself to be driven away. This was a female of his kind, and it was a law of his kind that the males must not fight the females. He did not know anything about this law, for it was no generalisation of the mind, not a something acquired by experience of the world. He knew it as a secret prompting, as an urge of instinct—of the same instinct that made him howl at the moon and stars of nights, and that made him fear death ...
— White Fang • Jack London |
