"Purblind" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indeed, is admitted by all, both from the structure of the heart and the arrangement and action of its valves. But still they are like persons purblind or groping about in the dark, for they give utterance to various, contradictory, and incoherent sentiments, delivering many things upon conjecture, as we ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... probably be near rocks—an unpleasant complication in a hurried dive. There would, probably, very soon be boats out too, seeking with a machine-gun or pompom for a chance at your occasionally emergent conning-tower. In no way can a submarine be more than purblind, it will be, in fact, practically blind. Given a derelict ironclad on a still night within sight of land, a carefully handled submarine might succeed in groping its way to it and destroying it; but then it would be much better to attack such ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... black-and-white engraving of a masterpiece of the painter's brush may, to an eye untrained in the harmony of colour, be a better interpretation of the artist's meaning than his own proper work, so our feeble copies of the transcendent splendour and beauty may suit some purblind and untrained eyes better than the serener and loftier perfection which we humbly copy. 'We are the witnesses of these things.' And depend upon it, mightier than all direct effort, and more unusual than all utterances of lip, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the poor souls to whom that Hour never comes, with its memories that nothing can wholly destroy, its brightness that nothing can ever wholly darken. Heaven especially help the poor purblind soul that can sneer at it, the greatest and noblest of mankind's gifts, the countervail of all his cruel woes ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... appears so naked on my side, That any purblind eye may find it out. Somerset. And on my side it is so well apparelled, So clear, so shining, and so evident, That it will glimmer through a blind ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... before Christ was crucified, before Moses was born, began the terrible and pathetic attempt of a predamned people to raise their heads and walk erect. The first lifting of purblind eyes destined never to see even ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... pigeon-house with a parti-colored green and blue roof, an orange standard, and red supports. Yet these are no fancy pictures I have painted, and if the child places the tablets in this fashion, they are often allowed so to remain without criticism from the purblind kindergartner. She even sometimes dictates, herself, extravagant and vulgar combinations of color, such as a violet centre-piece with green ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... loved her all the time; and I am a purblind ass not to have seen it!" he said to himself, with cynical self-contempt, as he climbed up ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... sugar dropped from old Matthew's fingers and splashed into the tumbler, and with that there fell a silence on the room. Samuel half rose from his couch and passed a nervous hand over his thick black hair. His purblind eyes sought his mother's; hers were fastened on this eccentric kinsman, but with a look that passed beyond him. ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... time they put no women into nunneries but such as were either purblind, blinkards, lame, crooked, ill-favoured, misshapen, fools, senseless, spoiled, or corrupt; nor encloistered any men but those that were either sickly, subject to defluxions, ill-bred louts, simple sots, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... lies unpruned, 750 Nor see more danger in it—you retort. Your taste's worth mine; but my taste proves more wise When we consider that the steadfast hold On the extreme end of the chain of faith Gives all the advantage, makes the difference With the rough purblind mass we seek to rule: We are their lords, or they are free of us, Justas we tighten or relax our hold. So, other matters equal, we'll revert To the first problem—which, if solved my way 760 And thrown into the balance, turns the scale— How we may lead ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... learn to know them, and his memory shall never starve; he will never forget the hour when first they yielded him up their secret. Many moments of intimate delight do I treasure in remembrance, moments when I was suddenly aware that all previous impressions were the poor gatherings of purblind eyes; but I will only tell you of one, which may suffice to show what riches lie ever open to ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... his benefactor a purblind sort of wink. "Always belonged to you? Why of course it ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... I believe this purblind policy of delaying the expedition instead of freely aiding it had much to do with the result. Virginia did her part with some degree of willingness, but Pennsylvania, whence the general expected to draw a great ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... covered it with a faded pall, set three candlesticks about it. The service commenced. A decrepit deacon, with a little shock of hair behind, belted low down with a green kerchief, was mournfully mumbling before a reading-desk; a priest, also an old man, with a kindly, purblind face, in a lilac cassock with yellow flowers on it, served the mass for himself and the deacon. At all the open windows the fresh young leaves were stirring and whispering, and the smell of the grass rose from the churchyard outside; the red flame of the wax-candles ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... well one seems to know thee, with thy purblind spectacled eyes peering into fusty books and parchments, or bending over thy crucibles and retorts! Truly a novel and interesting sight it would be to see thee assuming wings. In thy philosophy there is naught but dreams of elixirs of life or homunculi. Thy highest aspiration nowadays would ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill
... as good as a wink to a blind horse," says the old saw, and a wink is no doubt as good as a smile to a purblind ass. But the wink is indeed one of the worst uses to which the human eye can he put. It signifies usually the vulgarisation of humour, and the degradation of mirth. It is the favourite eye-language of the cynical cad, the coarse jester, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 24, 1891 • Various
... literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway track-walker, purblind from gloom; the coal-stoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler-room of a skyscraper; sweatshop workers, a flight below the sidewalk level, whose faces are the color of dead Chinese; six-dollar-a-week salesgirls in the arc-lighted subcellars ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... reproach and loathe the man whose eyes are red and weeping with the effects of intemperate drinking, we cordially pity purblind students, as in some sense martyrs to the cause of learning. Dr. Reynolds, a distinguished American oculist, administers a rebuke to such which we fear is too often merited: "A closer examination of their history presents a very different ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself. She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's Progress." The fad of drawing plans! What was life worth—what great faith was possible when ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Alexander's followers carried his head on one side, as he did; and the flatterers of Dionysius ran against one another in his presence, and stumbled at and overturned whatever was under foot, to shew they were as purblind as he. Hernia itself has also served to recommend a man to favour; I have seen deafness affected; and because the master hated his wife, Plutarch—[who, however, only gives one instance; and in this he tells us that the man visited his wife privately.]—has seen his courtiers repudiate ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... longer the landau rolled on; then it came to a halt under the broad porte cochere of the Villa Irma, and two minutes after that Cleek and the Count stood in the presence of Madame Tcharnovetski, her purblind associate, and her retinue ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Tasmanian Flora" as a whole, see "Life and Letters," II., page 257.), i.e. to where you treat of the Australian Flora itself; and the latter part I remember thinking most of in the proof-sheets. Either you have altered a good deal, or I did not see all or was purblind, for I have been much more interested with all the first part than I was before,—not that I did not like it at first. All seems to me very clearly written, and I have been baulked at only one sentence. I think, on the whole, I like the geological, or rather palaeontological, discussion best: it ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... moment; and, interested as were her regrets, they were not unmingled with some faint self-reproach when she remembered how lightly she had prized her services. The antiquated femme de chambre had never appeared so clumsy, purblind, and stupid; and the more her stately mistress chided her, the more bewildered Bettina became, the more ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... pity it seems to our purblind eyes that so many girls should be married before they are women! The woman comes at length, and finds she is forestalled—that the prostrate and mutilated Dagon of a girl's divinity is all that is left her to do the ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... all want and woe, all calamity and disappointment, all shame and guilt. In Christ there come forward to meet her, love, hope, truth, light, salvation. In Simon are acted out doting conservatism, mean expediency, purblind calculation, carnal insensibility. Generosity in this scene is confronted with meanness, in the attempt to shelter misfortune. The woman is a tragedy herself, such as Aeschylus never dreamed of. The scourging Furies, dread Fate, and burning ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... "O purblind race of miserable men, How many among us at this very hour Do forge a life-long trouble for themselves, By taking true for false, or false ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... over this simple letter, which, to her excited imagination, merely confirmed the warning of her dream. At the date of its writing her mother had been sick in bed, with the symptoms of a serious illness. She had no nurse but a purblind old woman. Three days of progressive illness had evidently been quite sufficient to reduce her parent to the condition indicated by the third dream. The thought that her mother might die without the presence of any one who loved her pierced Rena's heart like a knife and lent wings to her feet. ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... oppression; toil as he may the ryot is never free from debt. The current rates of interest leave no profit from agriculture or trade. Twelve to 18 per cent. is charged for loans on ample landed security; and ordinary cultivators are mulcted in 40 to 60. A haunting fear of civil discord, and purblind conservatism in the commercial castes, are responsible for the dearth of capital. India imports bullion amounting to L25,000,000 a year, to the great detriment of European credit, and nine-tenths of it is hoarded in the shape of ornaments or invested in land, which is a badge of social ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... evils recurred. Sculptors obtained high prices—the art became a trade—schools arose which professed to sell the holy spirit of art for money; pupils flocked from far and near to buy it, in the hopes of selling it later on, and were struck purblind as a punishment for the sin of those who sent them. Before long a second iconoclastic fury would infallibly have followed, but for the prescience of a statesman who succeeded in passing an Act to the effect that no statue of any public man or woman should ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... of the time we live in is ophthalmia of intellect, affecting the higher classes. Monarchs, stone-blind, have tumbled headlong from their thrones, and princes have been conducted by their subjects out of their principalities. The aristocracy are purblind, and cannot distinctly decipher the "signs of the times." The hierarchy cannot discover why people would have religion at a reduced price: in fact, they are all blind, and will not perceive that an enormous mass, in the shape ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... is hard to have to play second fiddle to this purblind old Scotchman." Alaric Hobbs had been a reporter upon that dainty sheet, The New York Whorl, in one of his "emergent" periods, and so he writhed in agony at being left at the post. "I must be content to tap old Fraser when he comes back from London with that embarrassing lump of beauty, his millionaire ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... Tully, made more accurate, lively, or better descriptions with both his eyes! Democritus was blind, yet, as Laertius writes of him, he saw more than all Greece besides. . . . AEsop was crooked, Socrates purblind, Democritus withered, Seneca lean and harsh, ugly to behold; yet show me so many flourishing wits, such divine spirits. Horace, a little, blear-eyed, contemptible fellow, yet who so sententious and wise? Marcilius Ficinus, Faber Stapulensis, a couple of dwarfs; Melanchthon, a short, hard-favored ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... not in them power to loose the bands of nature, and to harden the soul against sorrow? flow they not, think you, from faith of the finest sort, and are they not bred in the bosom of a truly mortified soul? are these the effects of a purblind spirit? are they not rather the fruits of an eagle-eyed confidence? O these desires! they are peculiar to the righteous; they are none others but the desires of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Anna hated his large ears; but before Karenin, Charles Bovary was despised by Emma because of his clumsy feet and inexpressive bearing, and his habit of breathing heavily during dinner. George Tesman with his purblind faculties, amiable ways, and semi-idiotic exclamations will go down in the history of fiction with Georges Dandin, Bovary, and Karenin. As for Hedda, her psychological index is clear reading. In Peer Gynt one of the characters is described thus: "He is ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the high secrets of his soul to coarsefibred woman. He turned away, darkly conscious of having magnanimously given Ada a chance to mount with him into the upper air, which opportunity she, daughter of earth, had, in her purblind manner, refused. Thenceforward Ada was to him an ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... briers, with no evil insects nor any beasts save the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come. The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noticed their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight died out among them the race lived ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... objection to being made a Field Marshal, and glory not so much an object as a good salary"; in another (A Grand Military Spectacle) we find the heroes of the campaign engaged in inspecting the Field Marshals, a pair of decrepid, purblind, old men seated in arm chairs; in the third we recognise the amiable Prince Consort, who was most unjustly suspected in those days of a desire to interfere in the administration of our military matters—it would be moonshine to term it military system, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... suspicion given him the least hint to remark; but this, indeed, is the great optic-glass helping us to discern plainly almost all that passes in the minds of others, without some use of which nothing is more purblind ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... spoke as I saw: I report, as a man may of God's work—all's love, yet all's law. Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty tasked To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked. Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare. Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care! Do I task any faculty highest, to image success? I but open my eyes,—and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God In ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... leisure to treasure its recollections; even to pause and look back; to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a noble art, it might have overlooked or left down-trodden. But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind, and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the Doctor, "it is God's truth, and stands in no need of the endorsement of a set of well-meaning but purblind bigots and pedants, who presumed to set metes and bounds to Divine inspiration, and decide by vote what is God's truth and what is the Devil's falsehood. But, speaking of eagles, I never see one of these spiteful old sea-robbers without fancying that he may be the soul ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... any case your game in Edinburgh is up. The public is dog-tired of you and your ascensions, as any observant child in to-day's crowd could have told you. The truth was there staring you in the face; and next time even your purblind vanity must recognise it. Consider; I offered you two hundred guineas for the convenience of your balloon. I now double that offer on condition that I become its owner during this trip, and that you manipulate it as I wish. Here are the notes; and out of the total you will refund ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... were, so to speak, thrust under our noses, what force remained in the dilemma—creation or nothing? It was obvious that, hereafter, the probability would be immensely greater that the links of natural causation were hidden from our purblind eyes, than that natural causation should be unable to produce all the phenomena of nature. The only rational course for those who had no other object than the attainment of truth, was to accept 'Darwinism' as a working hypothesis, and see what could be made of it. Either ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... they should not have made, they do the thing they should not have done. But when fortune beckons and the others are hastening, urged by the deep voice of benevolent powers, these pass by, not hearing; and, vouchsafed no advice or warning but that of their intellect, the very wise old guide whose purblind eyes see only the tiny paths at the foot of the mountain, they go astray in a world that human reason has not yet understood. These men have surely the right to exclaim against destiny; and yet not on the ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... more characteristic moods of minds and men? "Fools, do you know anything of this mystery?" says Swift, stamping on a grave and carrying his scorn for mankind actually beyond it. "Miserable, purblind wretches, how dare you to pretend to comprehend the Inscrutable, and how can your dim eyes pierce the unfathomable depths of yonder boundless heaven?" Addison, in a much kinder language and gentler voice, utters much ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mr. Wooster, that I appreciate your splendid defiance of the outworn fetishes of a purblind social system. I appreciate it! You are big enough to see that rank is but the guinea stamp and that, in the magnificent words of Lord Bletchmore in 'Only a Factory Girl,' 'Be her origin ne'er so humble, a good woman is the equal of the finest ...
— Death At The Excelsior • P. G. Wodehouse
... advantage, makes the difference, With the rough, purblind mass we seek to rule. We are their lords, or they are free of us, Just as we tighten ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... had; she has probably never heard of the corrupted, or any version of the Epistles of St Ignatius, but she would accept the corruptions bodily upon the smallest hint that they savoured better with the hierarchy, and she would do all this apparently in good faith on the authority of a purblind party within the Church, which exists to keep open its wounds. Now, I submit that a volte face is possible, especially in religious opinions, but that a pronounced habit of religious thought cannot be acquired in a day, so that, in the history of Miss Vaughan's conversion, there is ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... hoop as any woman in England, except Lady Delacour; accordingly he was dressed by Marriott, and made his entree with very composed assurance and grace, being introduced as the Countess de Pomenars to the purblind dowager, Lady Boucher, who had come to call. He managed his part well, speaking French and broken English, until Lady Delacour dexterously let down Belinda's beautiful tresses, and, calling the French lady to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... have recognition as a specially effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself suddenly caught ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... brought upon a tray into the drawing-room, so that she might eat her sandwiches while she went on with her book. In the middle, Mr. Osborne Hamley was announced. He came in, looking wretchedly ill in spite of purblind Mrs. Goodenough's report of ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... prank, O think you, Friend with the musing eye Who watch us stepping by, With doubt and dolorous sigh? Can much pondering so hoodwink you? Is it a purblind prank, O think you, Friend ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... mistake if we allow ourselves to suppose that because that age knew less than ours, because its bounds were narrower and the undispelled clouds lower down, it therefore thought itself feeble and purblind. By contrast with the strenuous hurry-push of modern life such movement as we can see, looking backwards, seems slow and uncertain of its aim; before the power of modern armaments how helpless all the might of Rome! It is easy ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... a man or woman and influences that life so long as it is lived here on earth, is on the surface sufficiently finite for us to say: It was on such a day I made my decision; to such and such an event I can look back as the cause of all that has followed. The How thereof remains traceable to our purblind eyes for a month, a term of years, one generation, possibly two; the Where and When can generally be defined; but the Why we ask blindly, and are rarely ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... and no trifling enhancement of his friends' kindness in tolerating his eccentricities, that he seldom made allowance for his own palpable and undeniable deficiencies. As well might a blind man deny the existence of colours, as a purblind man assert that there was no charm in a prospect, or in a Claude or Titian, because he could see none. Once, by way of pleasing Reynolds, he pretended to lament that the great painter's genius was not exerted on stuff more durable ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... And frugal ants, whose millions would have end, But they lay up for need a timely store, And travail with the seasons evermore; Whereas Great Mammoth long hath pass'd away, And none but I can tell what hide he wore; Whilst purblind men, the creatures of a day, In riddling ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... of their liaison, when they made their love in that same room under the very nose of a purblind husband. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... then alone will the true war begin. Yet all this may be but the prelude. When the war of weapons has been buried in its own ashes, another war may begin, the war of minds—the struggle of mighty nations, the battle of an ambition of which our purblind age has not even a glimpse—a terrible strife, yet worthy of the immortal principle of man, and to be rewarded only by a victory which shall throw all the exploits of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... fiercely. "I understand, and I tell you they're all mad. Hopelessly mad." She laughed wildly. "Disaster? Oh, blind, blind, fools. There'll be disaster, sure enough. The old Indian curse will be fulfilled. Oh, Helen, I could weep for the purblind skepticism of this wretched people, this consequential old fool, Mrs. Day. And I—I am the idiot who has brought it ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... trusteth not in the Supreme Wisdom of the Enlightened One, clinging unto his own purblind knowledge, must suffer by fire for ...
— Buddhist Psalms • Shinran Shonin
... all this myself; for in a quiet, unconscious way this poor child had manifested even to my purblind eyes the dealings of God's munificence with her. By degrees all the old vain regrets after her beauty had yielded to perfect resignation; and resignation had grown into peace, and peace had ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... to such ears as should always be closed against poetry, there is no music in verse which has not in it sufficient fulness and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of emotion or of thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the purblind scrutiny of prepossession or the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... more have left off trying for what I hoped and aimed at than I could have left off living, though I did not know very distinctly what either was. As I look back at the endeavor of those days much of it seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering. I can see that doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, but only a ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... glorious and beneficent career, at the age of fifty-five (57?), Caesar, whose frank and fearless spirit disdained suspicion or precaution, was assassinated by a knot of rancorous, perfidious aristocrats, whom he had pardoned and promoted. Their purblind spite was powerless to avert the inevitable advent of monocracy. What they did effectually extinguish for more than a century, was the possibility of amnesty, conciliation, and mutual confidence. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... past. For why is a young man like Poliziano (who was not yet born when I was already held worthy to maintain a discussion with Thomas of Sarzana) to have a glorious memory as a commentator on the Pandects—why is Ficino, whose Latin is an offence to me, and who wanders purblind among the superstitious fancies that marked the decline at once of art, literature, and philosophy, to descend to posterity as the very high priest of Platonism, while I, who am more than their equal, have not effected anything but scattered work, which will ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... let me add that we have by no means exhausted the lessons which Spiritualism, in the hands of some of its votaries, can teach us. To our purblind vision the joint ownership of one skull by two different persons presents a physiological problem more or less difficult of solution. But all difficulty vanishes as soon as 'the river is crossed.' I derived no little comfort and much light ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... took the old purblind fish first to the bank of the other pond, and alighted in a Varana-tree growing on the bank there. But he threw it into a fork of the tree, struck it with his beak, and killed it; and then ate its flesh, and threw its bones away ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Collected by Joseph Jacobs
... curiously enough as it seems to purblind law-loving man,—should the favored one be openly convicted, that alters not one whit his ...
— Hints for Lovers • Arnold Haultain
... front half plunged into the back of her hut, the Epeira certainly cannot see her web. Even if she had good sight, instead of being purblind, her position could not possibly allow her to keep the prey in view. Does she give up hunting during this period of bright sunlight? Not at all. ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... askant[obs3], askant askance[obs3]; screw up the eyes, glare, glower; nictate[obs3]. dazzle, loom. Adj. dim-sighted &c. n.; myopic, presbyopic[obs3]; astigmatic moon- eyed, mope-eyed, blear-eyed, goggle-eyed, gooseberry-eyed, one-eyed; blind of one eye, monoculous[obs3]; half-blind, purblind; cock-eyed, dim-eyed, mole-eyed; dichroic. blind as a bat &c. (blind) 442; winking ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... two, three, But made a careless, slouching bow, And said, "Your highness will allow, That I am personable, tall, A rather handsome face withal, And fit to serve as volunteer, At least as any present here! Purblind, and deaf, and long and short, Without distinction here resort; Whilst I, neglected and forgot, Sate daily watching in my cot; And scarcely stirr'd, for fear there might, Arrive that morning or that ...
— Vignettes in Verse • Matilda Betham
... Allow me three to have been spent before I was aware of him, three more will be the outside I can have passed gazing at him. But I speak of "minutes," of course, referring to my ostensible self, that inert, apathetic child who followed its mother, that purblind creature through whose muddy lenses the pent immortal had been forced to see his familiar in the wood, and perchance to dress in form and body what, for him, needed neither to be visible. It was this outward self which was now driven by circumstances to resume command—the command ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... back of his head to utter concerning woman? Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his "Theory of Sexual Selection"? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the very fount of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... administrations. But when Roosevelt was elected Governor, he was determined that no corporation should get a valuable privilege from the State without paying for it. Before long he had become convinced that they ought also to pay for those which they already had, free gifts of the State in those purblind days when corporations were young and coddled. He proposed that public service corporations doing business on franchises granted by the State and by municipalities should be taxed upon the value of the privileges they enjoyed. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... French, after which the King moved forward under a rich canopy. The monarch's appearance was in strange contrast with that of the numerous and powerful army behind him. He seemed almost a monster, with his enormous head, long nose, wide, gaping mouth, big, white, purblind eyes, very diminutive body, extraordinarily thin legs, and misshapen feet. He was clad in black velvet and a mantle of gold brocade, bestrode a tall and very beautiful charger, and entered the city riding with his lance levelled—a martial ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... the South, the crazed perfume-hunter in the East, the stifled hemp-curer in the fetid swamps of Russia, the shriveled iron-worker in the scorching furnaces of England. Here, in Paris, amid that motley herd who feed on virtue, the moon shines down calmly on purblind embroiderers and peerless beauties, on worn-out roues and squalid beggars. The breeze that wafts to heaven the pure prayer of the maiden witnesses the fierce ribaldry of the courtesan; it flutters the curls of a sleeping ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... so it stands in your mind. You judge thus: you follow your judgment. I judge partly so, and partly otherwise, and I follow my judgment. Mere experience is but a purblind wisdom, after all. When I do not at all see my own way, I follow that, still aware of its imperfections; where eyes are of service, I use them, learning from experience caution, not submission. The real danger in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... guaranteed by the Constitution of 1814; but, as a matter of fact, the former kingdom is by all the world looked upon as a dependency, if not a province, of the latter. The Bernadottes, lacking comprehension of the Norwegian character, had shown themselves purblind as bats in their dealings with Norway. They had mistaken a perfectly legitimate desire for self-government for a demonstration of hostility to Sweden and the royal house; and instead of identifying themselves with the national movement (which they ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Got out, she went to coole loues burning thirst, Yet ere she went (yet as she went) she hide, She had a care to decke her vp in pride, Respecting more his loue to whom she went, Then parents feare, though knowing to be shent, And trickt her selfe so like a willing louer, As purblind Cupid tooke her for ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale
... for Princess Amelia; but they only told the latter that the King was ill and wanted her. She had been confined some days with a rheumatism, but hurried down, ran into the room without further notice, and saw her father extended on the bed. She is very purblind, and more than a little deaf. They had not closed his eyes; she bent down close to his face, and concluded he spoke to her, tho she could not hear him—guess what a shock when she ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... little thing to those who know the truth," the speaker resumed. "To the purblind laws of the West it may seem a great thing. We seek in Rome to do as Rome does. We judge every man as we find him. Therefore, recognizing that your total disappearance might compromise our movements in the near future, we have decided to offer you an alternative. This ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... Time has refuted the purblind purists, the chilly "wet-blankets"; and the Lincoln stories, bright, penetrative, piquant, and pertinent are our classics. Hand in hand with "Father Abraham," the President next to Washington in greatness, walks "Old Abe, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... high carved mantel was a little round old-fashioned mirror, and as I lay back in the chair my purblind eyes were fixed upon it as it reflected the mingled gleams of lamp and fire that touched the shining surfaces of the oaken wall or the furniture of the room. My back was to the door, and yet by the sudden passing of a shadow across the glass I saw that it was being opened stealthily—and ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... For, as to the last—it denoted that the task of the spectacles was over; that, when a philosopher has made up his mind to marry, it is better henceforth to be short-sighted—nay, even somewhat purblind—than to be always scrutinizing the domestic felicity to which he is about to resign himself, through a pair of cold, unillusory barnacles. And for the things beyond the hearth, if he cannot see without spectacles, is he not about to ally to his own defective vision a ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... the tribunes in the First Folio version 'what harm can your besom conspectuities [i.e. vision or eyes] glean out of this character?' Theobald replaced the meaningless epithet 'besom' by 'bisson' (i.e. purblind), a recognised Elizabethan word which Shakespeare had already employed in 'Hamlet' (II. ii. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... that old man listening! His ears must have grown before my purblind eyes! But his story was an extraordinarily interesting and circumstantial effort. And to come back to your question, it did fit in with the theory of a fatal accident on your boy's part; he was ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... fancy might busy itself of an afternoon, or at morning as he lay awake in bed. With our deeper and more logical sense of life, we can have no idea how large a space in the attention of mediaeval men might be occupied by such figured hangings on the wall. There was something timid and purblind in the view they had of the world. Morally, they saw nothing outside of traditional axioms; and little of the physical aspect of things entered vividly into their mind, beyond what was to be seen on church windows and the walls and floors of palaces. ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she shook him furiously. He woke; he glared at her with bloodshot eyes; he threatened her with his clenched fist. There was but one way of lifting his purblind stupidity to the light. She appealed to his experience of himself, on many a former occasion: "You fool, you have been drinking again—and there's a patient waiting for you." To that dilemma he was accustomed; the statement of it partially roused him. Mrs. ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... utterance, the emphasising or the softening, of his opinions, I do not think that he ever said anything but what he sincerely thought. The problem, therefore, is to discover and define, if possible, the critical standpoint of a man whose judgment was at once so acute and so purblind; who could write the admirable surveys of English poetry contained in the essays on Mme. de Stael and Campbell, and yet be guilty of the stuff (we thank him for the word) about the dancing daffodils; who could talk ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the deluge. Now, it is certainly true, that the Bible does describe things as they appear to men. It is, however, beginning to be discovered, that these popular appearances are closely connected with philosophical reality. Our purblind astronomy and prattling geology may be as inadequate to expound the mysteries of the Bible philosophy as was the incoherent science of Strabo and Ptolemy. The experience of another planet, now transacting before our eyes, admonishes ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... know—'became completely absorbed in silent rumination; very unexpectedly, however, he shewed himself alive to what surrounded him, by one of those singular starts of vision, that made him seem at times, though purblind to things in common, gifted with an eye of instinct for espying any action that he thought merited reprehension; for all at once, looking fixedly on Mr. Greville, who without much self-denial, the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... to the purblind crew who fill The heart with each day's care, Nor learn, from past and future, skill To bear and ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... out the bird-cage and hung it in the sun. And surprisingly, almost alarmingly, the ancient bird began to sing. It was like hearing an old man sing a love-song. The bird sat there, rough and purblind, and chanted youth with ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... improvement; that the place at which we were was called Rhyd y fen, or the ford across the fen; that it was just half way between Festiniog and Bala, that the clergyman of the parish was called Mr Pughe, a good kind of man, but very purblind in a spiritual sense; and finally that there was no safe religion in the world, save that of the Calvinistic-Methodists, to which my ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Shakespeare, with passionate conflicting sympathies and curious impartial intellect cannot discover himself so simply; needs, like the diamond, many facets to show all the light in him, and so proceeds to cut them one after the other as Falstaff or Hamlet, to the dazzling of the purblind. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... himself as a quite inexplicable Sphinx-riddle. A rich poverty of Latin and Greek,—so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,—but naught farther? O purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are things in him incommunicable by stroke of birch! Did it ever enter that old bewildered head of thine that there was the Possibility of the Infinite in him? To thee, quite wingless (and even featherless) biped, has not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... is a statement in many books that this is a reminiscence of the theme in the Finale of the Ninth Symphony. How such a legend started it is difficult to say; it must be due to what the late W.F. Apthorp called "purblind criticism." For my part I see a resemblance in only one measure—save that both melodies are in quadruple rhythm—between the theme ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... banners And spears of the Morning; Sifting the nations, The slag from the metal, The waste and the weak From the fit and the strong; Fighting the brute, The abysmal Fecundity; Checking the gross, Multitudinous blunders, The groping, the purblind Excesses in service Of the Womb universal, The absolute drudge; Firing the charactry Carved on the World, The miraculous gem In the seal-ring that burns On the hand of the Master - Yea! and authority Flames through the dim, Unappeasable Grisliness Prone down the ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... English statesmen could only regard it from the shopkeeping point of view. When a new world began to arise at the Antipodes, our rulers saw an opportunity not for planting new offshoots of European civilisation, but for ridding themselves of the social rubbish no longer accepted in America. With purblind energy, and eyes doggedly fixed upon the ground at their feet, the race had somehow pressed forwards to illustrate the old doctrine that a man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going. While thinking of earning an honest penny by extending the trade, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... and talking to his Visitants.' For all his bragging, drink alone preserved his courage: 'he was very restless in the Condemned Hole,' though 'he gave little or no attention to the condemned Sermon which the purblind Ordinary preached before him,' and which was, in Fielding's immortal phrase, 'unto the Greeks foolishness.' But in the moment of death his distinction returned to him. He tried, and failed, to kill himself; and his progress to the nubbing cheat was a triumph of ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... dear woman and the many others who are wasting their time and eyesight over fashions which perish could only be reached and aroused by the influence of the lovely old English stitchery of our great period! If only the purblind authorities and custodians of our National collections could awaken to the infinite possibilities which they hold, once again "Opus Anglicum" might rule the world, and the labour of even one woman's life might be of lasting value. It is useless ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... man without imputing to him what is infamous:—To the eye of enmity, virtue appears the ugliest blemish; it is a rose, O Sa'di! which to the eyes of our rivals seems a thorn. The world-illuminating brilliancy of the fountain of the sun, in like manner, appears dim to the eye of the purblind mole." ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... property qualification, could or did protect him. As early as 1705 old Justice, in his treatise on sea law, deplores bitterly the "barbarous custom of pressing promiscuously landsmen and seamen," and declares that the gang, in its purblind zeal, "hurried away tradesmen from their houses, 'prentices and journeymen from their masters' shops, and even housekeepers (householders) too." By 1744 the practice had become confirmed. In that year Capt. Innes, of His Majesty's armed sloop the Hind, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... as he passed through the Great Hall. This circumstance, together with what I saw that afternoon in every street, convinced me how much our friends were dispirited, and I therefore resolved next day to raise their courage. I knew the First President to be purblind, and such men greedily swallow every new fact which confirms them in their first impression. I knew likewise the Cardinal to be a man that supposed everybody had a back door. The only way of dealing with men of that stamp is ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... beasts before they were dead. At last they were reduced to such extremity, that they proposed to cast lots for one to be killed to support the others; they turned back on their route, that they might find the dead bodies of their companions for food. Finally, out of the whole crew, three or four, purblind and staggering from exhaustion, craving for death, arrived at the borders of the colony, where they were kindly received ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... all such as reading this my narrative shall contemn and abhor me for the purblind fool and poor, desperate wretch I was, and who, living but for murder, could cry thus on God for the blood of his fellow-man—to all such I would say that none can despise me more utterly than I who write these words. For life since then ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... thou hast on foot the purblind hare, Mark the poor wretch; to overshoot his troubles, How he outruns the wind, and with what care, He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles; The many musits through the which he goes Are like a labyrinth to amaze ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... Good Heaven! that I, poor old man, should live to have the joy—what a stupid blockhead was I that I did not at a glance—oh, gracious powers! And you are really come back, and the dear old master is underground, and here you are again! What a purblind dolt I was, to be sure! (striking his forehead) that I did not on the instant—Oh, dear me!—-who could have dreamt it—What I have so often prayed for with tears—Oh, mercy me! There he stands again, as large as ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... goes that once in the twilight undergrowth of a forest of nut-bearing trees a number of little purblind creatures wandered, singing for nuts. On some of these purblind creatures the nuts fell heavy and full, extremely indigestible, and were quickly swallowed; on others they fell light, and contained nothing, because the kernel had already been eaten ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in good humour or out of the way. It was her certain belief that my brother William would have returned to his country, and my eldest brother would not have looked so high, if they had had a little less learning." Poor, purblind, well-meaning, obstructive old dame Herschel! what a boon to the world that children like yours are sometimes seized with this incomprehensible fancy for ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... is adopted, with salaries "On the higher scale," as they say in the Courts. It is curious that, when I explain to my creditors this most promising source of prospective income, they don't seem to see it! But creditors always were a purblind race.—WOULD-BE LEGISLATOR. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 18, 1893 • Various
... tales made no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his Greek and Roman Mythology; and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished ...
— Boy Life - Stories and Readings Selected From The Works of William Dean Howells • William Dean Howells
... be purblind, and perhaps could not see a guillotine: but her neck might chance to ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... I watched for the postman! Envelopes of portentous bulk were put into my hands so often that I became inured to disappointment, unsurprised and unhurt, like a patient father who has more faith in the abilities of his children than the stupid and purblind world ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... in the dishevelled drawing-room, after a round of the widely parted chambers, where frowzy beds, covered with frowzy white counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind courts. A vulgar modernity coexisted with a shabby antiquity in the appointments; a mouldering wall showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of pseudo-aesthetic rugs. ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... supernaturally long yellow teeth. She wore a black gown, black cotton gloves, and a black velvet band across her forehead, fastened in the centre with a black and gold clasp containing a ghastly representation of a human eye, apparently purblind—which gave this lady the air of a ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the moment of demobilisation slip. We have a good and zealous Minister of Agriculture, we have good men alive to the necessity, working on this job. If we miss the chance it will be because "interests" purblind, selfish and perverse, and a lethargic public opinion, do not back them; because we want to talk it out; because trade and industry think themselves of superior importance to the land. Henceforth trade and industry are of secondary importance in this country. There is only one thing of absolutely ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... this proposed expedition, he went into one of the boxes at the playhouse, as usual, to show himself to the ladies; and reconnoitring the company through a glass (for no other reason but because it was fashionable to be purblind), perceived his mistress very plainly dressed, in one of the seats above the stage, talking to another young woman of a very homely appearance. Though his heart beat the alarm with the utmost impatience at sight of his Emilia, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... a printed Document, emanating, as it were, from a vile, mean, and ignorant miscreant of the name of ———, calumniating and vituperating me; it is evidently the production of a vain, supercilious, disappointed, frantic, purblind maniac of the name of ———, a bedlamite to all intents and purposes, a demon in the disguise of virtue, and a herald of hell in the paradise of innocence, possessing neither principle, honor, nor honesty; a vain and vapid creature whom nature plumed out for the ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... having a remedy proposed, as if the proposer were creating a mischief instead of offering relief from one. People are so inured to the evils that they feel as if it were unreasonable, if not wrong, to complain of them. Yet, avoidable or not, he must be a purblind lover of liberty on whose mind they do not weigh; who would not rejoice at the discovery that they could be dispensed with. Now, nothing is more certain than that the virtual blotting out of the minority is no necessary or natural consequence of freedom; that, far from ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... people ye remain for me, even with your virtues, the people with purblind eyes—the people who know not what ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... man in the face: and was of so mild and humble a nature, that his poor Parish-Clerk and he did never talk but with both their hats on, or both off, at the same time: and to this may be added, that though he was not purblind, yet he was short or weaksighted; and where he fixed his eyes at the beginning of his sermon, there they continued till it was ended: and the Reader has a liberty to believe, that his modesty and dim sight were some of the reasons ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... functionary, a meagre old captain of invalids, who had been roused from his bed, and was evidently half asleep. I stoutly denied my being "the criminal who had offended the majesty of the people." But as the governor himself, on gazing at me with his purblind eyes, was perfectly satisfied of my identity, there was no use in contesting the point. A couple of sentinels were placed at the door of my cell, and I was left, like himself, to my slumbers. Before the door closed, I grasped my guide by the throat. The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... according to our behavior as larvae, the power to develop wings under the mortal wrapping. Also they tell us not to trouble ourselves about the fact that we see no Psyche-imago detach itself from the broken cocoon: this lack of visual evidence signifies nothing, because we have only the purblind vision of grubs. Our eyes are but half- evolved. Do not whole scales of colors invisibly exist above and below the limits of our retinal sensibility? Even so the butterfly-man exists,—although, as a matter of course, we ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn |
