"Recondite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by none, Algernon yet left behind him at the University the most remarkable reputation of his day. He had obtained some of the highest of academical honours, and by that proverbial process of vulgar minds which ever frames the magnificent from the unknown, the seclusion in which he lived and the recondite nature of his favourite pursuits attached to his name a still greater celebrity and interest than all the orthodox and regular dignities he had acquired. There are few men who do not console themselves for not being generally loved, if they can reasonably hope that they are generally esteemed. ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... deeper reason yet: we have not fully learned or obeyed the laws and conditions of prayer. Until they are apprehended and complied with, it is not possible for us to pray as we might. They are not, however, very recondite. The least advanced in the Divine school may read them on this page, where Christ unbares the deepest philosophy of devotion in the ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... to me, that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature. But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of science will, I am sure, be willing to ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... subject to a certain point. It does not indeed seat itself merely in centres of the world; this is impossible from the nature of the case. It is intended for the many, not the few; its subject matter is truth necessary for us, not truth recondite and rare; but it concurs in the principle of a University so far as this, that its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever been that which nature prescribes in all education, the personal presence of a teacher, or, in theological language, Oral Tradition. It is the living ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... venture to say, a very beautiful result, and we may say it yielded us no little astonishment. What our calculation might lead to we never dreamt of; that it should educe a conclusion so recondite that our unassisted power never could have attained to, and which, if we could have conjectured it, would have been at best the most distant probability, that conclusion being itself, as it would appear, the quintessence of truth, afforded ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... imaginative faculty's mode of working, than all our philosophizing and analysis. It seems to let out with the fulness, simplicity, and unconsciousness of a child—"Fancy's Child"—the secret mechanism or procession of the greatest creative mind our race has produced. In itself, it has no recondite meaning, it answers fully its own sweet purpose. We are not believers, like some folks, in the omniscience of even Shakspeare. But, like many things that he and other wise men and many simple children say, it has a germ of universal meaning, which it is quite lawful to bring out of ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... be a good or a bad institution. This may sound like a truism; but if I am to judge by the speeches which, on this and former occasions, have been made by gentlemen opposite, it is no truism, but an exceedingly recondite truth. I, Sir, think the Established Church of Ireland a bad institution. I will go farther. I am not speaking in anger, or with any wish to excite anger in others; I am not speaking with rhetorical exaggeration: I am calmly and deliberately expressing, in the only appropriate terms, an opinion ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... day and did their business there, whatever it was, and in their leisure moments bought shares, and houses, and ate dinners, and played games, as he was told, it would have seemed to him ridiculous to suppose that there were any who would run risks for the sake of anything so recondite, so figurative, as passion. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... all very well know that the shaft of Bertrand de Gourdon put an end to the royal hero—and that from that 29th of March he never robbed nor murdered any more. And we have legends in recondite books of the manner of ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and the result was one of the most fruitful friendships of our history. Marshall's "original bias," to quote Story's own words, "as well as the choice of his mind, was to general principles and comprehensive views, rather than to technical or recondite learning." Story's own bias, which was supported by his prodigious industry, was just the reverse. The two men thus supplemented each other admirably. A tradition of some venerability represents Story as having said that Marshall was wont to remark: "Now Story, that is the law; you find ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... of the renaissance are distinguished from all other forms of allegory by the obscure and recondite allusions that they affected. There were few among their authors for whom the narration of simple loves and sorrows or the graces of untutored nature possessed any attraction; we find them either making their shepherds openly discuss contemporary affairs, or more often ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... fever for liberty, which drives prisoners to those heroic efforts of which the prodigious achievements seem to us impossible, though true, and which my friend the doctor" (and he turned to Bianchon) "would perhaps ascribe to some unknown forces too recondite for his physiological analysis to detect, some mysteries of the human will of which ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... required. The variations due to the grosser factors I have mentioned—such as condition of attention, physical unrest, disturbing noises, sights, etc.—are of greater influence than any of these more recondite variations in the stimulus. Intensity and lustre, however, are certainly important. It is possible, by carefully choosing a room of pretty constant daylight illumination, and setting the experiments at the same hour each day, to secure a regular degree of brightness ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... with his special conception of this political crisis, the removal of the silver had seemed an irrational and ill-omened measure. It was as if a general were sending the best part of his troops away on the eve of battle upon some recondite pretext. The whole lot of ingots might have been concealed somewhere where they could have been got at for the purpose of staving off the dangers which were menacing the security of the Gould Concession. The Administrador had acted as if the immense and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... big names, or from mere laziness, and yet absolving him from that particular charge of which his own knowledge enables him to judge. In the trust that I may be able to clear him from a few more charges, I write these pages, premising that I do not profess to have access to any new and recondite documents. I merely take the broad facts of the story from documents open to all; and comment on them as every man should wish his own life ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... as something more vivid than their own faint experience, yet either kindred to it, or virtually one and the same. Almost all human nature can, in some measure, understand and feel the most exquisite and recondite image which only the rarest genius could produce. Were it not so, great poets might break their harps, and ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... upon a little affection, will soone conjecture that it shall be dissolved upon a light occasion.' Others of Lyly's affectations are rhetorical questions, hosts of allusions to classical history, and literature, and an unfailing succession of similes from all the recondite knowledge that he can command, especially from the fantastic collection of fables which, coming down through the Middle Ages from the Roman writer Pliny, went at that time by the name of natural history ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... magazines, and so forth, all such occasions as this are depicted in terms of hysteria. Captains save their ships engineers complete their bridges, generals conduct their battles, in a state of dancing excitement, foaming recondite technicalities at the lips. I suppose that sort of thing works up the reader, but so far as it professes to represent reality, I am convinced it is all childish nonsense, schoolboys of fifteen, girls of eighteen, and ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... human, these sensations on occasion culminated in emotions. Still further, like a human, he could and did perceive, and such perceptions did flower in his brain as concepts, certainly not so wide and deep and recondite as those ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... Thenceforth he lingered often in the neighbourhood with I knew not what sense of envy or design of mischief; his white, handsome face (which I beheld with loathing) looked in upon us at all hours across the fence; and once, from a safe distance, he avenged himself by shouting a recondite island insult, to us quite inoffensive, on his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and a singular coalition. He thinks that to divulge our Indian politics may be highly dangerous. He! the mover, the chairman, the reporter of the Committee of Secrecy! he, that brought forth in the utmost detail, in several vast, printed folios, the most recondite parts of the politics, the military, the revenues of the British empire in India! With six great chopping bastards,[67] each as lusty as an infant Hercules, this delicate creature blushes at the sight of his new bridegroom, assumes a virgin delicacy; or, to use a more fit, as well ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The religion of the Mandans, say Lewis and Clarke, (vol. i. p. 138,) consists in the belief of one Great Spirit. As their belief in a Supreme Being is firm and sincere, so their gratitude to Him is fervent and unvarying. They are tormented by no false philosophy, led astray by no recondite opinions of controversialists, whether He is all in all, or shares a "divided throne." Simple and unenlightened sons of nature, they hold the belief which has never failed to present itself to such, that there is a God, and to be grateful ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... convict, after one long stare of amazement at the distant hut, began to comment freely and with much recondite blasphemy upon the transaction recorded by Margery. Luiz Sebastian only smiled amiably, like a lazy and well-disposed catamount, and the boy whistled long and thoughtfully. But the countenance of Master Win-Grace Porringer wore an expression of ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... trivial. It is known with what passionate tenacity and surprising ardour the French master studied the subject of ancient Carthage, grubbing like the lowliest archseologist to get at his fingertips all those recondite allusions so necessary if he were to move with lightness, assurance and consummate art through the scenes of his novel. But, frankly, one does not expect this of the third daughter of an Irish soldier, an ex-journalist and ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... acres, and the number of head of cattle which could be accommodated therein if it were to be utilized for grazing—that is, turned into grass lands; or, if transformed into tillage, the number of small farmers who would be the proprietors of economic holdings—that is, a recondite—that is, an abstruse and a difficult scientific and ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... letters of condolence which he received at the time, I have only space to insert three—one from the Rev. Dr. Hannah, then head of Glenalmond College, an accomplished scholar, to whom our Dean was much attached, and upon whom he drew very freely in any questions of more recondite scholarship, another from the Rev. D.T.K. Drummond, and ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... why should we add "fictitious"? The reason why is obvious. The reason why not, if something more recondite, does not want for weight. The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, whether it is applied to the selection and illustration of a real series of events or of an imaginary series. Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON (a work of cunning and inimitable art) owes its ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had been assured, and assured moreover without a qualm on her part. Ma Tamby did not know what it is to have a qualm—which she could not have spelled if she had known. She was differently and superiorly educated. In the university that life is, she had acquired encyclopedias of recondite learning. She knew that ice is not all that it is cracked up to be: that a finger in the pie is better than two in the fire, and that angels have been observed elsewhere than at Mons—learning which, as you may see, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... country was soon to be ordered; sycophantic scholars were busily preparing a volume poetically entitled "The Golden Mirror of the Empire," in which the virtues of the new sovereign were extolled in high-sounding language. A recondite significance, it was said, was to be given to the old ceremonial dress, which was to be revived, from the fact that every official would carry a Hu or Ivory Tablet to be held against the breast. The very mention of this was sufficient to make the local price of ivory leap ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... student of the works of Beethoven; his edition of the sonatas is noted for recondite learning, clearness and exactness in the smallest details. Through his recitals in America he did much to make these works better known and understood. Nor did he neglect Chopin, and though his readings ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... by calling them severally the inventive and refined, or the impressive and vigorous styles. It is only the subject-matter of eloquence, however, which is allowed to be remote or obscure. The things in themselves may be subtle and recondite, but they must be dragged out of their obscurity and brought struggling to the light; they must be rendered plain and palpable, (as far as it is in the wit of man to do so) or they are no longer eloquence. That which by its natural impenetrability, ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... suave and elegant, and his high, stock-like collar and folded satin neck-gear gave him a somewhat recondite appearance. With his dark eyes, pale skin, full, smooth, golden hair, and the vivid red of an advancing Hapsburgian lip, he had the look of a young ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... when they heard of Pekin. Had Curtis described his recent residence as "the Moon" it would have been regarded as only a degree more recondite. ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... pride that he had drawn quite a number of christian natives from their old belief. His sincerity of purpose enlisted my admiration, but his explanation of the advantages accruing to his neophytes was too recondite for ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... apparent existence of an unchosen ruler. The poorer and more ignorant classes—those who would most feel excitement, who would most be misled by excitement—really believe that the Queen governs. You could not explain to them the recondite difference between "reigning" and "governing"; the words necessary to express it do not exist in their dialect; the ideas necessary to comprehend it do not exist in their minds. The separation of principal power from principal station is a refinement which they could not ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... mellow years, were I unmindful of the gratifications I enjoyed while a fellow laborer in your noble pursuits. The press is the representative of the intellectual man on earth; it is the expositor of his cogitative powers; the promulgator of his most recondite labors; the strong arm of his support in the defence and maintenance of his inherent rights as a member of the social compact; the vindicator of his claims to the exalted station of one stamped in the express image ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... trunk, with its convenient air-pump; and the beaver, at once a carpenter and a mason, had his month full of chisels and his tail a trowel. The bipes implumis, on the contrary, was hatched nude, without even the embryo of a pin-feather. There was nothing for him but the recondite capabilities of his two talented, but talonless hands, and a large brain almost without instinct. Nothing was ready-made, only the means of making. He was brought into the infinite world a finite deity, an infinitesimal creator,—the first being ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... Aline was installed at Hanover Lodge and, before half a day was over, had wormed her way into the confidence of the housekeeper, had won a right to use the kitchen, had consulted the cook on several recondite subjects and furnished her with a new receipt for elderberry wine, and had taken over the whole matter of the preserving for the year. She had arrived a little late, but the gardener had orders to procure for her from Covent Garden all that her heart desired to boil and sweeten ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... these recondite matters, your best way is at once to descend into the blubber-room, and have a long talk with its inmates. This place has previously been mentioned as the receptacle for the blanket-pieces, when stript and hoisted from the whale. When the proper ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... The task of race statesmanship and reclamation devolves upon the educated Negro of this day and generation. Moral energy must be brought to bear upon the task, whether the Negro be engaged in the production of wealth or in the more recondite pursuits which minister to the higher needs ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... recently directed the compilation of a large Universal Geography or Gazetteer, the Carton or Vivien de St. Martin if those days—hence his glib references to the manners and customs of Laplanders, Caffres, Kamskatchans, and other recondite types of breeding. His imaginative faculty was under the control of an exceptionally strong and retentive memory. One may venture to say, indeed, without danger of exaggeration that his testimonials as regards habitual accuracy of statement have ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... such invocations are expressed in terms far more recondite and symbolic than the above. We have many such preserved in the work of Jacinto de la Serna, which supply ample material to acquaint us with the peculiarities of the sacred and secret language of the nagualists. I shall quote but one, that ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... Julius could not but understand that, in the present case at all events, neither fulfilment of prophecy nor answer to prayer had been disregarded.—And the hard-bitten, irascible, old trainer, Tom Chifney, was happier—probably really the happiest of the lot—since he demanded nothing more recondite and far-reaching than restoration to favour, and due recognition of the importance of his calling and of the merits of his horses.—And nice, funny, voluble, little Dick Ormiston was happier too. Richard's heart went out strangely ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... conversation at all times much vigour and originality, and made him, to young and old, a delightful companion. Though mainly an engineer, he was also a profound thinker on many scientific questions: and there was scarcely a subject of speculation, or a department of recondite science, on which he had not employed his faculties in such a way as to have formed large and original views. At Drayton, the conversation usually turned upon such topics, and Mr. Stephenson freely joined in it. On one ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... and slavery alone, was the basic issue[58]. But literary Britain was slow to express itself save in the Reviews. These, representing varying shades of British upper-class opinion and presenting articles presumably more profound than the newspaper editorials, frequently offered more recondite origins of the American crisis. The Quarterly Review, organ of extreme Conservatism, in its first article, dwelt upon the failure of democratic institutions, a topic not here treated at length since it will be dealt with ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... all, he never quite cared for music unless he had, in all literalness, his "hand" in it. He never liked to hear any one else play the piano, still less the violin; concerts of all sorts were likely to bore him; and he never really rose to an understanding of the more recondite and elaborate musical forms: to have his fingers on the keyboard—especially when improvising in a secure inarticulateness—was ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... would wish to quote is legion; but one must be content to say that the book is fascinating throughout—particularly perhaps in those parts which are not concerned with the education of Henry Adams. Where this recondite and cosmic problem is touched upon, there are often qualifications to be made. The perpetual profession of ignorance and incapacity seems at times a bit disingenuous; and we have to do for the most part, not with the way things struck Adams at the time, but with the way it seemed to him, ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Miss Ragozin in making Beowulf accessible to school children. The style is, in general, strong and effective, not without some of the beauty and dignity of the Old English, but relieved of the more obscure and recondite features of ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... respects be inferior to the lesser. Perhaps the reader will say that these are truisms. To be sure they are. And yet if he considers only the judgments which are every day pronounced, he may easily be led to believe that these truisms are most recondite truths now for the first time revealed. When Liszt after his first return from Switzerland did not find Thalberg himself, he tried to satisfy his curiosity by a careful examination of that pianist's compositions. The conclusions he came to be set forth in a criticism of Thalberg's Grande ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... But for some recondite reason—perhaps because this art cannot be taught at all—it has always been an accepted American conviction that poetry is a thing which may be thrown off at any time as a side issue by highly organized persons, most of whose time and strength and faculties ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... good reader, that 'twere folly to lose a life for such a cause, the bells will match the rest of thy garb. The learning, too, of the censors and critics was often indeed remarkable. They condemned a recondite treatise on Trigonometry, because they imagined it contained heretical opinions concerning the doctrine of the Trinity; and another work which was devoted to the study of Insects was prohibited, because ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... time also the health of Sophia Peabody steadily improved, nor is it necessary to account for it by any magical influence on the part of her lover. Her trouble was plainly some recondite difficulty of the circulation. The heart is supposed to be the seat of the affections because mental emotion stimulates the nervous system and acts upon the heart as the centre of all organic functions. A healthy natural excitement will cause the heart to vibrate more firmly and evenly; ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... her niece. Althea shrank from open combat with anybody, yet she could, under cover of gentle candour, plant her shafts. She planted one now in answering: 'I don't think that you would, either of you, take to one another. Helen's flavour is rather recondite.' ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... and practice of the art are not competent to interpret the different shades and colors of meaning better than the mere dabbler in foreign tongues? And then, again, is not human life too short for the lover of books to spend his precious time digging out the recondite allusions of authors, lexicon in hand? My dear sir, it is a wickedly false economy to expend time and money for that which one can get done much better and at a much ...
— The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac • Eugene Field
... of it." The language used should be as ready and as efficient a conductor of the mind of the writer to the mind of the reader as is the electric spark which passes from one battery to another battery. In all written matter the spark should carry everything; but in matters recondite the recipient will search to see that he misses nothing, and that he takes nothing away too much. The novelist cannot expect that any such search will be made. A young writer, who will acknowledge the truth of what I am saying, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... careful trout, for pundits skilled and wary, That use upon the chalk, Plump and recondite, dubious and chary— On such shall turn ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... we saw the cathedral at Chester; and, far more delightful, saw and heard a certain inimitable verger who took us round. He was full of a certain recondite, far-away humour that did not quite make you laugh at the time, but was somehow laughable to recollect. Moreover, he had so far a just imagination, and could put one in the right humour for seeing an old place, very much as, according ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of species—can exist, but which must now be or once have been useful to the individuals or races which possess them. This great principle gives us a clue which we can follow out in the study of many recondite phenomena, and leads us to seek a meaning and a purpose of some definite character in minutiae which we should be otherwise almost sure to pass over as insignificant ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... a just Stile; where it is said, "It must be a great fault of Judgment if where the Thoughts are proper, the Expressions are not so too: A Disagreement between these seldom happens, but among Men of more recondite Studies, and what they call deep Learning, especially among your Antiquaries and Schoolmen." This is a good careless way of talking, it may pass well enough for the genteel Negligence, in short, such Nonsense, ...
— An Apology For The Study of Northern Antiquities • Elizabeth Elstob
... currants and biscuits at the sides, and two decanters at the bottom. When oranges came in, a curious proceeding was gone through. Miss Jenkyns did not like to cut the fruit; for, as she observed, the juice all ran out nobody knew where; sucking (only I think she used some more recondite word) was in fact the only way of enjoying oranges; but then there was the unpleasant association with a ceremony frequently gone through by little babies; and so, after dessert, in orange season, Miss ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... pillars wore their new polish, and the statues retained the brilliant colors with which they were originally painted, and the shrines their rich gilding, of which the sunlight still shows a glimmer or a streak, though the sunbeam itself looks tarnished with antique dust. Yet this recondite portion of the Abbey presents few memorials of personages whom we care to remember. The shrine of Edward the Confessor has a certain interest, because it was so long held in religious reverence, and because the very dust that settled upon it was formerly worth gold. The helmet and ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... new History of Ethiopia. By Joseph Ludolphus. fol. 1684.—Though Ludolphus did not visit this country, yet his work, originally published in Latin, with a commentary and appendix by himself, is well worthy of perusal, as it is full of recondite and important information on the origin of the Abyssinians, the climate, soil, productions, and the natural history, physical and moral state of ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... those who interest themselves in literature can more or less appreciate. He makes no excessive demand either on the intellect or on the faculty of sympathetic emotion. On both sides of Lamb, however, there lie literatures more difficult, more recondite. The "knowledge" side need not detain us here; it can be mastered by concentration and perseverance. But the "power" side, which comprises the supreme productions of genius, demands special consideration. You may have arrived at the point of keenly enjoying Lamb and yet be ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... To investigate the recondite meaning of these legends and symbols, and to elicit from them the moral and philosophical lessons which they were intended to teach, is to withdraw the veil with which ignorance and indifference seek to conceal the true philosophy ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... all similar to those of our unfortunate recluse. With her near-sightedness, and those tremulous fingers of hers, at once inflexible and delicate, she could not be a seamstress; although her sampler, of fifty years gone by, exhibited some of the most recondite specimens of ornamental needlework. A school for little children had been often in her thoughts; and, at one time, she had begun a review of her early studies in the New England Primer, with a view to prepare herself for the office of instructress. ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... researches worse than useless, and that its tendency is to strike down one of the pillars on which the fabric of Christianity is supported." "Its tendency is to shock the pious,—confound the unlearned,—overwhelm those who are but moderately versed in the recondite investigations of theology, and above all to open an arsenal whence all the small wits of the infidel army may supply themselves with arms. Its greater evil is to disarm the power of public opinion." ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... history of the Jews. The sweet Psalmist of Israel was partly the pioneer to deeper thought, partly the representative of the age in which he lived. It is the charm of his poetry that it is very rich and recondite—a mine of gold, which the farther it is worked, the more precious its yield becomes. But it everywhere bears the stamp of passion and religious ardour, and does not bespeak the critical incisiveness of a highly civilised age. ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and the scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling. The exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite admiration by playing her "beautiful," with vigour, and saying "Oh! LET'S go," with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest was mentioned. But Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the end, that disappointed ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... common sensations. Had they been invented, by some inexplicable parthenogenesis in thought, it would indeed have been a marvel had they found application. Philosophy has enough notions of this inapplicable sort—usually, however, not very recondite in their origin—to show that dialectic, when it seems to control existence, must have taken more than one hint from the subject world, and that in the realm of logic, too, nothing submits to be governed ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... inferior birds for swans. He once held out to us, as a great treat, the reading of an unpublished play of his friend Lord Lytton, which was called Walpole. All the characters spoke and carried on conversation in hexameters. The effect was ridiculous. A more tedious thing, with its recondite and archaic allusions to Pulteney and other Georgian personages, could not be conceived. The ladies in particular, after a scene or two, soon became weary. He himself lost faith in the business, and saw that it was flat, so ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... each other, unwillingly, by curious reactions and evasions, by distastes and prejudices and unintended hints of the past. The girl was proudly incapable of jealousy and, because he was extremely jealous, this virtue piqued him. He told her recondite incidents of his own life on purpose to arouse some spark of it, but to no avail. She possessed him now—nor did ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... soldier!) This may be conceded, but the concession hardly furnishes an analogy. To these and all other subjects he recurs occasionally, and in season, but with reminiscences of the law his memory, as is abundantly clear, was simply saturated. In season and out of season now in manifest, now in recondite application, he presses it into the service of expression and illustration. At least a third of his myriad metaphors are derived from it. It would indeed be difficult to find a single act in any of his dramas, nay, in some of them, a single ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Poseidon; but then Poseidon's trident is a real fisherman's instrument, the tunny-fork. They are credited, notwithstanding, with an evil sorcery, unfriendly to men, as poor humanity remembered the makers of chains, locks, Procrustean beds; and, as becomes this dark recondite mine and metal work, the traditions about them are gloomy and grotesque, confusing mortal ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... ii., p. 153.) has propounded a dozen of most recondite and puzzling archaisms, upon which I have to ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... the author here uses adversus in some unusual and recondite sense, is intimated by the clause: ut sic dixerim. It is understood by some, of a sea unfriendly to navigation. But its connexion by que with immensus ultra, shows that it refers to position, and means ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... be!" came the instant answer. Yet, the words were uttered with a total lack of emotion. It seemed from their intonation that the speaker voiced merely a statement concerning a recondite matter of truth, with which sentiment had nothing whatever to do. But the effect on the employer was unfortunate. It aroused at once his antagonism against the girl. His instinct of sympathy with which he had greeted her at the outset was repelled, ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... with Lady Mary, and she was I saw an inch taller than his squat solidity. A tall lady in rose-pink had taken possession of Guy, Evesham and Lady Ladislaw made the two centres of a straggling group who were bandying recondite political allusions. Then came one or two couples and trios with nothing very much to say and active ears. Philip and I brought up the rear silently and in all humility. Even young Guy had gone over our heads. I was too full of a ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Paley calls the 'danger of scattering names and circumstances in writings where nothing but truth can preserve consistency,' they so happy succeeded, that whole volumes have been employed pointing out their latent and often most recondite congruities; many of them lying so deep, and coming out after such comparison of various passages and collateral lights, that they could never have answered the purposes of fraud, even if the most prodigious genius for fraud had been equal to the fabrication; congruities which, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... occasionally her nonchalant petulant gaze would wander up and down her bare arms and across her bosom. At intervals, with her ringed fingers she would lift the short skirt—a nothing, an imperceptibility, half an inch, with glance downcast; and the effect was profound, recondite, inexplicable. Her style was not that of a male dog-dancer, but it was indubitably clog-dancing, full of marvels to the connoisseur, and to the profane naught but a highly complicated series of wooden noises. Florence's ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... hand six hymns to the gods and many epigrams, the latter of which, as will be seen by the quotations given below, are models of their kind. His lyric hymns are, in reality, rather epics in little. They are full of recondite information, overloaded indeed with learning; elegant, nervous, and elaborate, rather than easy-flowing, simple, and warm, like a genuine product of the muse. Many of his epigrams grace ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... to the good sense of the assailants. They proceed partly by misrepresentation of the kind of ignorance which, as a matter of fact, actually leads to failure in the examinations. They quote with emphasis the most recondite questions [8] which can be shown to have been ever asked, and make it appear as if unexceptionable answers to all these were made the sine qu non of success. Yet it has been repeated to satiety that such questions are not put because it is expected of every one that he ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... or repeat. He was an admirer of what was high and good, of what was delicate (especially); but he delighted most to saunter along the humbler regions, where kindness of heart and geniality of humor made the way pleasant. His intellect was very quick, piercing into the recondite meaning of things in a moment. His own sentences were compressed and full of meaning; his opinions independent and decisive; no qualifying or doubting. His descriptions were not highly colored; but, as it were, sharply cut, like a piece of marble, rather than like a picture. He liked and encouraged ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... avarice that gives all books a value in our eyes; there is for us a recondite wisdom in the phrase, "A book is a book"; from the time when we made the first catalogue of our library, in which "Bible, large, 1 vol.," and "Bible, small, 1 vol.," asserted their alphabetic individuality and were the sole Bs in our little hive, we have had a weakness even for those checker-board ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... theory the result of legitimate deduction and judicial weighing of evidence, we shall find enough in the book to content us. Mr. Mueller does not now enter the lists for the first time to win his spurs as an original writer. The plan of the work before us necessarily excluded any great display of recondite learning or of profound speculation. Delivered at first as popularly scientific lectures, and now published for the general reader, it seems to us admirably conceived and executed. Easily comprehensible, and yet always pointing out the sources of fuller investigation, it is ample ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... boiling of a proper ham reaches the level of high art. Proper boiling makes any sound ham tolerable eating; conversely a crass and hasty cook can spoil utterly this crowning mercy of the smokehouse. Yet proper cooking is not a recondite process, nor one beyond the simplest intelligence. It means first and most, pains and patience, with somewhat of foresight, and ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... [Greek: chorion], the country. The literal meaning of a word is earlier than its artificial and poetical signification. And one can easily conceive how, when the style Chora was no longer literally correct, men abandoned the sober ground of common-sense and history to invent recondite meanings inspired by imagination ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... But then, risking her own interpretation of the recondite word, "Oh, no, Signorino. He is ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... to English readers with apologetic explanations as though his art were recondite and the tendency of his work immoral would be a ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... of entertainment Mrs. Pallinson cherished a shuddering aversion. But there were occasional morning and evening "recitals," or concerts, where the music for the most part was of a classical and recondite character—feasts of melody, at which long-buried and forgotten sonatas of Gluck, or Bach, or Chembini were introduced to a discriminating public for the first time; and to these Mrs. Pallinson and Theobald conducted ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... of habit, no relations between species or between groups of species—can exist, but which must now be or once have been useful to the individuals or the races which possess them. This great principle gives us a clue which we can follow out in the study of many recondite phaenomena, and leads us to seek a meaning and a purpose of some definite character in minutiae which we should be otherwise almost sure to pass over ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the conception of personal agents is more complex than a simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas; and a theory which assumes that the course of nature is determined by conscious agents is more abstruse and recondite, and requires for its apprehension a far higher degree of intelligence and reflection, than the view that things succeed each other simply by reason of their contiguity or resemblance. The very ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... talk were such as to call forth not unfrequent mirth among those who most revered him. He would meet you and look you in the face without speaking a word. He was not without humour; but his jokes, carried off by a little laugh of his own, were apt to be recondite in their meaning and allusions. With his great power of sympathy, he yet did not easily divine other men's lighter or subtler moods, and odd and sometimes even distressing mistakes were the consequence. His health was weak, and a chronic tenderness of throat ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... growing maidens troop in June To loose their girdles on the grass. Ah! speedier than before the glass The backward toilet goes; and swift As swallows quiver, robe and shift And the rough country stockings lie Around each young divinity. When, following the recondite brook, Sudden upon this scene I look, And light with unfamiliar face On chaste Diana's bathing-place, Loud ring the hills about and all The shallows ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one hampering restriction. Every baby must have a patron saint. Upon this point, the Murphys stood firm. However, by a careful study of early Christian martyrs, the girls had managed to unearth a list of recondite saints with fairly unusual and ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... concrete symbol, addressing itself not only to the understanding, but still more to the sentiments of the ordinary man. Art has, therefore, this peculiarity, that it is at once elevated and popular, that it manifests that which is often most recondite, and that ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... but will merely give an outline of the conclusions at which I have arrived. He must be a dull man who can examine the exquisite structure of a comb, so beautifully adapted to its end, without enthusiastic admiration. We hear from mathematicians that bees have practically solved a recondite problem, and have made their cells of the proper shape to hold the greatest possible amount of honey, with the least possible consumption of precious wax in their construction. It has been remarked that a skilful workman, with fitting tools and measures, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... things; they know a vast deal about the habits of their lives, far more, sometimes, than do we 'scientific men'; they are naturalists by tradition and by trade. Neither, by the way, must we forget the ancient medical and anatomical learning of the great Aesculapian guild, nor the still more recondite knowledge possessed by various priesthoods (again like their brethren of to-day in China and Japan) of the several creatures, sacred fish, pigeons, guinea-fowl, snakes, cuttlefish, and what not, which time out of mind they ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... fine hair, that retained its strength and brownness to the last, but he had a courageous spirit and a remarkably intelligent mind. He was a man of the finest culture, and was often, and never vainly, consulted by his son Robert concerning the more recondite facts relating to the old characters, whose bones that poet liked so well to disturb. His knowledge of old French, Spanish, and Italian literature was wonderful. The old man went smiling and peaceful to his long rest, preserving his faculties to the last, insomuch that the physician, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... any language, and equalled by few. That he has obvious and great defects, that he is wholly and in all probability deliberately careless of formal smoothness, that he adopted the fancy of his time for quaint and recondite expression with an almost perverse vigour, and set the example of the topsy-turvified conceits which came to a climax in Crashaw and Cleveland, that he is almost impudently licentious in thought and imagery at times, that he ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... fortunate, probably for no more recondite reason than that the French originals (from which they were in almost every instance certainly taken) were finished in themselves. Of the special Gawain cycle or sub-cycle we have two romances in pure metrical form, and more than two in ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... execrated. Luckily, the castle boasted a library well stocked with works on civil and international law, jurisprudence, and political economy. He took advantage of it; and, resuming the thread of those serious studies which had been broken off during his period of hopelessness, plunged into those recondite themes that pleased his active intelligence and his awakened ambition. Thus he waited patiently until politeness would permit him to bring to an explanation the former friend and companion-in-arms of his father. In the morning he rode on horseback; ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... are a fool.' You remember the boy in Pickwick, who on his father finding fault with him for something wrong he had done, offered to kill himself if that would be any satisfaction to his parent. In this case you have a more recondite instance of this peculiar folly. Here the primary course is tacitly assumed, without being stated. The primary impulse of the human being is to take care of himself; the opposite of that of course is to kill ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... Carcassonne and the neighbouring country, in which they had established their kingdom of Septimania, till the year 713, when they were expelled by the Moors of Spain, who ushered in an unillumined period of four centuries, of which no traces remain. These facts I derive from a source no more recondite than a pamphlet by M. Viollet-le-Duc—a very luminous description of the fortifications, which you may buy from the accomplished custodian. The writer makes a jump to the year 1209, when Carcassonne, then forming ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... be simplicity, or freedom from the curse of affectation. What is certain is that nobody of his time was a finer example of high good manners and genuine courtesy than Mr. Gladstone himself. He has left a little sheaf of random jottings which, without being subtle or recondite, show how he looked on this side of human things. Here is ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... that a whale is a fish, instead of a mammal, but few indeed are the individuals who do not still think that a cetacean possesses a sort of natural fountain on the top of its head, whence, for some recondite reason, it ejects at regular intervals streams of water into ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... I really possessed on many subjects, was not easily condensed, or brought to bear upon the object I wished particularly to become master of. Yet there occurred opportunities when this odd lumber of my brain, especially that which was connected with the recondite parts of history, did me, as Hamlet says, "yeoman's service." My memory of events was like one of the large, old-fashioned stone-cannons of the Turks—very difficult to load well {p.046} and discharge, but making a powerful effect when by good chance any object did come within range of its ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... wide range of subjects: Indian and colonial affairs, matters of trade, talk of travels, of seaside holidays and so on. Once I remember 'My wife's sailor-brother Captain Anthony' being produced in connection with nothing less recondite than a sunset. And little Fyne never failed to add: 'The son of Carleon Anthony, the poet—you know.' He used to lower his voice for that statement, and people were impressed or ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... suggestion, it would be presumptuous in me to pretend to instruct Mr. Gladstone in matters which lie as much within the province of Literature and History as in that of Science; but if any one desirous of further knowledge will be so good as to turn to that most excellent and by no means recondite source of information, the "Encyclopaedia Britannica," he will find, under the letter E, the word "Evolution," and a long article on that subject. Now, I do not recommend him to read the first ...
— Mr. Gladstone and Genesis - Essay #5 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... enough to give one's impression. A characterization of communities is one of the most common and at the same time most unsatisfactory of operations, as the data for its being done well are so wide, recondite, and difficult to grasp. As I proceed I shall have occasion to give my views of native Christians generally. All I can now say about orphans and their descendants is, that considering what human beings are, as shown from age to age, considering the circumstances and surroundings of ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... hearer this piece, when well treated, is one of the most pleasing piano solos possible to mention. I do not know, however, that it is necessary to turn it wrong side out in the effort to find some hidden or recondite meaning. It is pleasing and well made rather than deeply impassioned, and it is a mistake to overdo the contrasts ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... and asserting our personal liberty, must tend to prevent the erection of any very strict standard of [112] excellence, the belief in any very paramount authority of right reason, the recognition of our best self as anything very recondite and hard to come at. It may be, as I have said, a proof of our honesty that we do not attempt to give to our ordinary self, as we have it in action, predominant authority, and to impose its rule upon other people; ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... glow of the incandescent light Has banished the tallow candle; And the ox-cart is gone at steam's rapid flight, But Love is too subtle, is too recondite For Learning or Genius to handle. All honor to Science, let her keep her mad pace, I abate not a tittle her zeal; But the splendors of life can never efface The picture of Ruth in plain rustic grace Who wrought at the Old ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... said to have said) in addressing his students:— "Never forget, gentlemen, that you have to deal with an ignorant public." The dictum may fairly be extended from medical knowledge to general information amongst the many headed of England; and the Publisher, when rejecting a too recondite book, will repeat parrot-fashion, The English public is not a learned body. Equally valid is the statement in the case of the Anglo-American community which is still half-educated and very far from being erudite. The vast country has produced a few men of great and original ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... which succeed the baptism of a child are still more recondite. Four or five days after the christening, the midwife prepares, with her own mystical hands, certain savoury messes, spreads a table, and places them on it. She then departs, and all the family, leaving the door open, in silence retire to sleep. This table ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... himself, and carrying in his hand a silk handkerchief. The long stupid wrinkles ran up Davis's brow, as he saw it. What should it contain? He could think of nothing more recondite than a revolver. ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne |
