"Tangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... piece of wood, would accompany the music. Again and again I placed my ear on the very spot on the table whence this rough fiddling appeared to proceed, and felt distinctly the rhythmic vibration of the table, but no tangible cause was visible either above or below the table.... On one occasion, when no one else was in the room, ... I asked my young friend the medium to put her hands against the wall, and see how far she could stretch her feet back from the wall without tumbling ...
— Psychic Phenomena - A Brief Account of the Physical Manifestations Observed - in Psychical Research • Edward T. Bennett
... age, branded us as pagans and devil-worshipers, and demanded of us that we abjure our false gods before bowing the knee at their sacred altar. They even told us that we were eternally lost, unless we adopted a tangible symbol and professed a particular form of ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... comrades knew about it, but none of them felt rash enough to undertake mediation or interference in such a delicate matter where the tangible proofs seemed not within reach. It was to be expected, that if confronted with the facts of the case as far as these were palpable, both parties concerned would simply deny the damaging allegation, and in such a case the role of the advising friend might easily have become one of great difficulty. ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... opportunity of putting their establishment in a favorable light, for they had a strong suspicion that they were in a fair way to lose something of much more tangible value to themselves: a very handsome income. But Mr. Reeve easily saw through their little foibles, and was not deceived by the pretty veneer into believing that all was strong ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... the capture of Burgoyne, and was suspected to be in the thick of an intrigue to dethrone Washington and have himself proclaimed Commander-in-chief. At the moment he was the idol of the army, and of the northern and eastern States, for his victories were tangible and brilliant, while Washington's surer processes were little appreciated. Therefore to get troops from him would be little less difficult than to get them from Lord Howe, short of a positive command, and this prerogative Washington ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... belief in a future life was vague and powerless, mainly because it had no Gospel of the Resurrection, and so nothing tangible to lay hold on. The Gospel has made the belief in a future state infinitely easier and more powerful, mainly because of the emphasis with which it has proclaimed an actual resurrection and a future bodily life. Its great proof of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... dung and mud of a spacious yard. In another enclosure stood the bull, massive as a locomotive. He was a very calm bull, and his face wore an expression of melancholy stupidity. He gazed with reddish-brown eyes at his visitors, chewed thoughtfully at the tangible memories of an earlier meal, swallowed and regurgitated, chewed again. His tail lashed savagely from side to side; it seemed to have nothing to do with his impassive bulk. Between his short horns was a triangle of red curls, short ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... morning, when Lewis was missed at the house of his master, suspicion immediately fell upon Miss Ford. The plot was so simple that the truth could not well be concealed; but nothing was said about it until they might find some tangible evidence, and this was soon afforded by the imprudence of Dean. Two mornings after this he came to the garden fence by the arbor where she usually spent the morning, and threw over a note containing the words, ...
— A Child's Anti-Slavery Book - Containing a Few Words About American Slave Children and Stories - of Slave-Life. • Various
... her, but did not reply to the sceptical query. Gertrude Loring came to the door just then and spoke to McVeigh, who went to meet her. She wanted him to go at once to her uncle. He was trying so hard to speak; they thought he was endeavoring to say "Ken—Ken!" It was the only tangible thing they could distinguish, and he watched the door continually as though ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... perturbed musing, my attention was again recalled by an illumination like the former. Instead of hovering and vanishing, it was permanent. No ray could be more feeble; but the tangible obscurity to which it succeeded rendered it conspicuous as an electrical flash. For a while I eyed it without moving from my place, and in momentary expectation of ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... public what it wants," was the motto of this enterprising newspaper man. Herewith he supplied tangible evidence on which they could feast their ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... at all superstitious, or had come on such an object in a strange place, I think I should have been somewhat shaken. However, I knew my spectre, boldly took hold of it, and found I had something tangible in my grip. After a brief and silent struggle, I thrust open the door, and brought my victim into the room. My mother and sisters, who knew nothing of what had been going on, were greatly alarmed to see me dragging into the house a white object, and, womanlike, began to scream; but ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, more than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too much poetry for a poet—as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... near horse threw back its head and the pole-chains rattled smartly.—Honoria's lips parted, but the words, if words indeed there were, died in her throat. She raised her hands, as though putting a tangible and actual presence away from her. She did not change colour, but for the moment her delicate features appeared thickened, as by a rush of blood. She was almost plain. Yet the effect was inexpressibly touching. It was as though she had received some mysterious injury which she was dumb, incapable ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... energy from the cables was transformed to a tangible thing—a vast bulk of gas, of hydrogen and oxygen that had once been water, and the pressure of the gas made a roaring inferno of the exhausts. A spark plug ignited it, and the heat of combustion ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... rain—rain which washes the atmosphere of the suspended mud—does not affect them in the least. If the choke-damp of fog obscures them, it leaves no stain on the design; if the surfaces be stained, the idea made tangible in metal is not. They are no more touched than Time itself by the alternations of the seasons. The only noble open-air work of native art in the four-million city, they rest there supreme and are the ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... More, "in former times was tangible. It consisted in land, money, or chattels, which were either ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... according to what Marie had said it was to be. Billy still serenely spoke of it as a "simple affair," but Marie was beginning to be fearful. As the days passed, bringing with them more and more frequent evidences either tangible or intangible of orders to stationers, caterers, and florists, her fears found voice ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... of Paulina's mould this piety toward implicit demands, toward the ghosts of dead duties walking unappeased among usurping passions, has a stronger hold than any tangible bond. People said that she gave up young Winsloe because her aunts disapproved of her leaving them; but such disapproval as reached her was an emanation from the walls of the House, from the bare desk, the faded portraits, ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... mockingly, and he knew it would never return. In its place abode henceforth the image of this stately maiden, comely and desirable, with the profound eyes which lighted up—for Dick. An unaccountable sense of failure stole over Rainham—unaccountable because he could lay his finger upon no tangible ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... labor of his great grief brought forth another emotion so real, so tangible, that it seemed a companion walking at his side. It was Hate—and it brought to him a measure of solace and of comfort, for it was a sublime hate that ennobled him as it has ennobled countless thousands since-hatred for Germany ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a study in those delicate weights and measures that go to estimating the least tangible things in personality, to note how his action seemed not only to dim her vividness but actually to efface the girl. In the first moments she herself accepted it at that. Her looks said: He is not aware of me any more—ergo, ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... its reading to the ladies of the Literary and Home Study Club. It seemed to me that the Greeks must have divined this important secret of the vegetable world—the secret of ageless time—and that therein lay the charm of them; that spirit of ever freshening joy which they chiselled and sang into tangible grace for us of a later ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... Mrs. Smiley to stay the remainder of the night and took her away to bed, leaving us to measure and weigh and surmise. It seemed absurd—like a dream; and yet there lay the visible, tangible proofs of the marvel. ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... and he tries to define its outlines. He has no intention of denying, as some have vainly imagined, that there is an intervening mist. Nor, it seems necessary to explain, does he assume that wherever there is a mist there must be some tangible object behind it. For example, he does not believe that Boreas, or Zephyrus, or Jack Frost were ever anything but personifications of ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... As tangible results of her work abroad, she was given an amethyst cut in the shape of a pansy, by the Grand Duchess of Baden, also the Serbian decoration of the Red Cross as the gift of Queen Natalie, and the Gold Cross of Remembrance, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... whatever is seen to be below this standard and opposed to this inner harmony is at once swept aside as un-Homeric. But even this distinguishing characteristic, in place of wishing to recognise the supernatural existence of a tangible personality, ascends likewise through all the stages that lead to that zenith, with ever-increasing energy and clearness. Individuality is ever more strongly felt and accentuated; the psychological possibility of a single Homer is ever more forcibly demanded. ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche
... oneself behind an opaque glass through which one can see only the reflection of one's own nose. To see as far as possible the good, the bad, about, around, yonder, everywhere; to perceive the continual gravitation of all tangible and intangible things towards the necessity of the decent, the good, the true, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... occasion within her childish recollection when one of her own sex had spoken to her in kindness. Now and then she had dreamed of such a thing as having occurred in the long ago,—in some other world, perhaps,—this was real, tangible, perceptible to the ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... Charcot and his school. It cannot be said that it abolishes any of the positive results reached by Charcot, but it certainly alters their significance and value; it presents them in a new light and changes the whole perspective. With his passion for getting at tangible definite physical facts, Charcot was on very safe ground. But he was content to neglect the psychic analysis of hysteria, while yet proclaiming that hysteria is a purely psychic disorder. He had no cause of hysteria to present save only heredity. Freud certainly admits ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... "aspirations" because Austria was in a tight place, even for redeeming a million and a half more or less of expatriated Italians in Austrian territory. Politicians and statesmen talked of these matters, perforce; the people repeated them. For they were tangible "causes." But what Italians hated was Austrian and German leadership—were the "barbari" themselves, their ancient foe; and when told that they had better continue to make their bed with the "barbari," ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... what use is the memory of facts, if not to serve as an example of good or of evil? But the examples which the slow train of events presents to us are scattered and incomplete. They lack always a tangible and visible coherence leading straight on to a moral conclusion. The acts of the human race on the world's stage have doubtless a coherent unity, but the meaning of the vast tragedy enacted will be visible only to the eye of God, until the end, which will reveal it perhaps to the last man. All ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... can offend me or hurt me?" said Publius. "No, my child; it only proves to me that you love me as I could wish to be loved. Such rage under such circumstances is but the dark shadow cast by love, and is as inseparable from love as from any tangible body. Where it is absent there is no such thing as real love present—only an airy vision, a phantom, a mockery. Such an one as Klea does not love nor hate by halves; but there are mysterious workings in your soul as in that of every other woman. How did the wish that you could see me dead ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... speaker did understand remained in the air like a tangible object. Thorpe took a chair, and the two men exchanged a silent, intent look. Their faces, dusky red on the side of the glow from the fire, pallid where the electric light fell slantwise upon them from above, had for a moment a mysterious something in common. ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... better confine ourselves to something more specific, more tangible?" asked Caecilius, gravely. "I suppose if one individual may have that terrible lot, another may—both may, many may. Suppose I understand you to say that you never will believe that you will go to an ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... silenced, however, in this fashion. I had yet something to say, and I would say it. It was to this effect: that dreams were not usually productive of tangible results, and that I requested to know in what way the chairman conceived I had evolved from my dream so substantial and well-made a delusion as the cigar-case which I had had the honor to place before him at the commencement ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... wellnigh swooned with ecstasy, as I have inhaled the overcoming odors of some rare bouquet, love-bestowed and prized beyond gems; my senses have reeled in the intoxication of those wondrous extracts whose Oriental, tangible richness of fragrance holds me in a spell almost mystical in its enthralment; but I dare aver that no blossom's breath, no pungent perfume distilled by the erudite inspiration of Science, ever possessed a tithe of the delicious agony of that ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... wordless gibbering, and the shaking, shaking, shaking of the bed in the clutch of the nameless visitant—prevailed, refused to disperse like the evil dream I had hoped it all to be; manifested itself, indubitably, as something tangible—objective.... ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... system. Agnosticism was at least a phase of thought. The broadening of the conception of science and the invasion of every area of life by a science thus broadly conceived, has been an influence less tangible than those others but not, therefore, less effective. Positivism was bitterly hostile to Christianity, though, in the mind of Comte himself and of a few others, it produced a curious substitute, possessing many of ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... at expressing the soul of things is still further helped by his system of continuous, unresolved melody. The melody which circumscribes itself like Giotto's O is almost as tangible a thing as a statue; it has almost contour. But this melody afloat in the air, flying like a bird, without alighting for more than a moment's swaying poise, as the notes flit from strings to voice, and from voice to wood and wind, is more than a mere heightening of speech: ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... a better man had done before him. The blood of his mother controlled him largely and he wished that he might carry the girl off to his wigwam, and, at his leisure, with beads and blankets, or other less tangible methods, win her and conquer her. But present conditions held the boy in check and compelled him to adopt more modern tactics. He stole, when he couldn't beg, from his poor father all the money Jerry wrenched from an occasional day's work. With this he bought ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... position," he answered, lightly. "Matter is no longer the dead, inorganic, 'godless thing' which the old-time theologians declared it to be. Matter, so far from being some inert lump, is permeated with life—is life itself. So far as we now know, all the visible and tangible universe is resolvable into terms of force—that is to say, chemical process. There may be no line of demarcation between ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... good deal for a soul, Henry. It's a large amount of the sure and tangible for a very uncertain quantity of ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... formidable, even if the cause of the Government had been more worthily and efficiently sustained. There is no doubt that, in the first place, he appealed to races which thought they were overtaxed, and to classes whose only tangible property had been assailed and diminished by the Anti-Slavery policy of the Government. Even if it would be going too far to say that Mahomed Ahmed, the long-looked-for Mahdi, was only a tool in the hands of secret conspirators pledged to avenge Suleiman, ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... resist a sense of profound emotion before the abysses of infinite Space, when we behold the innumerable multitude of worlds suspended above our heads. We feel in this solitary contemplation of the Heavens that there is more in the Universe than tangible and visible matter: that there are forces, laws, destinies. Our ants' brains may know themselves microscopic, and yet recognize that there is something greater than the Earth, the Heavens;—more absolute than the Visible, the Invisible;—beyond ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... tangible comfort that Alves derived from this unusually didactic speech was the assurance that he would not be drawn away from her. She bowed to his conception, and sought to help him. While he was attending the cases in ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... my office now more than a twelvemonth, and I promised that you should have an increased salary at the expiration of that time. Your services have been very valuable to me during the past year, and I am in every way satisfied with you. As a tangible proof of this, I beg your acceptance of this little present," (handing him a ten-pound note,) "and during this year on which you have entered, I shall have much pleasure in giving you a salary of two guineas ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... of dismissal would fall on his rough-minded colleague, for the chancellor of the exchequer was well aware that he stood high in his royal master's favour. His majesty, indeed, had often expressed his high sense of his minister's services in words, and soon after this he testified it in a more tangible manner. By the death of Lord Guildford on the 5th of August, the wardenship of the cinque ports, worth about L3000 a-year, became vacant, and his majesty offered it to Pitt in such pressing terms, that even if he had been inclined to refuse the boon it would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... chuckled again, and Brown held the lantern yet nearer to him to get a better view. The fakir's skin was not oily, and for all the blanket-heat it did not glisten, so his form was barely outlined against the blackness that was all but tangible behind him. ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... rest, after coming of age, and composed music of his own, using as an inspiration a favorite poem, picture, or character. These compositions were marked by a quaintness like that—if a comparison may be made to something tangible—, of a Chinese vase or a broken bronze figure. His family, the Barwoods, had been from the earliest times a race of shrewd and driving New England storekeepers, the very antipodes of sentiment ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... civilized country, carefully preserved, registered in certain well-understood formulas, and protected by the use of technical and scientific language; they are easily handed down from one generation to another, and thus assuming an accessible, or as it were a tangible form, they often influence the most distant posterity, they become the heirlooms of mankind, the immortal bequest of the genius to which they owe their birth. But the good deeds effected by our moral faculties ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... atmosphere in the room of the Hermes seemed to Dion more full of peace even than before, but the peace was like something almost tangible. It troubled him a little because he felt that the Hermes, the child and Rosamund were of it, while he was not. They were surrounded by the atmosphere necessary to them, and to which they were mysteriously accustomed, while he was for the first time in such an atmosphere. He felt separated ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... of this, because it gave them something tangible as a reminder of the eventful trip, and the strange adventures that followed their being kidnapped by the ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... against the fashionable vices and the irreligion, but against the hardness of the world; and in a world which worshipped Chesterfield the protest was not needless, nor was it ineffective. Among the most tangible characteristics of this special sensibility is the tendency of its brimming love of humankind to overflow upon animals, and of this there are marked instances in some passages ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... thinks," answered Miller. "That the prosecution will have to secure more material and tangible proof before it can secure an ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... attained a certain state of consciousness, saw sickness, evil, and death around him, and as it was usual to assign to every effect some tangible cause, man developed the abstract notion of evil into a concrete form, which changed with the varying impressions of climate, food, and the state of intellectual progress. To the white man the Devil was black, and to the black man white. Originally, then, the Devil was merely ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... had been done by the hands of men. He had come to Bidwell, not only in the hope that there he would at last find companionship, but also because his mind was really aroused and he wanted leisure to begin trying to do tangible things. When the citizens of Bidwell would not take him into their town life but left him standing to one side, as the tiny dwelling place for men called Pickleville where he lived stood aside out from under the invisible roof of the town, he decided to try to forget men and to express himself ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... appreciation the idyllic scene below him, and with most particular appreciation, the dainty white-clad person of the girl on the balustrade. He was wondering—anxiously—how he might make his presence known. For no very tangible reason he had suddenly become conscious that the matter would be easier if he carried in his pocket a letter of introduction. The purlieus of Villa Rosa in no wise resembled a desert island; and in the face of that very fluent Italian, the suspicion was forcing itself upon him that, after ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... presence: she sometimes drooped an eye upon him like a question.... Let her look out or maybe he'd blaze into her teeth: howl menace down her throat until she swooned. Some one should yield to him a visible and tangible agony to balance his. Does law probe no deeper than the pillage of a watch? Can one filch our self-respect and escape free? Shall not our souls also sue for damages against its aggressor? Some person rich enough must pay for his lacerations or there was less justice in heaven ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... often than ever they had to the younger man who had played, with such vivid, brilliant strokes, so important a part in her life. She felt, what was new to her, a growing need of him—a need based on nothing tangible and yet none the less eager. She turned ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Glory, Glory!" Without any warning whatsoever she felt suddenly like Nothing-At-All, rigged out in an exceedingly shabby old ulster and an excessively homely black slouch hat. In a desperate attempt at tangible tom-boyish nonchalance she tossed her head and thrust her hands down deep into her big ulster pockets. That the bleak hat reflected no decent featherish consciousness of being tossed, that the big ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... I conceived it after you had handed down your verdict. Went around to the bank and quietly drew out the lot. I've planned a wild and original orgy. A riot of dissipation in giving. Think of the fun one can have with that much tangible money. Already to-day I've struck one man dumb and reduced another to mental decay, by the simple medium of a thousand-dollar bill. Miracles! Declare a vacation, Chris, and come with me on my secret and jubilant bat, ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Quarterly Review of January 1878 on "Democracy in Europe''; two lectures delivered at Bridgnorth in 1877 on "The History of Freedom in Antiquity'' and "The History of Freedom in Christianity''—these last the only tangible portions put together by him of his long-projected "History of Liberty''; and an essay on modern German historians in the first number of the English Historical Review, which he helped to found (1886). After 1879 he divided his time between London, Cannes and Tegernsee in Bavaria, enjoying ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... presence of the vastness, and grandeur, and magnificence of the universe, and of the power and glory of which the created universe is but the symbol and shadow. There is the felt apprehension that, beyond and back of the visible and the tangible, there is a personal, living Power, which is the foundation of all, and which fashions all, and fills all with its light and life; that "the universe is the living vesture in which the Invisible has robed his mysterious loveliness." ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... prolonged the struggle for over five years of toil and privation and hope deferred, and now, when his last sovereign had been changed and nearly spent, success—real, tangible, practical success—had come to him, and the discovery that was to be to the twentieth century what the steam-engine had been ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... first time" when he awoke in the Nu. In fact, the articulate word and the voice were believed to be the most potent of creative forces, not remaining immaterial on issuing from the lips, but condensing, so to speak, into tangible substances; into bodies which were themselves animated by creative life and energy; into gods and goddesses who lived or who created in their turn. By a very short phrase Tumu had called forth the gods who order all things; for his "Come unto me!" uttered with a loud ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... dear Rodion, very irritable, and I must own that I had taken that into consideration, for, when driven in a corner, many a man lets out his secrets. 'If,' I said to myself, 'I could only squeeze some kind of evidence out of him, however trivial, provided it were real, tangible, and palpable, different from all my psychological inferences!' That was my idea. Sometimes we succeed by some such proceeding, but unfortunately that does not happen every day, as I conclusively discovered on the occasion in question, I had relied too ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... sought for reasons and had very little faith. I was a slanderer of the Vedas. I was destitute of the (fourfold) objects of life, and was devoted to that science of argumentation which is based upon ocular or tangible proofs.[542] I used to utter words based on (plausible) reasons. Indeed, in assemblies, I always spoke of reasons (and never faith). I used to speak irreverently of the declarations of the Srutis and address Brahmanas in domineering tones. I was an unbeliever, skeptical ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... kiss proved more intoxicating to Quin than all the more tangible ones he had ever received. It sent him swaggering through the next few months with his head in the air and his heart on fire. Nothing could stop him now, he told himself boastfully. Old Bangs was showing him signal favor, Madam Bartlett was his staunch friend, Mr. Ranny and the aunties were ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... altogether. It had an effect not of her having exhausted the subject but as if, despairing of a direct solution, she turned deliberately to the relief of other considerations. She ceased to question her own life, and taking that for granted, wrote more largely of less tangible things. She remembered that she had said that life, if it was no more than its present appearances, was "utter nonsense." She went back to that. "One says things like that," she wrote "and not for a moment does one believe it. I grumble at my life, I seem to ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... more tangible community of interest between these two remarkable men. Each detested the silk hat. Frohman had never worn one since the Haverly Minstrel days, when he had to don the tile for the daily street parade. Barrie, in all his life, has had only one silk hat. It is ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... cruel, selfish, ungrateful, but for all that she could not yield nor say that she would marry him, trying to love him. Confused images of something dearer than this as the love of her life passed before her mind. They were images without recognizable form or tangible substance, but they were the true love, and this was not like them. No, she could not yield. Sorry as she might be for him, and was, she could ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... fact, that this inclining of our race to these brute servitors is largely due to the same cause which promotes the love of "horse-flesh." Man must assert his dominion over the brutes. He wants some tangible evidence, always beside him and running at his heels, of his superiority to something. It is a great upholder of his self-respect. It is so consoling, amid our conscious defeats and snubbings by a proud and unmanageable world, to have at hand a fellow-creature, strong enough ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... estimable than other common merchandise. It would be difficult to find, among the countless books about books produced by us in the old country, any in which the bent of individual tastes and propensities is so distinctly represented in tangible symbols; and the reality of the elucidation is increased by the sort of innocent surprise with which the historian approaches each "lot," evidently as a first acquaintance, about whom he inquires and obtains all available particulars, good-humouredly communicating them ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... address, in any such tangible and monumental form, has ever been possible. It was impossible to canvass our vast territories with the zealous and indefatigable industry with which England was canvassed for signatures. In America, those possessed of the spirit which led to this efficient action had no leisure for it. All their ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... fell upon our ears like a thunderbolt. A dozen different ideas coursed through my brain, yet I was too much bowed down with grief to attempt to form them into tangible shapes. And even while I was thinking what would become of the store and contents during our imprisonment, Mr. ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Three American doctors went down into that pesthole of a Cuban city to offer their lives for a theory. Not for a tangible fact like the flag, or for glory and fame as in battle, but for a theory that might or might not be true. There wasn't a day or a night that their lives weren't at stake. Carroll let himself be bitten by infected mosquitoes on a final test, and grazed ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the river and other such beings were the first gods, and that the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards as an extension of the same principle. Mr. Max Mueller seems to share this view when he says that man was led from the worship of semi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to that of intangible objects, which gave him deities proper. The Germans, as a rule, hold the view that the great nature-worship came first, and that the sanctity ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... self-questionings, no probing into motives. For the time being his customary attitude of mind—that of the pessimist sceptically weighing every emotion—deserted him. He had been, in his small circle in Chisley, the one person with a tangible grievance against life, but here he found another at more bitter variance with Fate, and weaker by far for the fight. A mutual grievance is a strong bond. He was lifted out of himself. When he returned he found Lucy Woodrow much more composed. She thanked him, and seated ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... The most tangible thing he had to build on was the night, immersed in bridge, when he had not been unaware of the abrupt leaving of the piano after the singing of the "Gypsy Trail"; nor when, in careless smiling greeting of them when they ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... the trailing of that stuttering voice seemed an impossible feat even for the radio boys. If they could only get some tangible clue to work on! ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... there is a strong prejudice against Mr. Mauleverer, and that it is entertained by many whom I should have hoped to see above such weakness but when I brought these tangible productions of his system, as evidence of his success, I did not expect to see them received with a covert distrust, which I own I do not understand. I perceive now why good works find ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... myth of the nursery story— Earliest love of mine infantile breast, Be something tangible, bloom in thy glory Into existence, as thou art addressed! Hasten! appear to me, guileless and good— Thou are so ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... one face and about 10 feet on the other. The wall is over 3 feet in thickness, but of very clumsy masonry, no care having been exercised in dressing the stones, which are of varying sizes and laid in mud plaster. Interest attaches to this fragment, as it is one of the few tangible evidences left of the Spanish priests who engaged in the fatal mission to the Hopituh in the sixteenth century. This bit of wall, which now forms part of a sheep-fold, is pointed out as the remains of one of the ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... intense since my blindness. That share of his presence, which my eyes had lost, my other senses craved. When he was absent from my side, I would feel as if I were hanging in mid-air, and had lost my hold of all things tangible. ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... a fine chicken-house under the trees began to assume tangible form when Mrs. Slater came to call, and brought with her a fine yellow hen and thirteen little woolly chicks. Mrs. Motherwell came, too, and brought with her a similar offering, only hers were Plymouth Rocks. Mrs. John Green brought nine little fluffy ducklings ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... prerogative, of tangible and consumable homage—is due to the proprietor on account of his nominal and metaphysical occupancy. His seal is set upon the thing; that is enough to prevent any one else from ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... results. Nobody had suggested that the mail would be delivered aboard ship, and I had not had sense enough to guess it. I did not make any explanations to the quartermaster and his clerk, however, because an intuition warned me not to add tangible evidence to a general belief in civilian stupidity. I merely swallowed my snubbing meekly ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... hid his face on his mother's knee, and burst into an agony of weeping. He was lifted on her lap in a moment, father and mother both comforting him with assurances that he was a very good boy, and that papa was much pleased with him, Mr. Kendal even putting the cannon into his hand, as a tangible evidence of favour; but the child thrust aside the toy, and sliding down, took hold of his brother's languid, dejected hand, and cried, with a sob and ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pleasure at the prospect, and endeavoured to speak as lightly as I could to Cowles upon the subject, but I felt depressed and anxious at heart. The words of Reeves and the unhappy fate of young Prescott recurred to my recollection, and though I could assign no tangible reason for it, a vague, dim fear and distrust of the woman took possession of me. It may be that this was foolish prejudice and superstition upon my part, and that I involuntarily contorted her future doings and sayings to fit into some half-formed wild theory of my own. This has ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... nearly all of the elected in places where, as at Rheims and Paris, terror has the elector by the throat, "under the clubs, axes, daggers, and bludgeons of the butchers."[3331] But where the physical impressions of murder have not been so tangible and impressive, some sense of decency has prevented too glaring elections. The inclination to vote for well-known names could not wholly be arrested; seventy-seven former members of the Constituent Assembly, and one hundred and eighty-six of the previous ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... given up in despair any attempt to arrange it more correctly. Indeed, being of the peasantry himself, he was not so very full sure in his own mind that demons were not bodily presences, quite as real and often much more tangible than saints. Anyway, he let her alone; and she believed in the goodness of God as she believed in the shining of ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... consciously, in the other unconsciously. Legends of the former class are the product of a lettered and learned age. The story floats loosely in a world of imagination. The other sort of pre-historic narrative clings close to the soil, and to visible and tangible objects. It may be legend, but it is legend believed in as history never consciously invented, and growing out of certain spots of the earth's surface, and supported by and drawing its life from the ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... farther aft, and more distant, and the sullen wash of the surf was no longer so near as to seem fresh and tangible. ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... border-line between poetry and prose, and novels should be as it were prose saturated with poetry, we may expect to come in this direction upon the secret of De Foe's power. Although De Foe for the most part deals with good tangible subjects, which he can weigh and measure and reduce to moidores and pistoles, the mysterious has a very strong though peculiar attraction for him. It is indeed that vulgar kind of mystery which implies nothing of reverential ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... had little difficulty in persuading his credulous followers that it was merely an apparition which Columbus had conjured up by magic arts; and such was the reputation for sorcery which the admiral had acquired by his astronomical observations, that even the sight and taste of some tangible bacon (half of that present from Ovando of which we have heard) which he sent as a peace offering to the mutineers, failed to convince them of the material character of ...
— The Life of Columbus • Arthur Helps
... for all our teaching, this the particular point that is most sensitive to educational inoculation. If we find that the boy is eager to have a wireless outfit and is working with supreme intensity to crystallize his wish into tangible and workable form, quite heedless of clock hours, it were unkind to the point of cruelty and altogether unpedagogical to force him away from this congenial task into some other work that he will do only in a heartless and perfunctory way. If we yearn ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... themselves (what an unseemly figure is this,—"disgorge," quotha, as if the vessels were sick) on the wharf, and everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased me to think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible business of this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not have gone on without my presence. Nevertheless, I must not pride myself too much on my activity and utilitarianism. I shall, doubtless, soon bewail myself at being compelled to earn my ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spasm of comprehension of the horrible void dividing us. Never did yearning babe stretch arms more wistfully to an unattainable mother than I at that moment to my mother earth. All her meanness and prosaicness was forgotten, all her imperfections and shortcomings; it was home, the one tangible thing in the glittering emptiness of the spheres. All my soul went into my eyes, and then I sneezed violently, and turning round, found that sweet damsel whose silky head nestled so friendly on my shoulder was tickling my nose with a feather she ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... more or less legendary, I confess; but the great tree we are discussing is very tangible. Indeed, it is always in the public eye; for it carries on a sort of continuous disrobing performance! The snake sheds his skin rather privately, and comes forth in his new spring suit all at once; the oak and the maple, and all the rest ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... proclivity to asceticism and self-torture is endemic, it was only natural that penance should in very truth seem easier and more satisfactory than this spiritual discipline. It won more respect and doubtless seemed more tangible and definite, more like what the world expected from a holy man. Accordingly we find that efforts were made by Devadatta and others to induce the Buddha to increase the severity of his discipline. But he refused[529]. The more ascetic form ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... nothing so much as in their handling of those filmy textures which clothe the vague shapes of the borderland between experience and illusion. This is perhaps because our people, who seem to live only in the most tangible things of material existence, really live more in the spirit than any other. Their love of the supernatural is their common inheritance from no particular ancestry, but is apparently an effect from psychological influences in the past, widely separated in time and place. It is as noticeable ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... validity do we know that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed on him might not perish but have everlasting life." God has not expected us to trust blindly: he has presented tangible and compelling evidence of his glorious scheme of salvation.' The speaker, who is always imbued with the magnetism of a striking personality, was more than usually effective on this occasion, and visibly moved the throng of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... were three more balls. I played every day, and every day I lost two or three hundred sequins. My prudence caused even more surprise than my bad fortune. I went every day to the fair cousins and made love, but I was still at the same point; I hoped, but could get nothing tangible. The fair marchioness sometimes gave me a kiss, but this was not enough for me. It is true that so far I had not dared to ask her to meet me alone. As it was I felt my love might die for want of food, and three days before the ball I asked her if she, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... into the future, whose shining ideal stood before him in vivid clearness, beckoning and calling to him. He saw fame, he saw honor; he heard the din of battle, he saw a wild chaos, and from this chaos emerged a something, a tangible shape; it grew large, it assumed form and substance, it was a country—his country—that he himself had created, drawn forth from chaos. And now he saw a happy, contented people, saw glad multitudes throng about him and shout: "Long live ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... folly, of any subsequent child of Adam. We are all drawn downward by every sin; we are lifted upward, too, by every act of heroic virtue, not by example only, but also by that mysterious influence, that subtile contagion, finer than anything visible, ponderable, or tangible,—that effluence from eye, voice, tone, manner, which, according to the character which is behind, communicates an impulse of faith and courage, or an impulse of cowardice and untruth; which may be transmitted onward, forward, on every side, like the widening circles in ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... all the music of it in her untried ears, she knew already in herself that her mind must have other food than her heart's rapture. I think, indeed, that she would have declined him altogether if he had proposed nothing more tangible to her than perpetual honeymoon. That was what Senhouse would certainly have proposed to her—she saw that in every look of his, and read it in every line he sent her; but that had never attracted her. She had given Senhouse her confidence, but not her heart. Ingram's proposals, therefore, ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... none. Its great organisation was spread by purely voluntary means, till it gained a firm footing throughout the Empire and beyond it. To a large extent it was an association for mutual aid. Wherever anyone was in need, help was at hand. The tangible advantages of belonging to such a guild were so great that the Church had to enforce labour on all who could work, as a condition of sharing in the benefits of membership. Social distinctions, such as those of rich and poor, master and slave, were not abolished, but they had lost their sting, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... obvious that these subjects, as well as the several modes of reproduction, stand in some sort of relation to each other. I have been led, or rather forced, to form a view which to a certain extent connects these facts by a tangible method. Every one would wish to explain to himself, even in an imperfect manner, how it is possible for a character possessed by some remote ancestor suddenly to reappear in the offspring; how the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... to Stephen Guest, that conflict assumes specific and tangible form; and it has emphatically to be fought out alone. All external circumstances are against her; even Lucy's sweet unjealous temper, and Tom's bitter hatred, combining with Philip's painful self- consciousness to keep the ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... have to bear the affliction of watching Charmian walk. Suddenly, however, a mysterious word of fear broke from the lips of the lotus-eaters. "Ah, ah," thought I, "now the dream goes glimmering." I clutched the chair desperately, resolved to drag back to the reality of the Snark some tangible vestige of this lotus land. I felt the whole dream lurching and pulling to be gone. Just then the mysterious word of fear was repeated. It sounded like REPORTERS. I looked and saw three of them coming across the lawn. Oh, blessed reporters! Then the dream was indisputably ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... for Mary herself, her breast heaved, her cheeks glowed, her hands trembled, a quick sigh fluttered in her bosom; and whilst she remained in his presence, she believed that happiness had lost its usual evanescent property, and become tangible, to hold and press upon ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... great valley of the Lena. It must not be supposed, however, that this "post-road" resembles anything that we know by that name. The word "road," in north-eastern Siberia, is only a verbal symbol standing for an abstraction. The thing symbolised has no more real, tangible existence than a meridian of longitude. It is simply lineal extension in a certain direction. The country back of Okhotsk, for a distance of six hundred miles, is an unbroken wilderness of mountains and evergreen forests, sparsely inhabited by Wandering Tunguses, with here ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... but they are apt to despair of themselves; they see their companions get before them, and they do not exactly perceive the cause of their sudden incapacity. Where we speak of sensible, visible, tangible objects, we can easily detect and remedy a child's ignorance. It is easy to discover whether he has or has not a complete notion of such a substance as gold; we can enumerate its properties, and readily point out in what his ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... to support her. The visible, tangible reality of the knife struck him with a panic, and utterly destroyed any faint doubts that he might have entertained up to this time in relation to the mysterious dream-warning of nearly eight years before. By a last desperate effort, he summoned self-possession ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... word "properly" lay the whole question. What constitutes proper payment? Every career in life carries with it some circumstance either of advantage or the reverse, which either compensates for the loss of a material benefit, or is requited by some addition of a tangible profit. The educated man who accepts three hundred a-year in the Church is not recompensed, or considered to be recompensed, by this miserable pittance. It is in the respect, the influence, the power, and the reverence that attach to his calling he is rewarded. Place a layman in the parish ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... It was of herself I was thinking. She's got to suffer so. One hates to see a person take a cloud for something tangible and keep falling off, to be bruised and beaten. If she could always ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... that Brenton was struggling with some half-forgotten memory, striving to bring it forth to light, to link it with the present; or, failing that, at least with something tangible in his past life. And yet, the blurring of his memory was not too inexplicable. Reed Opdyke still remembered Brenton clearly, still regretted the apparent waste of some of his more brilliant possibilities. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... this is a fragment made a profound impression on me. In the first place it came as a tangible, living token of the mother, so greatly venerated and adored - well-nigh as a departed saint; then, too, it awakened old, tender, childish feelings by the familiar tones of piety, which now struck my more experienced ears as something entirely new. And with the eager enthusiasm natural to me ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... dozen different and distant places, was not the man for staid little Anne. He was twenty-eight years old, but it was not the discrepancy in years that mattered. The doctor had himself been twelve years older than his wife. No, it was something less tangible— ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... forward at the eyebrows; it is not the brow nor countenance of a prominently intellectual man (not a natural student, I mean, or abstract thinker), but of one whose office it is to handle things practically and to bring about tangible results. His face looked capable of being very stern, but wore, in its repose, when I saw it, an aspect pleasant and dignified; it is not, in its character, an American face, nor an English one. The man on whom he fixes his eye is conscious of ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... learned that much from Judge Graney. He did not expect to secure justice, but he wished to have something tangible upon which to work to force the law into the country. His duty in the matter consisted only in delivering the prisoner into the custody of the authorities, which in this case was the sheriff. The sheriff would be held responsible for him. He ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... person, however, and Alaire called him her dream husband. Now this man's physical aspect was never long the same; it altered according to her changing ideals or to the impression left by new acquaintances; nevertheless, he was in some ways the most real and the most tangible of all her pale romantic fancies. No one who has watched a solitary child at play can doubt that it sees and hears playmates invisible to others. Alaire Austin, in the remotest depths of her being, was still a child. Of late her prince had assumed new characteristics ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... not suited to the discussion of this question. We must show that when enfranchised we shall hold a self-preservative attitude; that we know our rights, and, knowing them, dare maintain. Wisdom is less tangible than force but more powerful in the end. Women are different from men and their political methods will differ from those of men. Women will never win so long as they consent to barter their services for vague promises of what will be done for them in the future, or to subordinate woman suffrage ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... out brightly in this particular respect, it now eclipsed both time and space, cheated beholders of their senses, and worked on their belief in defiance of all natural laws. He walked along the tangible and real stones of Holborn Hill, an undersized boy; and yet he winked the winks, and thought the thoughts, and did the deeds, and said the sayings of an ancient man. There was an old principle within him, and a young surface without. He became an inexplicable creature; a breeched and booted ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... disappointed this time. But l'homme propose et Dieu dispose; and in this case there was no woman to intervene, as in the Spanish version of the proverb, to "discompose" the disposition of Deity. Before the project contemplated in Field's letter took tangible shape, however, he was laid on his back by a severe cold, which developed into pneumonia. On his recovery, the doctor advised that he should go to California; and on November 8th he wrote to Mr. Gray, asking him if he and his niece could not be ready to accompany him about the 1st of December. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... of flying-machine corporations as common carriers, which would give them the right of eminent domain with power to condemn a right of way. But what would they condemn? There is nothing tangible in the air. Railways in condemning a right of way specify tangible property (realty) within certain limits. How would an aviator designate any particular right of way through the air a certain number of feet in width, and a ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... conscious of a compelling force more dominant than the strong will of a man, Sledge Hume rode the one trail open to him. It was as though the deeds of his life were now grown tangible separate squares of rock cemented into sheer walls rising about him, narrowing, forcing him into the one ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... not, he was happy—and the one thing wanting was the presence of Lucille at the fight. How he would have loved to show her that he was not really a coward—given a fair chance and a tangible foe. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult and even impossible to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history from the Sonnets; "the strange imagery of passion which passes over the magic mirror," it has been finely said, "has no tangible evidence before or behind it." But its mere passing is itself an evidence of the restlessness and agony within. The change in the character of his dramas gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness, the keen delight in life ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... of the Riet the history of this De Wet hunt ceases, for everything came to pass precisely as the brigadier had foreseen. The brigade arrived at Kalabas bridge before daybreak, prepared, if a tangible enemy was still in front, to take up the running again and pursue the line to an end, no matter the cost.[42] But the soft ground on the far side of the river gave evidence of thirty trails. The commando had scattered to the winds, and as, with cunning foresight, De Wet and his following had removed ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... opinions for several years, I am more than ever convinced, since examining these few Tinguian records, that something really tangible and worth while can be deduced from the music of various primitive peoples, and I trust this branch of ethnology will soon receive ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... missionary societies, the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and even upon the still larger scale of international action, she has exhibited her power by mere moral influences and the inspiration of great purposes, without the aid of legal penalties or even of tangible inconveniences, to mold and direct the discordant thought and action of thousands and millions of people scattered over separate States, and sometimes even living in countries hostile to each other to the accomplishment of great earthly or heavenly ends, ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... him a little troubled. What did he know? Something tangible, or were these views of his just applicable to any case? Her eyes were full ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... Tengger was the chosen victim offered to Siva, who, in his attribute of a Consuming Fire, occupied the volcanic abyss. The worship of the Divine Destroyer has ever been a fruitful source of crime and cruelty, and a tangible atmosphere of evil lingers round those hoary temples of India dedicated to the Avenging Deity, whose fanatical followers are reckoned by millions. Through the inversion of creed peculiar to Hindu Pantheism, the propitiation of Divine wrath has become the fundamental principle of religion, and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... enemies, had hidden in the darkness to trap desperate foes, had watched, with bated breath and pounding hearts, for shadowy forms to appear. They were not unaccustomed to danger and the suspense of an ambush. But in the forest they had solid ground beneath their feet. Trees and other tangible objects were all about them. But here everything seemed unreal, almost ghostly. The darkness of the forest was no blacker than the night here in the open. And yet there was no shady covering of leaves to shut out the light—only a strange, weird, unearthly canopy of mist. In the forest ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... expanded to the utmost, would be their idea of God; and the grandest and happiest conditions of existence within their observation, enhanced by the removal of every limiting ill, would form their notion of heaven. Both would be outward, definite, local, and, as it were, tangible. Royal courts with their pomp of power and luxury; priestly temples, with their exclusive sanctity, their awe inspiring secrets, their processions and anthems, would inevitably furnish the prevailing casts and colors to the dogmas and the scenery of early religion. For what were the most ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... Chetwynde had gone away to recruit her health, and, now that she was better, she had determined to make a complete change. When she herself arrived other changes would be made. This much Gualtier managed to communicate to them, so as to give them some tangible idea of the affairs of the family and prevent idle conjecture. He let them know, also, that Lord Chetwynde was in India, and might come home at any moment, though his engagements there were so important that it might be impossible for ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... serious labour, but as the mere holiday sports of a geometrician. He would not indeed have constructed them but at the earnest request of King Hiero, who entreated him to leave the abstract for the concrete, and to bring his ideas within the comprehension of the people by embodying them in tangible forms. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... one of the company who was not afraid of something concrete, something tangible, was Williams. Now Williams is notoriously, hopelessly shy; and when he took up the subject where Bowman had left it, he poured out his soul with all the fervour and abandon of which only the shy are capable. Williams was afraid of his own past. It was not a hideously criminal one, ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... belief in woodland nymphs and sirens which had woven itself into their life whilst the spell of the forests remained upon them in their boyhood. That evil and good spirits did hover about the path of humanity, Raymond sincerely believed; but he was equally certain that they took no tangible form, and that the vision Gaston had seen in the wood was no ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that the wholly uncomprehending steersman went on with his work as though Bones had no separate or tangible existence. ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... stole over Sabine. It could not be all true—it was just some dream—a little more vivid, that was all, than those which used to come to her of him sometimes during—that year. She almost felt that she would like to put out her hand and touch him to see if he were tangible or a thing of illusion as she led the ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... separate. We are, according to the Bible, destined to undergo three great changes in the mode and nature of our existence. In the first period, while we are here in this our life on earth, the soul and spirit are united to a material and tangible body of flesh and blood, suited to our life here. The second stage begins at death, the name we give to the separation which then takes place between this material fabric of the body and the incorporeal part of us; and then the soul and spirit dwell disembodied for ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson
... said Max, she "intlups me worse. I'll never get my letter done." Max, except for a wavy line or two in red chalk generally confined his correspondence to enclosing tangible sections of things in which he was interested at the time. To-day he had stuffed into his envelope a clipping from the tail of Larkin's horse, one of the white daisies Trike was being nourished upon, some shavings of coloured chalks from a box on which he had just expended ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... to the plays of Sophocles, we feel that a new era in the drama is created; we feel that the artist poet has called into full existence the artist actor. His theatrical effects [375] are tangible, actual—could be represented to-morrow in Paris—in London— everywhere. We find, therefore, that with Sophocles has passed down to posterity the name of the great actor [376] in his principal plays. And ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lending powerful support to the other two. It is intelligible too that moral goodness, intellectual power, high vitality, and strength should be approved by the intuition." This reduces, or rather brings the problem back to a tangible basis namely:—the translation of an artistic intuition into musical sounds approving and reflecting, or endeavoring to approve and reflect, a "moral goodness," a "high vitality," etc., or any other human attribute mental, moral, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... repugnance from her, though it dung to her, dragging upon her as she moved like a tangible thing. She closed the door and went slowly back into the room, mastering her horror, fighting it at every step. She readied the struggling, convulsed figure, laid her hands upon it,—and ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... transmitter which communicated the statements to another agent outside the building.[17] Said Justice Jackson for the Court: "Petitioner relies on cases relating to the more common and clearly distinguishable problems raised where tangible property is unlawfully seized. Such unlawful seizure may violate the Fourth Amendment, even though the entry itself was by subterfuge or fraud rather than force. But such decisions are inapposite in the field of mechanical or electronic devices designed to overhear ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... on the strength of the reports of Charteris's doings up to the time he was superseded by Brigadier Speathley, the view of his exploits to which India itself was just coming round. The home authorities backed their opinion by tangible marks of favour. The greatest living soldier, mention from whose lips was in itself an honour, recommended Lieutenant Charteris to her Majesty for promotion, and her Majesty was pleased also to confer upon him a Commandership of the Bath, while the India Board decided to present him with a ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... people. After those many quite extraordinary experiences they had no right to expect merely the natural and the probable, but should cheerfully have trusted him; for, truly, in the sight of all, they had been shown the most tangible proofs of his reliability. When, on the other hand, Moses considered their distress, he forgave them; for he told himself that a multitude is by nature fickle, and allows itself to be easily influenced by impressions of the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... giving me some tangible keepsake, I'll simply ask you to send me the smallest Horace you can get. It will amuse me, and prevent me from forgetting all my Latin. There's a little woman who sells cigars on the jetty at Bastia. If you give it to her, she'll see ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... than they did with Mrs. Kate. The thought of her roused a certain resentment which bordered closely upon dislike. Still, she piqued his interest; for a week she was invisible to him, yet her presence in the house created a tangible atmosphere which he felt but could not explain. His first sight of her—beyond a fleeting glimpse once or twice through the window—had been that day when he had helped Mason carry her and her big chair into the dining-room. The brief contact had left with him a vision of the delicate parting in ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower |
