"Mere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with Lee's plan. The tips were quickly passed round. But none of the hints were ever given, not a single one. A facer lay ahead of them beside which the mere receipt of the five letters was nothing. To be sure, the letters were the greatest sensation the outfit had enjoyed since they stood off successfully two troops of U. S. Cavalry, come to arrest them for killing twenty maurauding Utes. But what soon followed filled them with an ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... accompanied the men upon a hunt since the arrival of the guests. She never had cared particularly for the sport of killing. The tracking she enjoyed; but the mere killing for the sake of killing she could not find pleasure in—little savage that she had been, and still, to some measure, was. When Bwana had gone forth to shoot for meat she had always been his enthusiastic ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... straight as an arrow to dwindle in perspective to a mere thread. The little car leaped forward on the invisible down grade. Again I anchored myself to one of the top supports. A long, rangy fowl happened into the road just ahead of us, but immediately flopped clumsily, ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... that Undine had been only a mere apparition of the forest, again gained ascendancy over him; indeed, amid the howling of the waves and the tempest, the cracking of the trees, and the complete transformation of a scene lately so calmly beautiful, he could almost have considered the whole peninsula with its cottage and ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... that was especially absorbing was the matter of lighting; catching the high lights and shadows. This was the first time the "bridge of lights" was used on any stage. Lighting has always been to me more than mere illumination. It is a revelation of the heart and soul of the story. It points the way. Lights should be to the play what the musical accompaniment is to the singer. A wordless story could be told by lights. Lights should be mixed as a painter mixes his colours—a bit of pink here, of blue there; ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm • David Belasco
... thought, a wave of which has reached us, is undoubtedly in the direction of bringing all subjects, however sacred, to the crucial test of argument, fact and experience, and our religious guides must not think they will prevail by the exhibit of mere contemptuous indifference to the free thought that prevails around them. If our great theological schools and seats of learning are to prove themselves equal to the demands of the present day, it will be by moving out of their ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... more than the mere setting to rise again of a heavenly body. The perfume of a flower, the sighing of the wind, suggesting some harmony or song, a full or crescent moon, recalled thoughts and associations of Sylvia. Everything seemed to bring out memory, and ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... the upper Agsan, there were only two towns of Maggugan conquistas—Tagusab and Pilar—and even these were mere suggestions of towns. It may be, however, that since the appointment of a deputy governor, the great numbers of Christianized Maggugans that had fled from the wrath of their enemies into the swamp region at the headwaters of the Mnat River have returned and that Maggugan ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... written a line. I will show him the manner of man you are, and a box of bright volumes shall be packed for you. The one condition is that you shall write me in return a sheet of similar appreciations. The only thing is to know what one likes, and strike out a line for oneself; the rest is mere sheep-like grazing—forty feeding ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... each other. Voltaire did not spare the King's poems; and the King has left on record his opinion of Voltaire's diplomacy. "He had no credentials," says Frederic, "and the whole mission was a joke, a mere farce." ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... considered as a curiosity, from other reasons than those which mere criticism affords. The poem was bad, the readers were many. The subject was sacred, the author a reputed atheist, and the profits which it produced exceeded two thousand pounds sterling. The fortunate writer relieved himself from the jaws of famine by this strange incomprehensible ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... a disgraced and ruined man, broken in health and spirits, contest the mere details of life with a high-spirited woman ten ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... is correct when he says that the land and sea forces were under separate commands, and it is equally true that but for the conciliating temper of Pepperrell, harmony could not have been preserved between the two chiefs; but when he calls Warren a mere spectator, he does glaring injustice to that gallant officer, whose activity and that of his captains was incessant, and whose services were invaluable. They maintained, with slight lapses, an almost impossible blockade, without ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... his limbs and joints, one after another, with invincible patience and courage, repeating these words, "Lord, teach me thy wisdom:" for the tyrants had forgot to cut out his tongue. After so many martyrdoms, his body lay a mere trunk weltering in its own blood. The executioners themselves, as well as the multitude, were moved to tears and admiration at this spectacle, and at such an heroic patience. But Arcadius, with a joyful countenance, surveying his scattered limbs all around ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... Waste of energy brings waste of life and victory thrown away. A regimental leader has, with his many other burdens, to endure the intolerable toil of taking thought, and of transmitting thought without pause into action. And those who work with him are not mere figures, not only items of a unit, but are intimate friends whose lives he must devote himself to preserve, whose lives he must be ready to sacrifice as freely as his own. It is well that we neither know nor decide the issues of life and death. There is, I think, a second meaning in ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... (268)—a flower growing out of the debris of the avalanche. The Coda begins, at measure 374, with a passionate insistence upon the fundamental rhythm, driven home with sharp hammer-blows and, as in all Beethoven's symphonic movements, furnishes an overpowering climax, not a mere perfunctory close. The second Movement, in A-flat major, is a series of free[154] Variations (five in number) based on a theme, Andante con moto,[155] of great rhythmic vitality, peculiarly rich and suave—announced, as it is, by 'celli and violas ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... branch. A little later, again, the branch at Liverpool, one of the most important, had been in peril owing to mismanagement and defalcation, and the man had gone to take charge of it, and again, by mere chance apparently, Jones had been promoted to the same place. And this pursuit of the Assistant Manager had continued for several years, often, too, in the most curious fashion; and though Jones had never exchanged a single word with him, or been so much as ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... view of the position expressed by the commander-in-chief, the month of July had passed, and the early days of August had already arrived; and yet the camp was not formed, nor anything more than that mere handful of troops mustered about Tilbury, to defend the road from Dover to London. The army at Tilbury never, exceeded ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... outcasts there; and I saw an infant literally die of hunger; a boy suffering from alcoholism; and a consumptive charwoman rinsing clothes outside in the cold. Then I returned home, and a footman with a white tie opens the door for me. I see my son—a mere lad—ordering that footman to fetch him some water; and I see the army of servants who work for us. Then I go to visit Bors—a man who is sacrificing his life for truth's sake. I see how he, a ...
— The Light Shines in Darkness • Leo Tolstoy
... being changed, or, if he was very gracious, give him a slight nod. With respect and a certain awe the people looked upon even these subordinate servants of the new principle, and the Silesians were not alone in this. Something new had come into the world in general. It was not a mere figure of speech when Frederick called himself the foremost servant of his State. As he had taught his wild nobility on the battlefield that it was the highest honor to die for the Fatherland, so his ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... I must have a fixed determination, and not a mere fluctuating and soon broken intention. I must have a steadfast affection, and not merely a fluttering love, that, like some butterfly, lights now on this, now on that, sweet flower, but which has a flight straight as a carrier pigeon to its cot, which ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... covered, and without an ax it was impossible to make a hole. At last it began to dawn, but the fog hid the sun. Nine o'clock, and he had not yet found the shore, though the fog seemed to grow less and the sun's disk was visible, like a pale, colorless ball, a mere shadow of its glorious self. The air was full of countless glittering particles of ice, which melted into a dazzling vapor. Now he will discover ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... even the mere forms of friendship, are the touchstone of a man. O'Neill was credited in his world with the friendship of Regnault. It had even been to him a matter of some social profit; there were many who deferred willingly to the great man's intimate. O'Neill saw no reason to set them right, but he knew ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... Dryden, nor that of more recent date by Sir Walter Scott; and, possibly, either of those works would render my present Query needless. It relates to a copy of Absalom and Achitophel now lying before me, which is a mere chap-book, printed on bad paper, in the most economical manner, and obviously intended to be sold at a very reasonable rate: indeed, at the bottom of the title-page, which is dated "1708," we are told that it was "Printed and sold by H. Hills, in Black-fryars, near the Water-side, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 55, November 16, 1850 • Various
... the list of his weaknesses; but so far from being convicted by seventy witnesses, he does not appear to have been directly criminated by one. In short, I look upon these aspersions as the effects of mere malice. How is it possible a buccaneer should have been so good a scholar as Blackbourne certainly was? He who had so perfect a knowledge of the classics (particularly of the Greek tragedians), as to be able to read them with the same ease as he could Shakespeare, must have taken great ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... under the passions? Think, O my brother, how many courts there are in Italy: are the princes more fortunate than you? Which among them all loves truly, deeply, and virtuously? Among them all is there any one, for his genius, for his generosity, for his gentleness, ay, for his mere humanity, worthy to ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... for harvest with steam-ploughs here. How could mere horses face the endless furrows? And they attack the earth with toothed, cogged, and spiked engines that would be monstrous in the shops, but here are only speckles on the yellow grass. Even the locomotive is cowed. A train of freight cars is passing along a line that comes out of the ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... intelligence of the American people, who are ordinarily alert and analytical, to realize how few of them really know how serious a matter constipation is. They don't know because they have given the matter absolutely no thought. They have accepted it as a mere matter of fact, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... is a mere hypothesis based on the idea that "if there was an Iliad at all in the ninth century, its length must have been such as was compatible with the conditions of an oral delivery,"—"a poem or poems short enough to be recited at ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... Narkom, with a slight shudder. "Awful thing, wasn't it? Gave me the creeps to read about it. The chap who was killed, poor beggar, was a mere boy, not twenty, son of the Chevalier di Roma himself. There was a great stir about it. Talk of the authorities forbidding the performance, and all that sort of thing. They never did, however, for on investigation—— Ah, the tea at last, thank fortune. ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... and, while disavowing the treaty, did not proceed against the pensionary. England declared war on December 20. The opposition maintained that the government had behaved arrogantly and was actuated by a desire for plunder, and that it was unjust to found a war on a mere proposal emanating from the magistracy of a single city and not confirmed by the states-general. Yet, if the conduct of Holland is viewed as a whole, it will be found to justify the course pursued by the ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... the town rose a picturesque building. Originally it had been a mere case to hold people. The shell had been so thin, so devoid of excrescence, and so closely drawn over the accommodation granted, that the grim character of what was beneath showed through it, as the shape of a body is ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... heed the common good, and not any private good, and would appoint officials and those who are to rule the city, not by party or prejudice, not for flatteries or bribery, but with virtue and reason alone; and they would choose men mature and excellent, and not mere children—such as fear God and love the Commonwealth and not their own particular advantage. Now in this way, their state and the city is preserved in peace and unity. But unjust deeds, and living in cliques, and the appointment to rule and government of men who do not ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... are deceptive. No. 1 is the saving of an abnormal grant, Nos. 2 and 5 signify mere transfers to Grants in Aid of Local Taxation, No. 7 a transfer of duties to ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... dressed up Abraham in the uniform of one of our dead troopers; and when at last a Kurdish chief rode up with a hundred men at his back and demanded to know our business, Ranjoor Singh called Abraham to interpret. We could easily have beaten a mere hundred Kurds, but to have won a skirmish just then would have helped us almost as little as to lose one. What we wanted was free ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... silver idol, and ne'er worshipp'd thee!— It is too late—or thou should'st have my knee— Too late now for the old Ephesian vows, And not divine the crescent on thy brows!— Yet, call thee nothing but the mere mild Moon, Behind those chestnut boughs, Casting their dappled shadows at my feet; I will be grateful for that simple boon, In many a thoughtful verse and anthem sweet, And bless thy dainty ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... way over, in overdrive, Sergeant Madden again dozed a great deal of the time. Sergeants do not fraternize extensively with mere patrolmen, even on assignments. Especially not very senior sergeants only two years from retirement. Patrolman Willis met with the sergeant's approval, to be sure. Timmy was undoubtedly more competent as a cop, but Timmy would have been in a highly emotional state with his girl on the ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the junta became a mere show. Everything was brought before the King in private, and he gave no decision until the Queen and Madame des Ursins had passed theirs. This conduct met with no opposition from our Court, but our ministers at ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... at the time with the Ape and the Fox, the confederate impostors, charlatans, and bullying swindlers, who had stolen the lion's skin, and by it mounted to the high places of the State, it seems to be a proof of the indifference of the Court to the power of mere literature, that it should have been safe to write and publish so freely, and so cleverly. Dull Catholic lampoons and Puritan scurrilities did not pass thus unnoticed. They were viewed as dangerous to the State, and dealt with accordingly. The fable contains ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... manners, and uses uncommonly correct and beautiful language. Let it not be supposed that, with such witnesses as these among them, our English brethren have derived their first practical knowledge of slavery from Uncle Tom's Cabin. The mere knowledge that two such persons as William and Ellen Crafts have been rated as merchantable commodities, in any country but ours would be a sufficient comment ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Canadian politics; they concern the leaders of to-day, all minor figures in the 1917 drama. Because the Union government passed without leaving behind it tangible and visible manifestations of its power, there are those who regard it as a mere futility—a sword-cut in the water, as the French say. But of the Union movement it might well be said: Si monumentum requiris circumspice. The spirit behind the movement passed with the war, but it left the old traditional ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe
... by way of the Tarim Valley, are eager to seize upon the faintest tradition, or what seems to them an apparent tradition, in support of these preconceived views; ignoring the obviously just argument that, if we are to pay any attention to mere traditions at all, we must in common fairness give priority in value to such traditions as there are, rather than such traditions as are not, but only as might be. For instance, there was a Chinese ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... and continual howlings seemed to claim our succour; but there was no possibility of relieving them in the slightest degree, except that some of them crept to the opening in our carriage through which the smoke escapes; and the more they felt the warmth closer they crept, and then, through mere feebleness, losing their equilibrium, they rolled into the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... China and India to see antiquity. Superficially it may be so, but not fundamentally. Any country is old where birth and death are like the coming and dropping of leaves on a tree, and where the individual is of as much importance as the leaf. Old world and New world are not mere relatives; they are as near ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... discovery of the robber of the treasury by Hadding is a variant of the world-old Rhampsinitos tale, but less elaborate, possibly abridged and cut down by Saxo, and reduced to a mere moral example in favour of the goldenness of silence and the danger of letting the tongue ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... instant looked keenly back; his eyes contracted in that time to a mere narrow slit; then, sudden as thought, he sprang back into the corner. He knew now. This was the man who held the aces at the barbecue, the railroad man—Whispering Smith. Kennedy, directly across the table, watched the lightning-like move. ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... even the family affection. It would be well on this account, if no other, if every child could be wisely and adequately diagnosed in respect to mental power so that fewer mistakes would be made in confounding greatness with showiness or creative power with mere discriminating taste. ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... opium license, precipitated the revolution of 1887. Overawed by the unanimity of the movement, and deserted by his followers, the King yielded without a struggle. The Constitution which he was pleased to sign on the 7th of July, 1887, was a revision of that of 1864, intended to put an end to mere personal government, and to make the executive responsible to the representatives of the people. Office-holders were made ineligible to seats in the Legislature. The Ministers were henceforth to be removable only upon a vote of want of confidence ...
— The Hawaiian Islands • The Department of Foreign Affairs
... was a dismal yesterday at least, perhaps it was to me! The genius of England might be a mere mercenary man of the world, and employed all his attention to turn aside cannonballs from my Lord Stair, to give new edge to his new Marlborough's sword: was plotting glory for my Lord Carteret, or was thinking of furnishing his own apartment in Westminster ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... flung himself on the sofa and turned his face to the wall. Devilish! But he had not been there five minutes before his anger seemed childish and evaporated into the chill of deadly and insistent fear. He was perceiving himself up against much more than a mere incident, up against her nature—its pride and scepticism—yes—and the very depth and singleness of her love. While she wanted nothing but him, he wanted and took so much else. He perceived this but dimly, as part of that feeling that he could not break through, of the irritable longing to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... answer he turned away from her. He had done all that he could do. And, besides, he thought that the woman's physical injuries were superficial and that her distress was doubtless that of mere violent hysteria. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... joy to her heart. With this joy filling and pervading it, she awoke. From that hour Mrs. Voss never doubted for a single moment that her son was dead, nor that he had come to her in a vision of the night. As a Christian woman with whom faith was no mere ideal thing or vague uncertainty, she accepted her great affliction as within the sphere and permission of a good and wise Providence, and submitted herself to the sad dispensation with a patience that surprised ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... It is no mere accident that in not one of the hundredfold provinces of life, from art to military organization, from State-craft to jointstock-companies, from saintliness to table-utensils, have we Germans discovered a single essential and enduring form. And again, there is scarcely one ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... been willing there was no opportunity for more than a word or a touch of her fingers—well, save once, when her father went himself to seek the bottle of oil she had been sent to fetch, and was some time in finding it. But even that was a mere nothing, and might have happened to ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... The heights of Peterswald were in his possession on the 28th; it would have been well for his master had he attempted nothing further. Vandamme, however, was ambitious of earning the marshal's baton by something more than mere obedience to an order received. He saw that Toeplitz was uncovered, and knowing that the possession of that place would render him master of all the passes that diverge from it, he resolved, on the 29th, to make the essay. He descended ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... such beautiful things. For my part, I think the duty of the true priest is not to grovel to the crowd and call wrong right and right wrong for the sake of a fleeting popularity. How striking! What a lesson to the Bishop, if he were only here. He is so lax about Dissent, as if right and wrong were mere matters of opinion! What a gift he has! I know he will eat nothing for luncheon. If only we were somewhere else where the best joints were a little cheaper, and his talents more appreciated." And Mrs. Gresley closed her ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... much more about the curious history of the Boston edition than I do. And the reader will not need, even in these lines of mine, any light on the curious question about Madam Vergoose, or her son-in-law Mr. Fleet, or the Contes de Ma Mere l'Oye, which are so carefully discussed in the preface. All this is admirably discussed also in Mr. William Whitmore's paper published in Albany in 1889, and reprinted in Boston in 1892. In that paper he reproduced in facsimile Isaiah Thomas's ...
— The Only True Mother Goose Melodies • Anonymous
... different initials ([Arabic] instead of [Arabic]), it can scarcely be doubted that the Kalchi and Kalakchi of Timur's Institutes are mere mistranscriptions of the same word, e.g.: "I ordered that 12,000 Kalchi, men of the sword completely armed, should be cantoned in the Palace; to the right and to the left, to the front, and in ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... home in the north, and which, though greatly overladen with reflection and remark, has preserved for me both the thoughts and incidents of an early time more freshly than if they had been suffered to exist till now as mere recollections in the memory. I next set myself to record, in a somewhat elaborate form, the traditions of my native place and the surrounding district; and, taking the work very leisurely, not as labour, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Torlonia furbished it up at his own expense, and brought to light the inscription which proved it to be Maxentius's instead of Caracalla's Circus. The remains are so perfect that it is easy to trace the whole arrangement of the ancient games. Forsyth says very truly that the Fountain of Egeria is a mere trough; but everybody praises the water, which is delicious, and it falls with a murmur which invites to idleness and contemplation. This fountain has been beautifully sung, but it is a miserable ruin, ill ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... forget Suki or Dhritarashtri yet. Then Kraunchi bare the crane and owl, And Bhasi tribes of water fowl: Vultures and hawks that race through air With storm-fleet pinions Syeni bare. All swans and geese on mere and brook Their birth from Dhritarashtri took, And all the river-haunting brood Of ducks, a countless multitude. From Suki Nala sprang, who bare Dame Vinata surpassing fair. From fiery Krodhavasa, ten Bright ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... in November 1991, Macedonia was the least developed of the Yugoslav republics, producing a mere 5% of the total federal output of goods and services. The collapse of Yugoslavia ended transfer payments from the center and eliminated advantages from inclusion in a de facto free trade area. An absence of infrastructure, UN sanctions on its largest market Yugoslavia, and ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Ham, and Japhet, the various Allophyllian and American aborigines would appear to have existed, and to have been spread over the world before the above nations overran it. On the other hand, supposing that the mere power of reproduction be not of itself sufficient evidence of identity of species, the similarity of physical formation, of periodic changes, and of psychical instincts, are strongly corroborative of this evidence, and would of themselves ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... seldom any inducement to him to buy. It was sufficient to him that he had the book.' 'The garniture of a book,' he would observe,'was apt to recommend it to a great part of our modern collectors'; he himself was not a mere nomenclator, and versed only in title-pages, 'but had made that just and laudable use of his books which would become all those that set up for collectors.' He was the possessor of thirteen fine Caxtons, which fetched altogether less ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... died for the liberties of Ghent, and who might in these days be thought a mere ordinary craftsman if the historian omitted to say that he possessed over forty thousand silver marks, obtained by the manufacture of sail-cloth for the all-powerful Venetian navy,—this Claes had a friend in the famous sculptor in wood, Van Huysum of Bruges. The artist had ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... case of natural agents. These, when unappropriated, and to be had for the taking, do not enter into the cost of production, save to the extent of the labor which may be necessary to fit them for use. Even when appropriated, they do not (as we have already seen) bear a value from the mere fact of the appropriation, but only from scarcity—that is, from limitation of supply. But it is equally certain that they often do ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... shall such men be reckoned of none account, and their labors of no value? No, the wealth of both Indies cannot balance their work; nor all the talents ever possessed by fallen man, with all the orthodoxy which mere talents are capable of acquiring, without that divine teaching which many of those, thus contemned, possess. That same small discourse, those few plain points, these same things repeated in the same way, contain truths by which ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... old lady and he was tall and stalwart; his handsome face was youthful, and she wished him to know that she thought him a mere boy. ...
— Dorothy Dainty's Gay Times • Amy Brooks
... on the struggles that went on between the prince president and the Assembly, from December, 1848, to November, 1851. It is enough to say that the Chamber, from being the governing power in France, found itself reduced to a mere legislative body much hampered by the mistrust and contempt of the Executive. Its members of course hated "the Man at the Elysee," or "Celui-ci," as they called him. The Socialists hated the Assembly even more than they hated the president. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... 1: Because evil is the privation of good, and not a mere negation, as was said above (A. 3), therefore not every defect of good is an evil, but the defect of the good which is naturally due. For the want of sight is not an evil in a stone, but it is an evil in an animal; since it is against the nature ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... court? Your number and your stature Are both advanced; all six foot high at least, In bearskins clad, Swiss, Swedes, and Brandenburghers." In a song which appeared just after the entrance into Exeter, the Irish are described as mere dwarfs in comparison of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... more to the EXPRESSION, of, rather than to a meaning in a deeper sense—which may be a feeling influenced by some experience perhaps of a spiritual nature in the expression of which the intellect has some part. "The nearer we get to the mere expression of emotion," says Professor Sturt in his "Philosophy of Art and Personality," "as in the antics of boys who have been promised a holiday, the further we get away ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... institutions.' The chamber will want before long to administrate, and the administrators will want to legislate. The government will try to administrate and the administrators will want to govern, and so it will go on. Laws will come to be mere regulations, and ordinances will be thought laws. God made this epoch of the world for those who like to laugh. I live in a state of jovial admiration of the spectacle which the greatest joker of modern ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... auxiliis etiam artis usus sum."[272] Again with regard to the episode of the ignition of his bed twice in the same night, without visible cause, he says that this portent may have come about by some supernatural working; but that, on the other hand, it may have been the result of mere chance. He tells another story of an experience which befell him when he was in Belgium.[273] He was aroused early in the morning by the noise made outside his door by a dog catching fleas. Having got out of bed to see to this, he heard the sound as of a key being softly put into the ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... rose to do Miss Sherard's bidding that Miss Abingdon, of course, found it quite hopeless to try to assert herself. Kitty, further, had a ridiculous way of eating, which Miss Abingdon could not approve. She ate mere morsels of everything and talked the whole time, very often with the air of a gourmet; and she would lay down her knife and fork, after a meal such as a healthy blackbird might have enjoyed, as though she had finished some aldermanic ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... submit to,—a chain of pleasure-grounds all around her. The Bostonian has looked up at the gilded dome of the State House, and down at the reflection of his own features in the Frog Pond, long enough. Our city has always been a centre; and it must not act as if it considered itself a mere feeder. We must provide ourselves with the complete equipment, not of a village community, not of a thriving town, but of a true metropolis, large enough for a citizen of the world to live in without feeling himself provincialized, ...
— Parks for the People - Proceedings of a Public Meeting held at Faneuil Hall, June 7, 1876 • Various
... natural, and Mr. Middleton continued: "Ashton was wasted to a mere skeleton by ship fever, and my heart yearned toward him. Perhaps I felt a stronger sympathy for him when I learned that he was an American. He, like myself, had run away. The vessel, in which he had embarked, had been wrecked, and he, ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... earliest prison work, entitled "Profitable Meditations," was in verse, and neither this nor his later metrical ventures before his release—his "Four Last Things," his "Ebal and Gerizim," and his "Prison Meditations"—can be said to show much poetical power. At best he is a mere rhymester, to whom rhyme and metre, even when self-chosen, were as uncongenial accoutrements "as Saul's armour was to David." The first-named book, which is entitled a "Conference between Christ and a Sinner," in the form of a poetical dialogue, according to Dr. Brown has "small literary merit ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables
... conscious; nor, indeed, have I found words since. I ran sideways, shouting; I dug glad heels into the squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick; I hurled clods skywards at random, and presently I somehow found myself singing. The words were mere nonsense,—irresponsible babble; the tune was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the one thing fitting and right ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... The machine.—A Cartesian expression. Descartes considered animals as mere automata. According to Pascal, whatever does not proceed in us from reflective thought is a product of a necessary mechanism, which has its root in the body, and which is continued into the mind in imagination and the passions. ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... church; but when I came to the part about his boarding with George and Miss Temple he could not help laughing. He excused himself, however, and told me to go on. He looked very happy when I had told him my story, and no one would have supposed that he had ever assumed the air of a mere common acquaintance. ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... for your noble faith in my poor girl, when all the world was against her, I can not express in mere words; but I shall rejoice in my ability to supplement it by a solid reward as soon as I am reinstated in my property," he exclaimed, as he wrung her ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... scrawled note which she knew Percy had not seen, but what did it signify? An eccentric old lady's penchant for match making? Perhaps she was even more guilty than the girl in attempting to lead Percy to see in Adelaide more than he ought. She might even take an old flirt's delight in the mere number of conquests made by her granddaughter. Or was the scrawled note slipped into the envelope by a prank- playing fourteen-year-old brother? In any case was it wise that Percy should see the note? She could probably do nothing better than ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... National Library, with all its immense accumulations, and in Hazlitt's Collections, many thousands of items are probably deficient; while the two sets of books above mentioned contain a very slender percentage of the whole—in fact, mere representative selections. ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... folding of the earth's crust is caused by the fact that the "crust," or skin of the earth, has ceased to cool, being warmed by the sun, and therefore does not shrink, whilst the great white-hot mass within (in comparison with which the twenty-mile-thick crust is a mere film) continually loses heat, and shrinks definitely in volume as its temperature sinks. The crust or jacket of stratified rock deposited by the action of the waters on the surface of the globe has been compelled—at ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... that Bhava is here used in the sense of that from which all things now and into which all things merge when the universal dissolution comes. Or, it may imply, mere existence, without reference, that is, to any attribute by which it is capable of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... half-tolerant smile crept into Agatha's eyes. The mere idea that the sunny-tempered, brilliant young man whom she had given her heart to could have changed or degenerated in any way seemed absurd to her. Winifred, ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... interests and experiences came to mingle that had never consciously approached each other before,—in which the little household of independent existences in Leicester Place was fused into an almost family relation all at once, after years of mere juxtaposition,—before the end of that ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... native dogs of all regions approximate closely in size, coloration, form, and habit to the native wolf of those regions. Of this most important circumstance there are far too many instances to allow of its being looked upon as a mere coincidence. Sir John Richardson, writing in 1829, observed that "the resemblance between the North American wolves and the domestic dog of the Indians is so great that the size and strength of the wolf seems to be the only difference. I have more than once mistaken a band ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... To Constance, Sophia's mere enterprise was just as staggering as her success. Fancy her deliberately going out that Saturday morning, after her mother's definite decision, to enlist Miss Chetwynd ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... mere carnal love, vanity or frivolity, on such attractions as are purely external, a sweet voice, personal beauty, superficial cleverness or outward show, is unworthy to be ...
— For Auld Lang Syne • Ray Woodward
... dull boy of yesterday. He was speaking to the exhorter and appeared not to have her in sight or mind, although, in fact, her untimely levity ran him through like a dart. His absurdly deep voice was rich with a note not of mere forbearance but of veritable comradery, yet his eyes, as they held the offender's, were as big and dangerous as she had ever seen her mighty father's and she laughed on for what laughter might be worth, the ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... only make progress in this direction if we frankly adopt the simple everyday conception of living things—which many of us have had drilled out of us—that they are active, purposeful agents, not mere complicated aggregations of protein and other substances. Such an attitude is probably quite as sound philosophically as the opposing one, but I have not in this place attempted any justification of it. I have touched very lightly upon the controversy ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... heavenly!" and Phebe's face shone at the mere idea; but fell again as she added wistfully, "Only I'm afraid I ought not to let you do it, Miss Rose. It will take time, and maybe the Doctor ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... men and women, of the highest rank—the most noteworthy among his feminine correspondents being Lady Louisa Stuart (sister of the Marquis of Bute and grand-daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu) and Lady Abercorn. With the former the correspondence is always on the footing of mere though close friendship, literary and other; in part at least of that with Lady Abercorn, I cannot help suspecting the presence, especially on the ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... others, show that incest is not the cause but the effect of mental disorders. This does not mean that the offspring of such unions are not slightly tainted by the mere fact of such concentrated incest, but these cases are comparatively so rare that they do not contribute to any appreciable extent, as incest, in causing degeneration of the race; the factor which causes degeneration is here mental disease, ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... tell a little of the why of things." And Colonel Kirby hoped it was the punkah, and not funk, that made the sweat stream down his neck until his collar was a mere uncomfortable mess. "For more than a year there has been much talk in India. The winds have brought it all to me. There was talk—and the government has known it, for I am one of those who told the government—of a ripe time for ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... things. Citizens said that their largest spiders could not more than spread their legs over an ordinary saucer, and that they had always been considered honest. Here was testimony of a clergyman against the testimony of mere worldlings—interested ones, too. On the whole, I judged it best to lock ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not," he said sulkily. "I can't walk. I haven't walked two consecutive blocks in three years. Automobiles have made legs mere ornaments—and some not even that. We could have Johnson out there chasing us over the country ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to compare each bull which he received with the Gospels and the canon law, and if he found anything in it that would not stand this test, he tore it in pieces. In 1254, one of these letters commanded him to institute to a benefice a nephew of the Pope, a mere child, besides containing what was called the clause "non obstante" (namely, in spite of), by which the Pope claimed, as having power to bind and loose, to set aside and dispense with existing statutes ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... within him that spurned this ignoble existence, and called for higher aims and worthier exertion. He was not vicious, he never had been vicious, or, as somebody else said, his vices were all refined vices; but a life of mere self-indulgence, although pursued without self- satisfaction, is constantly lowering the standard and weakening the forces of virtue lessening the whole man. He felt it so; and to leave his ordinary scenes and occupations, and ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of recent years, and the outcome of the same so far gives me at any rate more unmixed pleasure than the way in which the theorists have been confounded, those men who cut and carve and label human beings, whether individually or in the aggregate, as if they were mere blocks of wood. The Oriental mind, we have been told, cannot do this; Oriental prejudices and idiosyncrasies and modes of thought and hereditary influences will not admit of that; the traditions of the Far East, that mysterious thing, will prevent the other—we ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... to fortune, one of our poorest republican generals who have headed armies. He has not, during all his campaigns, collected more than a capital of eight millions of livres—a mere trifle compared to the fifty millions of Massena, the sixty millions of Le Clerc, the forty millions of Murat, and the thirty-six millions of Augereau; not to mention the hundred millions of Bonaparte. It is also true that Jourdan ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... may still be readers who suppose that Burns was a mere unsophisticated singer, without power of self-criticism, it may be as well to insert here a passage from a Commonplace Book written in 1783, ten years after ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... ventured to flee from France to England, where he did homage to Edward as King of France for the duchy which he claimed. He then went to Brittany, and there shortly afterwards died. The new Duke of Brittany, also named John, was a mere boy when he was thus robbed of both his parents' care, and his cause languished for want of a head. Edward took upon himself the whole direction of Brittany as tutor of the little duke. Northampton was once more sent thither, but for a time the war degenerated into ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... had made himself exceedingly popular; and the witty conversation of this gentleman kept the whole dinner-table convulsed with laughing, to such an extent that his colleague-in-arms, our quondam Mafeking commander, General Baden-Powell, who was also of the party, was reduced to mere silent appreciation. This impromptu feast, given under difficulties which almost amounted to siege conditions, was again an evidence of the versatility and inherent hospitality of the French nation, and the memory of that pleasant ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... can sink so low but that Jesus Christ will stoop to take his hand. Who so low, who so poor, who so despised as the American slave? The law almost denies his existence as a person, and regards him for the most part as less than a man—a mere thing, the property of another. The law forbids him to read or write, to hold property, to make a contract, or even to form a legal marriage. It takes from him all legal right to the wife of his bosom, the children of his body. He can do nothing, possess nothing, ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... upon a ledge of rock just outside the area of a great elm tree, and as they looked down and afar off, Black Lake seemed a mere puddle with toy cabins ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... oak that hung by his chimney, or bent double over the rosary of stone beads brought to him a cargo of silks and laces out of France. One night he had watched hour after hour, because a gentle and favourable wind was blowing, and La Mere de Misericorde was much overdue; and he was about to lie down upon his heap of straw, seeing that the dawn was whitening the east, and that the schooner would not dare to round Roughley and come to an anchor after daybreak; when he saw a long line ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats
... The mere fact of being able to exchange letters with Deena was a revelation to French, and as he walked home from their interview his fancy was busy putting himself in Simeon's place. The paths that lead through another man's kingdom are never very safe for the wandering feet of imagination. It is an old ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... her truly accomplished. One or two things for which she had real taste and ability thoroughly mastered would have been a far greater source of delight to her husband, and of satisfaction to herself, than the mere handful of unripe fruit which she had gathered from a dozen different branches of the tree of knowledge, and in the collecting of which she had, in a measure, impaired the elasticity of her mind and her bodily strength, and found no time for making herself mistress of ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... meditated. There was no use in staying where he was, that would bring him no nearer to Leoline, and nothing was to be gained by killing the count beyond the mere transitory pleasure of the thing. On the other hand, he had an intense and ardent desire to re-visit the ruin, and learn what had become of Miranda—the only draw-back being that, if they were found they would both be most assuredly beheaded. Then, ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... furious vituperation—something that affected certain nerves within his body in a new and awful manner. Once or twice in his life he had been conscious of it before, once in an empty room, once in a room tenanted by a mere outline beneath a sheet and closed by a ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... was unequalled. His knowledge of men enabled him to determine the character of every juror, and his versatility to adapt his argument or address to their feelings and prejudices so effectually as to secure a verdict in mere compliment to the advocate. He left the bench to enter the political arena. It was here he found the field nature designed him for. Before the people, he was omnipotent. At this period Dawson, Cooper, Colquitt, Cobb, Stephens, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... mode of treating the question the order of the terms is numerical, and though the amount of labour is such as might well have deterred a younger man, yet the details were easy, and a great part of it might be entrusted to a mere computer. The work was published in 1886, when its author was eighty-five years of age. For some little time previously he had been harassed by a suspicion that certain errors had crept into the computations, and accordingly he addressed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... necessary. This plan may possibly be admissible in a very small school; that is, in one of ten or twelve pupils. I am convinced, however, that it is very bad here. No vigilant watch, which it is possible for any teacher to exert, will prevent a vast amount of mere talk, entirely foreign to the business of the school. I tried this plan very thoroughly, with high ideas of the dependence which might be placed upon conscience and a sense of duty, if these principles are properly brought out to action in an effort to sustain the system. I was told ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... had left him. Left him for a stripling of a slave—a mere creature from the public market. What was the loss of gold and jewels and quarries to this! And how could he ever hold up his head again, with this heavy shame upon it! For there could be no doubt;—alas! no. Had he not seen ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... virtue of their office, and that religious orders should not be exempt from the authority of the ordinaries, nor be placed under the jurisdiction of foreign superiors. The /Punctuation of Ems/ reduced the primacy of the Pope to a mere primacy of honour, and had it been acted upon, it must have led ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... saying that, in like manner with the mental phenomena called sensations, all the other states of mind have for their proximate causes nervous states, there would be no original laws of mind, and Psychology would be a mere branch of Physiology. But at present, this tenet is not proved, however highly probable; and, at all events, the characteristics of those nervous states are quite unknown; consequently the uniformities of succession among the mental phenomena, which undoubtedly do exist, and which ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... Gates found the colony in a pitiable condition. The tomahawk of the Indians, famine and pestilence had wrought terrible havoc with the settlers. A mere handful of poor wretched men were left to welcome the newcomers and to beg eagerly to be taken away from the ill-fated country. The town "appeared rather as the ruins of some auntient fortification, then that ...
— Virginia under the Stuarts 1607-1688 • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... I cried, "she baffles me; for a hint I let drop in a mere careless badinage of your gallanting reputation made her ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... He had Sage-brush rattled. The coolest man on the ranch was flustered by the mere thought of ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... and the Democratic National Convention the week following, both included suffrage planks in their national platforms for the first time in history. To be sure, they were planks that failed to satisfy us. But the mere hint of organized political action on suffrage had moved the two dominant parties to advance a step. The new Woman's Party had declared suffrage a national political issue. The two major parties acknowledged the issue by writing it ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... think the savages of America live much more happy than the poorer sort of these, because as they have nothing, so they desire nothing; whereas these are proud and insolent and in the main are in many parts mere beggars and drudges. Their ostentation is inexpressible; and, if they can, they love to keep multitudes of servants or slaves, which is to the last degree ridiculous, as well as their contempt of all the ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... asked whether this investigation is a matter of mere curiosity, or whether it tends to any beneficial purpose? I should answer, that notwithstanding the happy effects of Inoculation, with all the improvements which the practice has received since its first introduction into this country, it not very unfrequently produces deformity of ...
— An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae • Edward Jenner
... bare ground, but sometimes the nest is lined with seaweed or grass. They lay either one or two eggs early in April. These eggs are of a dull white color and are heavily covered with a chalky deposit. Size 2.50 x 1.70. Data.—Clarion Is., Mexico, May 24, 1897. Nest a mere hollow in the sand near the beach. Collector, ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... far-fetched and quaint Simile's, which runs thro' almost all these Characters, makes 'em appear like so many Pieces of mere Grotesque; and the Reader must not expect to find Persons describ'd as they really are, but rather according to what they are thought ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally
... the fine and excellent Uncle Braesig, who, in the opinion of competent critics, is the most successful humorous figure in all German literature. Braesig is certainly a masterpiece of psychology; as remote from any mere comic effect, despite his idiosyncrasies, as from maudlin sentimentality; an impersonation of sturdy manhood and a victor in life's battles, no less than his creator, who, although he had lost seven of the most precious years of his life in unjust imprisonment ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... Agobbio, and having expelled the Count Novello, caused Lando d'Agobbio to be brought into the city as Bargello (sheriff), and gave him the most unlimited power of the citizens. This man was cruel and rapacious; and going through the country accompanied with an armed force, he put many to death at the mere instigation of those who had endowed him with authority. His insolence rose to such a height, that he stamped base metal with the impression used upon the money of the state, and no one had sufficient courage to oppose ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... now-a-days to rob others of the King's subjects. Has not Lonee Sing robbed all his cousins of their estates, and added them to his own, and thereby got the means of bribing the King's servants to let him do what he likes?" "What," said the Rajah, with some asperity, "should you, a mere soldier, know about State affairs? Do you suppose that all the members of any family can be equal? Must there not be a head to all families to keep the rest in order? Nothing goes on well in families or governments where all are equal, and there is no head to guide; and the head ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... the man. But the singer and the seeker, the two main tendencies of his being, are already apparent in early life. Of moral traits, the most conspicuous in the child is a power of self-control,—a moral heroism, which secured to him in after life a natural leadership unattainable by mere intellectual supremacy. An instance of this self-control is recorded among the anecdotes of his boyhood. At one of the lessons which he shared with other boys, the teacher failed to appear. The young ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... they lived still it was in the background. The grasp of his hand was firmer than usual, the tone more earnest, which said, "I am very glad to see you!"—and yet the doctor felt that in them both there was more—and also less—than mere personal feeling. ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... the stone replied with assurance, "why are you so excessively dull? The dynasties recorded in the rustic histories, which have been written from age to age, have, I am fain to think, invariably assumed, under false pretences, the mere nomenclature of the Han and T'ang dynasties. They differ from the events inscribed on my block, which do not borrow this customary practice, but, being based on my own experiences and natural feelings, present, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... revolutionary Socialists even, to say nothing of "reformists," become mere political partisans, make almost instinctive efforts to credit all political progress to the Socialist Parties, contradict their own revolutionary principles. All reforms that happen to be of any benefit to labor, they claim, are ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... I looked when I first came, and the stupidity, the emptiness, the mere wood and dirt and rock of it seemed like a personal insult. I should prefer the worst huddle of a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... its primary motive, is invariably expected to deal broadly with the entire problem of the Negro and his relationships of every kind. It must be more than a mere flesh-and-blood narrative, descriptive of the material progress of the men and women the Institute has produced and is producing. It must be a book free from ostentatious pretension, breathing the atmosphere of the life of the earnest people it describes. It must, of course, exhibit not only the ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... approach to idealistic fiction and to the analysis of human feelings. Defoe's romances of incident were the triumphant culmination of the picaresque type; Mrs. Haywood's sentimental tales were in many respects mere vague inchoations of a form as yet to be produced. But when freed from the impurities of intrigue and from the taint of scandal, the novel of heart interest became the dominant type of English fiction. Unfortunately, however, Eliza Haywood was ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... remark expressed volumes. We knew that most of the poor creatures "had no papa and didn't know where mamma lived," that they were mere jetsam and flotsam thrown up on this quiet shore from the waves of the great ocean of London and forgotten by all the world save those whose business it was to pay and to receive the twenty pounds a year which was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... sensible argument that the President could not be held to responsibility unless he could control his subordinates. "And if it should happen that the officers connect themselves with the Senate, they may mutually support each other, and for want of efficacy reduce the power of the President to a mere vapor; in which case, his responsibility would be annihilated and the ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... earth to leave so many by-ways unexplored. We can only glimpse and conjecture and, generally, forget. Life for us is like a walk along the broad, modern streets of an Italian city. Every little while we pass narrow alleys, mere slots in the mass of marble architecture, which dive down into darkness and mystery. Every little while we pass low-lying ramps and odd little causeways, where lighted windows give one sudden vivid pictures of heads and faces ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... catalogue took a long time. Both were absorbed in their occupation. Cataloguing in itself is a straight and narrow path, but in this instance there were so many delightful side excursions that rapid progress could not be expected. To a reader the mere mention of a book brings up recollections. Margaret was reading out the names; Renmark, on slips of paper, each with a letter on it, ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... him slightly, invited him to stay at Pisa, but Keats refused. He had never cared for Shelley, though Shelley seems to have liked him, and, in his invalid state, he naturally shrank from being a burden to a mere acquaintance. ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... the State, though he held no official position and excited no man's envy. People paid their respects to him and courted his society, and, though he spent much of his time on his couch, his room was always full of company who were no mere chance callers, and he passed his days in learned and scholarly conversation, when he was not busy composing. He wrote verses which show abundant pains rather than genius, and sometimes he submitted them to general criticism by having them read ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... which nothing but mere vanity could have inspired, in opposition to so many more weighty presumptions, she took the resolution of bringing the affair to a fuller explanation, before she would concert any measures to the prejudice of our ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... three, and four, and five years of age, I was not yet I. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit not yet cooled solid in the mould of my particular flesh and time and place. In that period all that I had ever been in ten thousand lives before strove in me, and troubled the flux of me, in the effort to incorporate ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... the time the mid-June days were come, the little brook that sang through John McIntyre's pasture-field had shrunk to a mere jeweled thread of golden pools and silver shallows, with here and there only the bleached pebbles to mark its course. But this summer was of a new and wonderful variety. Just two or three brilliant, hot days, and then, as regular as the sun, up from the ocean's rim would ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... do this with the utmost purity, who should in the highest degree approach each subject by means of the mere mental faculties, neither employing the sight in conjunction with the reflective faculty, nor introducing any other sense together with reasoning; but who, using pure reflection by itself, should attempt to search out each essence purely by itself, freed as much as possible from the eyes and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... any arguments had been supported in any speech he had ever heard. He wished, however, that more of these facts had been introduced into the debate; for they were apt to have a greater effect upon the mind than mere reasonings, however just and powerful. Many had affirmed that the Slave Trade was politic and expedient; but it was worthy of remark, that no man had ventured to deny that it was criminal. Criminal, however, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... There be women such as she: but they are not to be picked, like blackberries, off every bramble. Edith, young folks are apt to think love a mere matter of youth and of matrimony. They cannot make a deeper blunder. The longer love lasts, the stronger ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt |
