"Unformed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... most of my readers, when I say that very few people understand music. For most people it is, as Victor Hugo said, an exhalation of art—something for the ear as perfume is for the olfactory sense, a source of vague sensations, necessarily unformed as all sensations are. But musical art is something entirely different. It has line, modeling, color through instrumentation, all making up an ideal sphere where some, like the writer of these lines, live ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... great cities appear—How the Democratic masses, turbulent, wilful, as I love them, How the whirl, the contest, the wrestle of evil with good, the sounding and resounding, keep on and on; How society waits unformed, and is between things ended and things begun; How America is the continent of glories, and of the triumph of freedom, and of the Democracies, and of the fruits of society, and of all that is begun; And how the States are complete in themselves—And how all triumphs and glories ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... compositions, sustained by character and dialogue, founded sometimes on themes of tragic interest, and at others on such as, from their light and social character, belong to comedy.10 Of the execution of these pieces we have now no means of judging. It was probably rude enough, as befitted an unformed people. But, whatever may have been the execution, the mere conception of such an amusement is a proof of refinement that honorably distinguishes the Peruvian from the other American races, whose pastime was war, or the ferocious sports that reflect the ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... bidding; but she had never quite realized what a clumsy boor he was till their handsome, dark-faced Trevlyn cousin had come amongst them, with his earnest eyes, his graceful movements, and his slim, attractive person. Cuthbert's manners, that in fine society would have been called rustic and unformed, were a great advance on anything Cherry had seen in her own home, save in the person of Anthony Cole and his son. She admired him immensely, and he was rapidly becoming the sun and centre of her life; whilst Cuthbert, who had always been used ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... that we should keep always in mind is that the moral character of the child is still unformed, and that his standards of truth, like his other standards, are not the same as those of the adult. Indeed, this fact is at the same time the hope of childhood and the source of its many tragedies. It is the hope because the child ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... imagine, to act the same part with the lady as you have done with the gentleman. I am to step in, I suppose, as the confidential counsellor on all subjects of sweet May. I am to preserve her from a youth whose passions are so impetuous and whose principles are so unformed.' ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... mother of the child that with this outward attraction she had corresponding qualifications to fill the home with helpful counsel and sustaining sympathy, when he comes to find that, instead of a wife, he has married a plaything, and that his children are being committed to the care of a helpless, unformed companion, rather than to the guidance of a true ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... poetry with the world open before him; the rules of the ancients were yet known to few; the publick judgment was unformed; he had no example of such fame as might force him upon imitation, nor criticks of such authority as might restrain his extravagance: He therefore indulged his natural disposition, and his disposition, as Rhymer has remarked, led him to comedy. In tragedy he often writes with ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... originally fuller phonetic groups—Latin habet and ad and Indo-European ei respectively. If language is a structure and if the significant elements of language are the bricks of the structure, then the sounds of speech can only be compared to the unformed and unburnt clay of which the bricks are fashioned. In this chapter we shall have nothing further to do ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... little pupils, I should not do so here. They required peculiar training and an unfailing stock of patience, and it was long before any very perceptible change was wrought in their almost confirmed habits of carelessness, or any improvement in their rude and unformed manners; but at length a material change was apparent, and even the Misses Fairland could not keep their eyes closed to the visible improvement of the children. They were all much more gentle and quiet; and even poor Tiney softened much, under Agnes' gentle influence, and the ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... God has committed the child, in utter helplessness, and weakness, and ignorance, an unformed being. The power and the knowledge are theirs, and on their side is He, the Almighty and infinitely wise, with his spirit and his laws, and his promises. If they are faithful,—if from the first they realize their responsibility, and the advantages of their position, can the ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... that Germany's best blood was to be shed in a stream flowing westward. A time was beginning for Wilhelm of powerful but very painful impressions, not, it is true, to be compared with those which the battlefields of 1866 had made on him when an unformed youth. The war unveiled to him the foundations of human nature ordinarily buried under a covering of culture, and his reason, marveled over the reconciliation of such antitheses. On the one hand one saw the wildest struggle for gain, and love of destruction; on the other hand were the daily ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... And I recognized in her something of her mother's old charm, but something as yet unformed, something which promised for the future. And life seemed to me as swift as ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the formation of man, and the destruction of the world by a deluge. They suppose the existence originally of two worlds, an upper and lower. The upper completed and filled with an intelligent order of beings, the lower unformed and chaotic, whose surface was covered with water, in which huge monsters careered, uncontrolled and wild. From the upper there descended to the lower a creating spirit, in the form of a beautiful woman. She alighted ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... personality, as it should, impresses us first, powerfully and irresistibly. While under Mark Lemon, Mr. Sambourne, as an artist, was still unformed. Under Shirley Brooks was awakened his wonderful inventive faculty. Under the regime of masterly inactivity—the happy policy of laissez faire—of Tom Taylor, the talent had burst forth into luxuriance, not to say ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... suppose matter (or matter and form as separate entities) to have existed from eternity, we are liable to the difficulty involved in the idea of anything having traversed infinite time and reached us; though it is doubtful whether unformed matter would lend itself to the experiment of abstracting a part as ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... prevailing expression was that of kindly benevolence or light-hearted mirth were united with a figure of exquisite proportions, sufficiently tall for dignity, though as yet, of course, slight and unformed, and every movement of which was directed by a grace that could neither be taught nor imitated. If any defect could be discovered in her face, it consisted in a somewhat undue thickness of the lips, especially of the lower lip, which ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... half-hour he had spent with Dick in the dead boy's bungalow, looking through his papers—a chaos of bills, mostly unpaid; racing notes; old programmes; and half a dozen envelopes addressed in a girl's unformed hand. On the open blotter, an unfinished letter to a friend in Simla had announced his hope of a speedy exchange down country! his determination not to spend another hot weather 'on this God-forsaken Frontier ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... perhaps unconsciously, threw his dark eyes full upon the lady, who blushed deeply; but the gloom concealed this outward show of feeling, too unformed and indefinite for thought. She spoke not; but the knight, under cover of his errand, continued the discourse without awakening her alarm. He excelled in that specious, though apparently heedless raillery, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... Intrepidity of Behaviour discovers it self in the several Adventures which he meets with during his Passage through the Regions of unformed Matter, and particularly in his Address to those tremendous Powers who are described ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... into its original elements,—when barbarism on the one hand, and superstition on the other, made the Middle Ages funereal, dismal, violent, despairing. But commerce, arts, and literature had introduced a new era,—still unformed, a vast chaos of conflicting forces, and yet redeemed by reviving intelligence and restless daring. The one thing which society needed in that transition period was a strong government in the hands of kings, to restore law and develop ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... to talk to him, and, in a few minutes, had completely dumbfounded him with her pedantic replies, which fell from lips as luscious and unformed as an infant's. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... on the organic causes without falling into tiresome repetitions. The new-born infant is a spinal being, with an unformed diffluent brain, composed largely of water. Reflex life itself is not complete in him, and the cortico-motor system only hinted at; the sensory centers are undifferentiated, the associational systems remain isolated for a long time after birth. We have given above Flechsig's ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... monetary characteristics of the land he lives in. Labour is growing towards such a manhood of freedom as has never been achieved elsewhere. It, too, has reached the hobbledehoy height and has all the signs which mark that elevation, the brief aspirations, the splendid unformed ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... father is, at the outset, as great as that of the mother. The unhappy or immoral thoughts of one alone at the critical moment when life is imparted, may fix for eternity a foul blot upon a character yet unformed. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... is unformed and imperishable; it has no natural end or beginning. It could begin to be only by creation; it can cease to be only by annihilation. It cannot be affected from without or changed in its interior by any other creature. Still, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... intelligence, yet omnipotent over the father's heart? God was there. The misery was that the devil was there too. Thence came the crying and tears. "Rescue the divine; send the devil to the deep," was the unformed prayer ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... remembrance. Nevertheless, he had pretty well forgotten it, when he pulled off the cover of his box of shaving soap the next morning. He was belated, and in something of a hurry. If ever a man suddenly forgot his hurry, Mr. Randolph did, that morning. He knew the unformed, rather irregular and stiff handwriting in a moment; and concluded that Daisy had some request to make on her own account which she was too timid to speak out in words. That was what he expected when ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... becomes the means of fixing similar impressions in the families of the most enlightened, and the unformed minds of children propagate in public schools the stories of their nurses. The lowest superstition pervades therefore all ranks, even of a population so comparatively enlightened as that of England; and, being imbibed in ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... immoderately fascinating in his appeal to her own imperious youth, but the most interesting life partner that a romantic maiden with secret intellectual promptings could demand. Her brilliant long eyes melted and flashed, her soft unformed mouth ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... no two persons at perfect unity in spirit. But unless there is a general harmony there should be no Marriage. Now, how can children know whether this harmony exists, when their own characters are unformed, their powers undeveloped? But it may be asked, what we call an early Marriage? About this there may be a difference of opinion. What some would call early, others would call late. Our ideas on this point should be founded in physiological and mental science. There ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... more of the civic interest, and urged that the clubs study the numerous questions dealing with the life of their communities. This seems strange, in view of the enormous amount of civic work done by women's clubs to-day. But at that time, when the woman's club movement was unformed, these civic matters found but a small part in the majority of programmes; in a number of cases none ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... face, coupled with what I could see of her figure, made me guess her age to be about twenty. There was the appearance of maturity already in the shape of her features; but their expression still remained girlish, unformed, unsettled. The fire in her large dark eyes, when she spoke, was latent. Their languor, when she was silent—that voluptuous languor of black eyes—was still fugitive and unsteady. The smile about her full lips (to other eyes, they might have looked too full) struggled ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... who, in time, knows whither we may vent The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores This gain of our best glory shall be sent, To enrich unknowing nations with our stores? What worlds in the yet unformed Occident May come refined with the accents that are ours? Or who can tell for what great work in hand The greatness of our style is now ordained? What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command, What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained, What mischief it may powerfully withstand, ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... or less than the results of evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All we require for the demonstration of our theory, is a little bit of protoplasm at the beginning of things and a mass of elemental matter in an unformed state." ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... service or in the ranks of the segregated Marine Corps and the new Air Force, its racial policy still fluid, merely attracted less attention and so escaped many of the charges hurled at the Army by civil rights advocates both in and out of the federal government. But however different or unformed their racial policies, all the services for the most part segregated Negroes in practice and all were open to ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... and Mr. Folsom did not end with this separation. The latter survived to the end of the civil war, and was thus privileged to follow the successful and great career of the admiral to whom, while yet an unformed boy, he had thoughtfully extended a helping hand. As late as 1865 letters passed between the two, showing that both cherished warm recollections of that early association; Mr. Folsom dating his, as though careful to make the coincidence, on the anniversary of the day when he parted ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... out it was a mistake—our marriage—for you. I wasn't half clever enough. I was only an ignorant, silly, unformed girl, and you were so different. Oh, I tried my hardest to improve. I wanted to prove to you that I wasn't quite such a little fool as you thought me. I wanted to show you I had a soul—Mr. Herrick said I had, and I tried to make myself more companionable to you—oh, I know ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Many, indeed the greater portion of the graduates, had left for their homes, or to pay visits to friends before joining their ships at the end of their month's leave, though some still lingered, their plans as yet unformed. ...
— Peggy Stewart: Navy Girl at Home • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... in oils. Clever sketches by clever unknowns, rest beside sprawling frescos by youths whose ambition is vaster than their genius; and finished and accomplished works of art are set off by the foils of unnumbered pieces of unformed and not very promising mediocrity. Among them are the productions of many of the more humble painters of genre subjects—the class who delight in portraying homely cottage interiors, or troops of playing children, or bits of minutely-finished still life—or careful ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... quiet life of a small garrison. He had gone out to Mexico a second lieutenant; he had come back a field-officer. He had won a name in the army, and his native State had enrolled him amongst her heroes. He had gone out an unformed youth; he had come back a man and a proved leader of men. He had been known merely as an indefatigable student and a somewhat unsociable companion. He had come back with a reputation for daring courage, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... justice, behaved exceedingly well. Her character, indeed, which had been quite unformed before her marriage, had gained solidity, and her mind, judgment as well as tone, since her introduction to a family so superior as that of the Selwyns. And she now neither blushed nor tittered, nor, ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... on wonder and censure on the girl's silence, more unjust than they knew, but hardly wasted, since they relieved the tension. Mary slid down on her knees beside her friend, and then came a silence of intense heart-swelling, choking, and unformed, but none the less true thanksgiving, and ending in a mutual embrace and ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... required immediate attention. If his procedure in regard to Hunt's pictures succeeded in drawing the painter from his hermitage, nothing was more likely than that Hunt unexpectedly would happen upon Maggie in the company of Dick Sherwood. That might be a catastrophe to Larry's unformed plan; it had to be forestalled if possible. Such a matter could not be handled in a letter, with the police opening all mail coming to the Duchess's house. So once more he decided upon a secret visit to the Duchess's house. ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... especially that she was not learning to speak French and play on the piano. But Bessie felt no want of these polite accomplishments. She had no accomplished companions to put her to shame for her deficiencies. She was fond of a book, she could write an unformed, legible hand, and add up a simple sum. The doctor, not a bad judge, called her a shrewd, reasonable little lass. She had mother-wit, a warm heart, and a nice face, as sweet and fresh as a bunch of roses with the dew on them, and he did not see what she wanted with talking French and playing ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... have your written impression of Brittany, I did not see enough to talk about. But I sought a general impression and that has served me for reconstructing one or two pictures which I need. I shall read you that also, but it is still an unformed mass. ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... part" more than sister and mother in one, the qualities which in them were his pride and delight, were made of no account. Flesh of his flesh, the keeper of his honour and his peace henceforth, the maker or marrer of his life's happiness, be it long or short, was this pretty unformed, wayward child. ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... when she thought of him as a minister of God, whose duty it was to pronounce God's threats to erring human beings, she was almost alarmed. She could hardly understand his leniency,—his abstinence from reproof; but entertained a vague, wandering, unformed wish that, as he never opened the vials of his wrath on them, he would pour it out upon her,—on her who would bear it for their sake so meekly. If there was such a wish it was certainly doomed to disappointment. At this moment Fanny came in and curtseyed ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... were paling in the firmament when I opened my window. Mists clothed the horizon. The rushing wind soon tore them aside, and drove them into the gorges, whence descend, in the shape of a fan, the unformed masses of the lower glacier, soiled with a ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... my head back into its original position, when there flashed upon my mind what I cannot better describe than as the unformed half of that idea of deliverance to which I have previously alluded, and of which a moiety only floated indeterminately through my brain when I raised food to my burning lips. The whole thought was now present—feeble, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... adventures in which the horrible is sometimes dangerously near the ludicrous. Brown had not a particle of humor. Of literary art there is little, of invention considerable; and while the style is to a certain extent unformed and immature, it is neither feeble nor obscure, and admirably serves the author's purpose of creating what the children call a "crawly" impression. There is undeniable power in many of his scenes, notably in the descriptions of the yellow fever in Philadelphia, found in ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... said reproachfully, reading my unacknowledged and almost unformed thought, 'but not at our hands, ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... study the youth, who certainly was, as Aunt Ada said, remarkable for the cameo-like cutting of his profile, though perhaps no one without an eye for art would have remarked it, as he had the callow unformed air of a lad of seventeen or eighteen, and looked shy and grave; but his voice was a fine one, and was heard to more advantage in the solos to a hunting song which ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... see what else I had caught; and turning over the net, found a few of the same fish I had taken before, and some others of a flat-tish make, and one little lump of flesh unformed; which last, by all I could make of it, seemed to be either a spawn or young one ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... landsman, in the years that followed, shared the fate of the Irish "country farmer" who went into Waterford to sell his corn, and was there pressed and sent on board the tender; of James Whitefoot, the Bristol glover, "a timid, unformed young man, the comfort and support of his parents," who, although he had "never seen a ship in his life," was yet pressed whilst "passing to follow his business," which knew him no more; and of Winstanley, the London butcher, who served for upwards of sixteen ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... of God is not called the Thought, but the Word of God. When our thought realizes what we know and takes form therefrom, it becomes our word. Hence the Word of God must be understood without any thinking on the part of God, for there is nothing there that can take form, or be unformed." In this way thought is, properly speaking, the movement of the mind while yet deliberating, and not yet perfected by the clear sight of truth. Since, however, such a movement of the mind may be one of deliberation either about universal notions, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... soul-rending struggle with her conscience, with her better self. She knew that a word from her, and his prison doors would open to a free world. Time and again this word had trembled on her lips unuttered. She knew also that it was not hate of North that kept her silent. It was an intangible, unformed, unthoughtout fear of what might follow after. North, she knew, was innocent; who then was guilty? She closed her eyes and shut her lips. That North would ultimately clear himself she never seriously doubted, and yet the burden of her secret was intolerable. ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... "Some unformed idea that we were going to escort, or rescue, benighted travelers flickered dimly in my mind as I galloped through the night air; but when I managed to approach my companion and called out to him for explanation, he only turned half ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... the mutual relation between a lord and his vassal, I would call your attention to political anarchies ending in political degradation; to an unformed state of society; to semi-barbarism, with its characteristic vices of plunder, rapine, oppression, and injustice; to wild and violent passions, unchecked by law; to the absence of central power; to the reign of hard and martial ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... the land, and then a rising moon flooded the country in its weird light. I had been on many a wild expedition before, but in some ways never a wilder than this. Its very uncertainty, wrapped as it was in unformed suspicions, gave it an ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... fashion to deride woman's influence over woman, to laugh at female friendship, to look with scorn on all those who profess it; but perhaps the world at large little knows the effect of this influence,—how often the unformed character of a young, timid, and gentle girl may be influenced for good or evil by the power of an intimate female friend. There is always to me a doubt of the warmth, the strength, and purity of her feelings, when a young girl merges into womanhood, passing over the threshold of actual life, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... humanity at large upon each individual globe. Its ambassador was the only person Hoddan could even imagine as listening to him, and that because he came from off-planet, as Hoddan did. But he mainly counted upon a breathing-space in the Embassy, during which to make more plans as yet unformed and unformable. He began, though, to see some virtues in the simple, lawless, piratical world in which ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... less anger. The Gods above call this second-rate thunder; it he assumes, and he enters the house of Agenor. Her mortal body could not endure[64] the aethereal shock, and she was burned amid her nuptial presents. The infant, as yet unformed, is taken out of the womb of his mother, and prematurely (if we can believe it) is inserted in the thigh of the father, and completes the time that he should have spent in the womb. His aunt, Ino, nurses him privately in his early cradle. After that, the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... was the rendezvous of some of the worst characters of the west; fights were frequent on the then unformed streets. ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield
... 3: The rational mind is formed immediately by God, either as the image from the exemplar, forasmuch as it is made to the image of God alone; or as the subject by the ultimate perfecting form: for the created mind is always considered to be unformed, except it adhere to the first truth; while the other kinds of enlightenment that proceed from man or angel, are, as it were, dispositions ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... unformed; she is like a young tree," he told himself again. "People are like that. They just grow up suddenly out of childhood. It will happen to my own children. My little Winifred that cannot yet say words will suddenly be like this girl. I have not selected her to think about for any particular ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... passed suddenly from this world into the world beyond. By this tragic circumstance our thoughts are sobered and we find ourselves face to face with a sad and bitter incident—the termination of a life while it was still incomplete and unformed. I hope that the whole school will refrain from useless comment and will form no harsh or unjust judgments. This is a time ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... ran upward; her curving thin, black eyebrows were like question-marks; her chin was tilted upward like the petal of a flower. She was very slim, and wore a very short brown skirt which revealed the slenderest of feet and ankles; a sweater clung to her unformed, lithe little figure. She had an air of pointed sharpness and firmness like a lifted sword. She might have been sixteen, though she was, as a matter of fact, three years older; but she was not so much an age as a sensation—the sensation of youth, incredibly arrogant and unharmed. The men ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... doctrine to an age that has so often been assured that it has only to take from works of Art already in existence the most consummate Beauty, and thus, as at a step, to reach the final goal. Have we not already the Excellent, the Perfect? How then should we return to the rudimentary and unformed? ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... might marry their boy. They decided on little Marie Adrienne de Noailles, daughter of a great peer of France. The girl was only twelve years old, and her mother was very unwilling to have her married to a boy whose character was unformed, and whose fortune would allow him to become as wild as he chose. Her father, however, liked the match, and her mother finally agreed, insisting, however, that the children should wait ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... that he was a handsome boy, for youth is amorphous and the promise of today is not always fulfilled by the morrow. Jerry's features were unformed at ten and, as has already been suggested, made no distinct impression upon my mind. Whatever his early photographs may show, at least they gave no sign of the remarkable beauty of feature and lineament which developed in his adolescence. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... clearest evidence, that the actual cellular contents of the ovarian tubes, by the gland-like action of a modified portion of the continuous tube, passes into the cementing stuff: in fact cirripedes make glue out of their own unformed eggs! (33/6. On Darwin's mistake in this point see "Life and Letters," ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... that liberty, like intelligence, is naturally an undetermined, unformed faculty, which gets its value and character later from external impressions,—a faculty, therefore, which is negative at the beginning, but which gradually defines and outlines itself by exercise,—I mean, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... really invaluable aid among his associates was Joseph Story, who in 1811, at the age of thirty-two, was appointed by Madison in succession to Cushing. Still immature, enthusiastically willing to learn, warmly affectionate, and with his views on constitutional issues as yet unformed, Story fell at once under the spell of Marshall's equally gentle but vastly more resolute personality; and the result was one of the most fruitful friendships of our history. Marshall's "original bias," to quote Story's own words, "as well as the choice of his mind, was to general ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... result is that when the word "black" is added, a check is given to the process of thought. Either the picture of a brown horse already present to the imagination has to be suppressed, and the picture of a black one summoned in its place; or else, if the picture of a brown horse be yet unformed, the tendency to form it has to be stopped. Whichever is the case, a certain amount of hindrance results. But if, on the other hand, "a black horse" be the expression used, no such mistake can be made. The word "black," indicating an abstract quality, arouses no definite ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... that this law of commensurability has largely influenced the present distribution of the asteroids. But its effects must have been produced while they were still in an unformed, perhaps a nebular condition. In a system giving room for considerable modification through disturbance, the recurrence of conjunctions with a dominating mass at the same orbital point need not involve instability.[1026] On the whole, the correspondence of facts with Kirkwood's ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... astonishing, that any sober-minded person should allow himself to be shaken in his religious convictions by the alleged results of a science so unformed and imperfect, as geologists themselves acknowledge their favorite science to be. "The dry land upon our globe occupies only one-fourth of its whole superficies. All the rest is sea. How much of this fourth part have geologists been able to examine? and how small ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... occurred to him that his lively friend, the Princess Mistchenka, was sailing on the Lusitania; and he remained silent, uncertain, looking with vague misgivings at this girl in the armchair opposite—this thin, unformed, inexperienced child who had attained neither mental nor ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... woman, as she sucked her lead-pencil, was quite unconscious that the boulder thought at all. She wrote in an unformed hand, and in letters that began by being large and round, and tailed off into a slanting niggle. "W. Keyse, Esquer." Then she bit the pencil awhile, and dreamed dreams. Then she wrote again, "Jane Keyse" and "Mrs. W. Keyse," ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... artist like Merimee would not have left his work in so unformed a state, so defaced by repetitions, or with such a want of proportion between the parts. The Inconnue was undoubtedly a real person, and her letters in answer to those of Merimee have just been published by Messrs. Macmillan under the ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... place, he was very, very good-looking. A handsome, graceful figure, agreeable, rather unformed features, kindly bluish eyes, golden hair, a clear white and red skin, and, above all, that peculiar, naively-cheerful, confiding, open, at the first glance, somewhat foolish expression, by which in former days one could ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... to be the suppositum completed with its final completion. Hence, since they placed two supposita in Christ, they said that God is two, in the neuter. But because they asserted one Person, they said that Christ is one, in the masculine, for the neuter gender signifies something unformed and imperfect, whereas the masculine signifies something formed and perfect. On the other hand, the Nestorians, who asserted two Persons in Christ, said that Christ is two not only in the neuter, but also in the masculine. But since we ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... account of the loose stones, the water, and the masses of crystal rock that we had to climb over, our guides strongly recommended us to return. It was difficult to turn away our eyes from the great unformed masses that now seemed to fill the cave as far as the eye could reach. It looked like the world in chaos—nature's vast workshop, from which she drew the materials which her hand was to reduce to form and order. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... often at this little hollow as he had passed it, and every time he had looked upon it he seemed to have an idea of some sort in the back of his head regarding it; a dim, unformed, fugitive sort of idea which had never asserted itself very prominently because he had been too busy to listen to its rather ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... change!" thought Doctor Mack. "It seems only yesterday that Walter started for college, a bashful, unformed boy, full of good resolutions, and determined to distinguish himself in scholarship. Now he has become a gay butterfly. And, what is worse, he has learned to deceive his old guardian, and his chief aim seems to be to have a good time. What can I ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... warned me that I must change my tactics. Like all reformers, I found the world too stiff and rigid for my purposes, and only harmed myself with kicking against the bristling pricks. I must turn to a new generation, to early youth, and find some mind still unformed and flexible, that I could myself submit to a far-sighted training, and cast into the mould of my own ideas. The opportunities of which my contemporaries were unworthy, I would reserve as a gracious boon for a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... potentialities are in the unborn. While there is not life there is hope. When you commence to educate the child it is already too late. But if the great forces of education are brought to bear upon the unformed, you may bring all Itigh qualities to birth. Think, for instance, how this will contribute to the cause of religion. The unborn will simply eliminate the false religions by refusing to be born into them. Persuade ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... disclosed itself as a book of small quarto shape, bound in limp parchment, with strings to tie the covers together. Its pages, measuring 9 and 3/4 by 8 in., were 64, and numbered throughout; but a bare third of them were written on, and these in an unformed hand which yet was eloquent of much. A paragraph would start with every letter drawn as carefully as in a child's copy-book; would gradually straggle and let its words fall about, as though fainting by the way; and so would tail into incoherence, to be picked up—next day, no doubt—by a new ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... than those of the sub-human forms. Even among animals under conditions of domestication, instinct tends largely to be replaced by habitual or acquired modes of behavior. The human being, born with a nervous system and a brain in extremely unformed and plastic condition, is so susceptible to every influence current in his environment that most of his actions within a few years after birth are, when they are not the result of deliberate reflection, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... a magnificent view spread out before us in the raw light. The chain of rocks, clearly visible in their barren desolation which stretched to the very summit, lay stretched out like some great heap of gigantic, unformed things left by some primordial race of Titans to stupefy human ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... circle of general reading. His own account of the acquirements he had made at this period, and of the various branches of study which he had cultivated with more or less assiduity, proves that, however desultory may have been the nature of his reading, and however unformed or incoherent were his literary projects, he possessed, in ample measure, even at this period, the great elements of future fame; viz. the habit of vigorous industry, and the power of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... the marriage-feast is re-performed as Christ attends the wedding of our souls to truth, that union which cannot by man be put asunder. As this takes place the water turns to wine; that within our mental make-up which before was unformed, unstable, in a condition of flux and change, becomes vivified with creative power, and bubbles and sparkles with newness of life and inspiration, refreshing and stimulating the soul with higher emotions and desires, imparting to the very cells ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... is the process by which systems of means are formed, organised, and established for the attainment of various ends of felt value. The establishment of these systems of means is only possible because in the human infant the nervous system is relatively unformed at birth, is relatively plastic, and so is capable of being organised in such and such a definite manner. On the other hand, in many animals the nervous system of each is definitely formed at birth; it is so organised that experience does little to add to or aid in its further development. ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch
... for Richard Shafer was only twenty and had just finished his second year in college. To Carola Brune, who was a year younger, he seemed perfect as a playmate, but she simply could not imagine him as a husband. He was too vague, unformed, boyish in his moods and caprices. She was a strong girl, with quick and powerful impulses in her nature, and she felt that she would need a strong man to hold her. What Richard was, what he would be, she could not clearly see. She ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... hope of catching his eye. And the very poverty of those charms made her efforts the more pathetic. He blamed his eyes for the hard clearness with which they noted the shortcomings of the small, unformed features, the freckled skin, the insignificant and niggardly contour, and for the cruelty of the comparison they suggested between all this and Madeline's rich beauty. A boundless pity poured out of his heart to cover and transfigure ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... gradual, unseen deterioration of mind and character was revealed to the country on the 7th of March, 1850. What a downfall was there! That shameful speech reads worse in 1867 than it did in 1850, and still exerts perverting power over timid and unformed minds. It was the very time for him to have broken finally with the "irreconcilable" faction, who, after having made President Tyler snub Daniel Webster from his dearly loved office of Secretary of State, had consummated the scheme which gave us Texas at the cost of war with Mexico, and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... friend here, who is already so much inclined to melancholy, for a heart already predisposed to receive its impressions. Climates that breathe amorous secrets and futile regrets may agree with an old and disillusioned man like myself; but they must always prove fatal to a temperament which is still unformed. Believe me," he went on with emphasis, "the waters of that bay—more Breton than Norman—may exert a sedative influence, though even that is of questionable value, upon a heart which, like mine, is no longer ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... dim notion that there was more about herself in the letter than about him. He took it with him from the Southern Hotel, when he went to walk, and read it over and again in an unfrequented street as he stumbled along. The rather common-place and unformed hand-writing seemed to him peculiar and characteristic, different from that ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... first experiences were unusually bitter. The struggle with poverty was hard to bear, but perhaps a more serious drawback was his want of an aim in art, of a substantial reason, so to speak, for the profession he had chosen, leading him to one false move after another in search of a subject. Unformed and unrecognized in his mind lay the desire to express in art the life he had left behind him in Normandy; but it was long before he arrived at the knowledge of himself and of his true vocation. He seems to have had no one in Paris to guide or direct ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... seen, was only seventeen, unformed and wild, full of youthful passion and social despair, on the verge of what we call prostitution; reckless, hopeless, with a deep touch of sullenness and hatred. She was working at the time in the house of one of Terry's brothers. Katie, too, was employed ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Compassion[x]; who delighteth in Mercy[y]; who waiteth to be gracious[z]; and endureth, with much Long-suffering, even the Vessels of Wrath fitted to Destruction[a]. He intimately knows our Frame[b], and our Circumstances; he sees the Weakness of the unformed Mind; how forcibly the volatile Spirits are struck with a thousand new amusing Objects around it, and born away as a Feather before the Wind; and, on the other hand, how, when Distempers seize it, the feeble Powers are over-born in a Moment, and render'd incapable ...
— Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children • Phillip Doddridge
... parents and teacher. Their notes lingered in my ears for a great many years, and I can still hum some of them. We drew plain figures, blocks, cones, the sides and roofs of buildings and outlines of trees. In penmanship I made no progress, and it was always unformed and illiterate until I was a man, and took it in hand without a teacher. My two years' detention from school did not seem to put me into classes below me in age. I could read and spell very well. ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... the man, the strength of his purpose—the sudden and full realization of both—this caught her like a tangible thing, and left her no more than the old, blind, unformed protest. He must not go! She ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... cemetery. At a period later than that first mentioned these dances had instrumental accompaniment and became animated even to the verge of hysteria. Thus unwittingly the people of the medieval church were gathering into a loose, but by no means unformed, union the same materials as the ancients used in ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... think on this point, for it is well that man and wife should be agreed in matters of importance.—But to return to Vinland: I have been thinking much about it since I came here, though saying little,—for it becomes a man to be silent and circumspect in regard to unformed plans. My mind is to go thither next spring, but only ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... is a mere unformed embryo, hidden as yet in his earthly chrysalis-case, while the natural man has the breeding and evolution of ages represented in his character. But what are the possibilities of this spiritual organism? What is yet to emerge from this chrysalis-case? ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... disfigured their features, distorted their bodies, fashioned them into ludicrous, grotesque, or hideous monstrosities for king and populace to laugh at, and then resold them. Soft, immature faces were made into animal likenesses; tender, unformed bodies were put into wicker forms or porcelain vases and allowed to grow; then when they had become things of compressed flesh and twisted bone, the wicker was cut, the vase was broken, leaving a man in the shape of a bottle ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... one third of the whole number elected. Third, there was to be a system of self-government administered by the students themselves. As to this third point, I must frankly confess that my ideas were vague, unformed, and finally changed by the logic of events. As the fourth and final main division, I presented "Permeating Ideas''; and of these—First, the development of the individual man in all his nature, in all his powers, as a being intellectual, moral, and religious. ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... required materials wherewith to construct his temple. There was, for instance, the rough ashlar—the stone in its rude and natural state—unformed and unpolished, as it had been lying in the quarries of Tyre from the foundation of the earth. This stone was to be hewed and squared, to be fitted and adjusted, by simple, but appropriate implements, until it became a perfect ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... been too much for her unformed mind," she murmured complacently, pleased with herself for having secured a disciple. "The path is narrow and rugged at the beginning, but it will broaden out before her as she ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... Word are more and more inclining to take it, as the account of the rehabilitation of the earth after its plunging into chaos through sin after the original creation described in v. 1. In either case we have set before us here the development of the earth from a chaotic and unformed condition into its present highly developed condition through the agency of the Holy Spirit. We see the process carried still further in Gen. ii. 7, "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... than illustrating, as the logicians say, obscurum per obscurius, or, rather, making darkness more dark; as if it were not considerably more probable, that so strange a circumstance should have taken place in the sixth century, and have been left unrecorded, when society was unformed, anomalies frequent, and historians few, than that it should have happened in the fourteenth, a period when the government of France was completely settled in a regular form, under one monarch, when literature was generally ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... sisters—Sculpture, in Greece, by that of Architecture—Painting, in Europe, by that of Architecture and Sculpture. If Sculpture and Painting stand by the side of Architecture in Egypt, if Painting by that of Architecture and Sculpture in Greece, it is as younger sisters, girlish and unformed. In Europe alone are the three found linked together, in equal stature ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... box of quinine pills. No papers, no letters, not a single clew to his identity. Bruce felt relief. Wait—what was this? He took the bag by the corners, and a photographer's mailing case fell out. It was addressed to Slim in Silver City, New Mexico, in a childish, unformed hand. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... dimples, and not always to be trying to look like a child." It was true there was something childlike in her face; and there will be, I think, till she dies, though she should live to a hundred. Her eyes were large blue wondering eyes, looking straight at you; her nose was unformed and snub, and her lips were red and dewy; she wore her hair, too, in little rows of curls, which heightened this appearance. I do not know whether she was pretty or not; but I liked her face, and so did everybody, and I do not think she could help her dimples. She had something of her father's ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... "and while he is uneducated and his mind is unformed concerning most things outside the clothing business, I should hesitate to accuse him of ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... and slimmer and more childish than I had thought her, her bosom without its kerchief meagre or unformed, and her cheeks not painted either, but much burned by the July sun. Nor were her eyes black, as I had supposed, but a dark, clear grey with black lashes; and her unpowdered hair seemed to be a reddish-chestnut and scarce longer than ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of many lyrics heard by him in his childhood—from mother, or nurse, or some old crooning dame at the fireside—which are to be found in no collection, and which are now to himself but like a distant, unformed sound? All our collectors, whilst smiling in triumph over the pearls which they have brought up and borne to the shore, lament the multitude of precious things irrecoverably buried in the depths of oblivion. Where, for instance, amid the similar wreck ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... deck, musing into a sheer muddle this singular business of the Maharajah of Ratnagiri's gift to the Queen of England, with all sorts of dim, unformed suspicions floating loose in my brains round the central fancy of the fifteen thousand pound stone there, when the captain returned. He was alone. He stepped up to me ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... precocious girl and in a way fascinating, there is evidence that Margaret was crude and unformed socially, due perhaps to the habit of considering her mother as a negligible quantity. Cambridge ladies preserved an unpleasant portrait of the child as she appeared at a grand reception given by Mr. Fuller to President Adams in 1826, "one of the most elaborate affairs ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... gleaned in her wanderings about the great city with her little brother were vague and unformed. But even Cecile, thinking now of her father's deathbed, remembered words which she had little thought of at ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... (and some librarians even have said it) that for unformed readers to read a bad book is better than to read none at all. I do not believe it. You might as well say that it is better for one to swallow poison than not to swallow any thing at all. I hold that library providers are as much bound to furnish wholesome food for the minds ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... below? What mysteries awaited them? He shivered, despite the warmth of the generator, cherry-red, that heated the snug cabin; shivered with unformed thoughts of unknown terrors. But he forced his voice to calm steadiness when he repeated ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... faculty has its correspondence in this upper area of the brain situated between the frontal and posterior portions, and physiologically speaking, it is here that intuitive ideas find entrance. These at first are more or less unformed and generalized in character, but are nevertheless perceived by the conscious mind, otherwise we should not be aware of them at all. Then the effort of nature is to bring these ideas into more definite and usable shape, so ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... the little piece of obstinacy would stay, she would; and Mrs. Harlow politely declared they should all be delighted. But how would she behave at the table? Her manners were as yet unformed; she needed line upon line and precept upon precept. It was dreadful to think of her taking supper at one of the nicest houses in the city, in that dress, and without her watchful mother too! It was ...
— Little Prudy's Dotty Dimple • Sophie May |
