"Alertness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it be that Bennington de Laney waited for some one, and that therefore his gaze was so fixed? It would seem so. For when the beat of hoofs became audible, the white face quickened into alertness, and ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... he put to it, by way of motto, Chamfort's saying, "Happiness is no easy matter; 'tis very hard to find it within ourselves, and impossible to find it anywhere else." Schopenhauer was so well read in European literature, he had such natural alertness of mind, and his style is so pointed, direct, and wide-awake, that these detached discussions are interesting and most readable; but for the most part discussions they are, and not aphorisms. Thus, in the saying that "The perfect man of the world should be he who never sticks fast in indecision, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... vigour and interest in the fight, we may wish that the shabbiness and the pettiness of the daily lives of some of them had faded away from memory, and left us nothing to think of in connection with their names but the alertness, courage, tenacity, self-sacrifice, and faith with which they defended the cause of human emancipation and progress. Happily the mutual hate of the Christian factions, to which liberty owes at least as much as charity owes to their mutual love, prevented a common ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... banish the notion that the history of the Convention is only the history of the guillotine. No chamber in the whole annals of governing assemblies ever displayed so much alertness, energy, and capacity, in the face of difficulties that might well have crushed them. Besides their efforts, justly held incomparable, to hurl back the enemy from the frontiers, they at once in the spirit ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... which an artist can never without risk forget; in abbreviating his speech his utterance thickened; he created new difficulties by a legerdemain in the construction of sentences; he assumed in his public an alertness of intelligence equal to his own. When it needs a leaping-pole to pass from subject to verb across the chasm of a parenthesis, when a reader swings himself dubiously from relative to some one of ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
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