|
|
|
More "Abstruse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and Health with Key to the Scriptures," and feasting—like a starving, ship-wrecked mariner, on the food that was to sustain him—on truths which ages to come will appreciate, understand, and accept. Many of the theories which at first appear abstruse and obscure, at length become clear and lucid. The candle of intellect requires occasional snuffing to throw the clear light ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... not even refraining from relating his own dreams—is a figure we can understand but very imperfectly if we have no knowledge of his creator and counterpart, Friedrich Nietzsche; and it were therefore well, previous to our study of the more abstruse parts of this book, if we were to turn to some authoritative book on Nietzsche's life and works and to read all that is there said on the subject. Those who can read German will find an excellent guide, in this respect, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the trivial, fictitious, or imaginary pretences on which men thus combine, meet, and act in concert, are manifest proofs of a social proclivity so strong as to create reasons for its indulgence where such reasons do not already exist. Even in science and in the most abstruse forms of erudition, men of learning seek mutual countenance and encouragement, and readily suspend their solitary research and study for the opportunity of intercommunication on the subjects and objects of their pursuit. The cases in which society is voluntarily shunned or forsaken are ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... almost as much to the age as to the writer. In description he is too copious and detailed: his poems abound with long speeches: his parade of varied learning, his partiality for abstruse mythology, are just the natural defects of a lettered but ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... dignitate to which, after the labours of a long life, he is well entitled. Although verging on his eightieth year, he is still hale, hearty, and vigorous, and able to converse intelligently on the most abstruse and recondite subjects. Principal Barclay was married in 1820 to Mary, the daughter of the late Captain Adamson of Kirkhill. They have had a large family, but only two daughters and one son survive. Both the ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... old beau, as her majesty calls Mr. Bryant, to dinner, and he made me my best day out of the ten days of our Windsor sojourn. He has insisted upon lending me some more books, all concerning the most distant parts of the earth, or on subjects the most abstruse. His singular simplicity in constantly conceiving that, because to him such books alone are new, they must have the same ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... all the powers of the mind on abstruse study!" Abishai muttered to himself as he descended the hill. "Hadassah is going mad; her judgment is giving way under ...
— Hebrew Heroes - A Tale Founded on Jewish History • AKA A.L.O.E. A.L.O.E., Charlotte Maria Tucker
... of history, divinity, and natural philosophy, which were those her father had desired her to read, had seemed heavy and abstruse, but gradually their meaning, like a dawning light, beamed upon her mind, which, opening to receive it, let in the new delight of intellectual pleasure! Then, in the long twilight of the summer evening, when it was too dark to read, would she sit on a stool at her father's ...
— The Young Lord and Other Tales - to which is added Victorine Durocher • Camilla Toulmin
... the dead, The sciences, and most of all the abstruse, The arts, at least all such as could be said To be the most remote from common use, In all these he was much and deeply read; But not a page of any thing that 's loose, Or hints continuation of the species, Was ever suffer'd, lest he ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... peopled with demons and spirits, and therefore the faithful physician should lay hold of the armor of God, for he has not to struggle against flesh and blood. He published treatises on various subjects which are replete with abstruse and visionary theories. The title of one of these treatises is as follows: "De Supernaturalis, Naturalis, Praeternaturalis, et ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... you are doubtless aware, sir"—he was always scrupulous to assume knowledge on the part of his hearer, no matter how abstruse or technical the subject; it was a phase of his inherent courtesy—"was intended to represent not the cuckoo, but the blackbird. It had a double pipe for the hours, 'Pit-weep! ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... taste for mental display in which it was necessary that women should participate, if they wished to retain their old position in the social world. In the salons of Berlin, therefore, women have been heard taking a prominent part in conversations in which the most abstruse questions in religion, politics, and general science were discussed. The philosophers, male and female, debarred by the spy system from any open investigation of passing political events, revenged themselves by treating these ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... wouldn't understand, or, if they understood, would get ahead of him in his researches. He wanted a lawyer, he said, who was accustomed to weighing evidence. That was good sense, for evidence must always be judged by the same laws, and I suppose in the long-run the most abstruse business comes down to a fairly simple deduction from certain data. Anyhow, that was the way he used to talk, and I listened to him, for I liked the man, and had an enormous respect for his brains. At Eton he sluiced down all the mathematics they could give him, and ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... and there, swift and active as a panther. Seeing him thus, with his heart in his returns, I could not but doubt; more, as the game proceeded, amid the laughter and jests and witty sallies of the courtiers, I felt the doubt grow; the riddle became each minute more abstruse, the man more mysterious. But that was ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... of several societies, in the great task of education. We hope there is not a single member of any one of our societies who does not perceive the importance of it. To make men happy in themselves and useful to society it is not necessary that they be taught the abstruse sciences, but it is indispensibly requisite that they be qualified to form a correct estimate of those powers, and to exercise those faculties which the Great Creator of man has been pleased to intrust to their care. The Abolition Societies may be regarded as the paternal ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... existing in your regiment. Only I will beg you to remember in future that I am the judge as to the capabilities of movement of the units composing this column. But let us discuss the prospects of peace, or some other less abstruse subject than the Mount Nelson Light Horse. In the meantime, colonel, just to emphasise what I have said, my Intelligence officer has orders to go out to those farms over there to see if he can get ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... understand a pleading, there are so many volumes about the subject and so many bookcases of decisions they would furnish a house. All this may appear flippant, but the subject is so absurd, abstruse, and abnormal to a man of business, that it is almost impossible to make it understandable. A partial list of authorities on the subject sounds like a chapter from Alice in Wonderland: Pepper on Pleading; Perry on Pleading; Pollock on Pleading; Pound on Pleading; Puterbaugh on Pleading; ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... lyes very Abstruse, and all the rumaging of the whole House cannot find it; nay, when all the People in the House have given it over, they very often find one thing when they are looking ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... the world, which poses in every country as an elite body of scientific fighters, and is often found on the battle-field to be an aggregation of abstruse theorists, were jealous and contemptuous. They said, "See how easily the artillery knocked out machine guns at Gravelotte." The Cavalry of the world, famous everywhere for an esprit-du-corps which looks haughtily down on all other ...
— The Gatlings at Santiago • John H. Parker
... which stands as one of the most charming autobiographies of all times. Goethe's versatility as a writer and man was shown not only by his free use of all literary forms, but also by his essays on such abstruse subjects as astrology, optics, the theory of color, comparative anatomy and botany. Shortly before his death, the poet finished the greatest of his works, the tragedy "Faust." He died in the eighty-third year of his life, uttering the ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... of France would have any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of any long word he uses or ever gets it in the right place; yet he will serenely venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up complacently with quotations from authors who never existed, and finally when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken arguments, only with the big words all tangled, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... these facts the author came to the opinion that if a course of instruction were prepared which would demonstrate clearly the many abstruse details of the art in an interesting and comprehensible way, it would be appreciated by those who are desirous to learn. Acting upon this impulse, he began the ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... planet in a fiery sign; but astrologers still say that Pisces is watery and Aries fiery, WHICH IS NOT THE CASE, IF THE STARS HAVE ANY INFLUENCE AT ALL. It is not necessary," say these logical thinkers, "to learn your abstruse science if we can demonstrate that the very basis upon which your conclusions rest is in every sense fundamentally false." The scientific facts of the case are as follows: The influence of the twelve signs, as described by astrologers, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... minutely into the detail of this business will not afford much information or entertainment to the generality of readers, who will however be surprised to hear that pepper-planting, though scarcely an art, so little skill appears to be employed in its cultivation, has nevertheless been rendered an abstruse science by the investigations which able men have bestowed upon the subject. These took their rise from censures conveyed for supposed mismanagement, when the investment, or annual provision of pepper, decreased in comparison with preceding years, and which ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... evolved a plan for transporting sixty thousand oaks to France, from a territory on the Russian frontier belonging to Count Georges Mniszech and his father. He was anxious that M. Surville should undertake the matter, as, after abstruse and careful calculations—which have the puzzling veneer of practicality always observable in Balzac's mad schemes—he considered that 1,200,000 francs might be made out of the affair, and that ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... learned Traveller came there who had gained renown at college, Whose abstruse research had won him even European fame, Questioned Philip, praised his genius, marvelled at his self-taught knowledge, Could she murmur if he called him up to London and ...
— Legends and Lyrics: Second Series • Adelaide Anne Procter
... prayer;" because even the savage believed in Deity. As his understanding was expanded, and his heart purified—as every heart must be which truly lifts itself to God—he gradually taught him the more abstruse and wonderful doctrines of the Church of Christ. Gently and imperceptibly he led him on, until the whole tremendous work was done. The untutored savage, if he knew nothing else, yet knew the name of his ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... most commends. But as a poor pretending beau, Because he fain would make a show, Nor can afford to buy gold lace, Takes up with copper in the place: So the pert dunces of mankind, Whene'er they would be thought refined, Because the diff'rence lies abstruse 'Twixt raillery and gross abuse, To show their parts will scold and rail, Like porters o'er a pot of ale. Such is that clan of boisterous bears, Always together by the ears; Shrewd fellows and arch wags, a tribe That meet for nothing but to gibe; Who first run one another ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... the delight he felt in reading; and this prevailed in him to such a degree, that he has been frequently known by his intimates, to retire late at night from a tavern to his chambers, and there read and make extracts from the most abstruse authors, for several hours before he went to bed; so powerful were the vigour of his constitution and the activity ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... who discovered, among other great scientific facts, the functions of the lever. The solution of an abstruse problem having occurred to him while in the bath, he leaped out of the water, and ran naked through the city, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... was another of Robert Nelson's most esteemed friends. After the loss of his Camdenian Professorship of History, he lived among his nonjuring acquaintances at Shottisbrooke, immersed in abstruse studies. His profound learning—for he was acknowledged to be one of the most learned men in Europe[27]—especially his thorough familiarity with all precedents drawn from patristic antiquity, made him a great authority ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the rules and advices have been simplified and divested, as much as possible, of all abstruse scientific terms, and made as simple and plain as could be done, having a due regard to the proper explanations requisite to make them easy to understand and not ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... writing; could sign her own name without missing a letter, and so legibly, that her aunts could read it without spectacles. She excelled in making little elegant good-for-nothing lady-like nicknacks of all kinds; was versed in the most abstruse dancing of the day; played a number of airs on the harp and guitar; and knew all the tender ballads ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... fear?" she cried, and looked at him with such a heightened colour, such bright eyes, and a smile of so abstruse a meaning that the Baron discarded ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Realism than inattention to this ambiguity. When several persons are said to have one and the same opinion, thought, or idea, many men, overlooking the true simple statement of the case, which is, that they are all thinking alike, look for something more abstruse and mystical, and imagine there must be some One Thing, in the primary sense, though not an individual which is present at once in the mind of each of these persons; and thence readily sprung Plato's theory of Ideas, each of which was, according to him, one ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... Hotchkiss were sauntering slowly down the road as I caught up with them. As usual, the little man was busy with some abstruse mental problem. ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... reading. Peculiarities of the author's style have been, it is believed, largely preserved; and occasional difficulties of apprehension are no doubt to be expected, both from the method of treatment and from the profound and abstruse character of the topics treated. The translator will be well satisfied if it shall be found that he has succeeded in performing his task without adding unduly to the seeming obscurities of certain passages—obscurities which, however, will ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... a contribution to a "Library of Devotion," and in the body of the work the reader will be seldom troubled by any abstruse philosophising. I have thought it necessary to give, in this Introduction, a short account of Eckhart's system, but the extracts which follow are taken mainly from his successors, in whom the speculative tendency is weaker and less original, while the religious element is stronger ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... to come music will have lost its personal flavor. Instead of interpretative artists there will be gigantic machinery capable of maniacal displays of virtuosity; merely dropping a small coin in a slot will sound the most abstruse scores of Richard Strauss—then the popular and bewhistled music maker. And yet it is difficult for us, so wedded are we to that tragic delusion of earthly glory and artistic immortality, to conjure up a day when the music of Chopin shall ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... all united, the Protestants were shamefully divided upon the most trivial points of discipline, or upon abstruse questions in philosophy above the reach of mortal minds. It was as true then, as in the days of our Saviour, that "the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light." Henry IV., of ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... had been doing was to set himself an abstruse and difficult problem in mathematics, in order to see if his brain would respond. It did so, he solved it and thus had no more fears as ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... Melissa, to change the subject, asked why the public were forbidden to approach the Serapeum, her companion told her that since his return from the Circus Caesar had been devoting himself to astrology, soothsaying, and other abstruse matters, and that the noise of the city disturbed him. He was very learned in such things, and if she only had time she could have told Melissa wonderful things. Thus conversing, they crossed the square, and when it lay ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... interesting and its treatment readable and comprehensible to the man without technical knowledge. Foreign exchange is no easy subject to understand; there are few important subjects which are. But, on the other hand, neither is it the complicated and abstruse subject which so many people seem to consider it—an idea only too often born of a look into some of the textbooks on exchange, with their formidable pages of tabulations, formulas, and calculations of all descriptions. For the average man there is little of interest in these intricacies ...
— Elements of Foreign Exchange - A Foreign Exchange Primer • Franklin Escher
... idea may seem to be "too abstruse" for the minds of some of our students at first reading—it may appear like an assertion of a Being who is Non-Being. But, be not too hasty—take time—and your mind will assimilate the concept, and will find that it has a corresponding Truth imbedded in its inmost recesses, ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... miles out of town; I have a cottage (which was Mr. Geach's) a quarter of a mile farther. He is what you may call a speculative man: he reads a good deal, knows a little and wants to know more, and is fond of speculating on the most abstruse and unattainable points of science and philosophy. You would be astonished at the number of men among the captains and traders of these parts who have more than an average amount of literary and scientific taste; whereas among ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Brown or Baker the day before, the mask of unconcern would be dropped, and the whole assembly would glare eagerly and silently at the speaker. Generally on such occasions matters are made infinitely worse by some Job's comforter, who creeps about suggesting abstruse questions, and hinting that they represent some examiner's particular hobby. Such a one came to Dimsdale's elbow, and quenched the last ray of hope which lingered in ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I will not say another word. There are limits. Only an abstruse theologian with a taste for the more recondite niceties of obscure heresies could possibly do ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... acclamation; being the Wassail Bowl, so renowned in Christmas festivity. The contents had been prepared by the Squire himself; for it was a beverage in the skilful mixture of which he particularly prided himself; alleging that it was too abstruse and complex for the comprehension of an ordinary servant. It was a potation, indeed, that might well make the heart of a toper leap within him; being composed of the richest and raciest wines, highly spiced and sweetened, with roasted ...
— Old Christmas From the Sketch Book of Washington Irving • Washington Irving
... the world were laborers for the bread they ate, and it was his opinion that when such persons were resting after the day's toil, indulging their leisure, it was impossible to expect them to read works on theology and the abstruse sciences, while it was natural for them to seek amusement in novels and romances. He thought reading novels was much better than idle gossip, or loitering in saloons or in the streets. His remarks were received with great applause, and this declaration of his liberality of opinion ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... afford amusement at the time, but subjects also of conversation for the future. Such meetings would give no offence to that part of the community who are averse, upon religious principles, to cards and dancing, or dramatic amusements; and if not rendered too abstruse, and consequently tiresome and incomprehensible to the general auditor, must necessarily become a favourite method of passing time now too frequently ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... second part of this work, and represent to the eye the whole progress of the mind, and the continued structure and order of invention, in the most chosen subjects, after the same manner as globes and machines facilitate the more abstruse and ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the works of the ancients, which would otherwise have never, perhaps, been known to us, it is really surprising, that their language should be so little known in Europe. It is certainly very difficult and abstruse, (to learners particularly,) but this difficulty is rendered insurmountable by the European professors knowing it only as a dead language, and teaching it without due attention to the pronunciation of the before mentioned synonymous letters, a defect which is not likely to ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... the sophistries and illusions by which the war system is still defended. If the public as a whole had to follow all the intricacies of those marvellous diplomatic combinations, the maze of our foreign politics, to understand abstruse points of finance and economics, in order to have just and sound ideas as to the real character of international relationship, why then public opinion would go on being as ignorant and mistaken as it had been hitherto. But sound ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... to enclose the genie," said Edmund. "Abstruse questions, Marian; but perhaps it is because they contract the space, so as to bring it more to the level of our capacity, make it less grand, and more what we can get into keeping. To be sure, he would ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... generally to the more complicated relationships of society and government; they are more intellectual in the sense that they represent the operations of the brain rather than the impulses of the heart. They deal with more highly trained wills, with more abstruse problems; they reason, they argue, they consider; they are philosophical, scientific, legal, historical. Listen to a soldier relate his war experiences. What will his vocabulary be? Listen to a diplomat explaining the League of Nations. What will ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... will be found such sentences as "the tranquilized glory of our glorious country," and "the undying beauties, that starry emblem, our flag, awakens in our heart of hearts;" and sundry others, equally abstruse, but no less essential to the objects of primary meetings. The author of this invaluable work is my learned friend and very erudite scholar, Dr. Easley. And as some readers hold the study of an author of much more importance ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... necromancy awaken nothing but curiosity. How then can one who thinks and reasons admit that an art can be cultivated and sustained by theories extravagant, fantastic, enigmatic, explained and condensed in abstruse phrases and sentences, which not only have no meaning whatever, but even lead one to doubt whether the teacher himself knows what result it is desired to obtain? Do you wish a ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... has had as prominent place as that of the natural sciences. It could not be otherwise with such a man as Ex-President Hopkins in the chair of instruction. Dr. Hopkins has had, in a remarkable degree, the faculty of making these studies, usually regarded as abstruse and repulsive to the majority of students, both intelligible and attractive. It has been his conviction that we may know and ought to know what is nearest to us—ourselves; that we are capable of ascertaining the laws and movements of our own being. This is properly the science of Man. This, in ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 6, June, 1886, Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 6, June, 1886 • Various
... this principle has been elaborated into a large and abstruse subject; in ordinary arguments where there is no judge to make subtle discriminations, you must interpret it in the broadest way. The average man lacks both the interest and the capacity for making keen distinctions; and when you are writing for him you would make a mistake if you were to stickle ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... Pages required the exertion either of superior judgment, or of abstruse research, the Author is not sufficiently vain to have submitted them to the ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... In bringing it forward Mr. Gladstone spoke five hours, and during that length of time held the House spellbound. The speech was delivered with the greatest ease, and was perspicuity itself throughout. Even when dealing with the most abstruse financial detail his language flowed on without interruption, and he never paused for a word. "Here was an orator who could apply all the resources of a burnished rhetoric to the elucidation of figures; who could make pippins and cheese interesting and tea serious; who could sweep the ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... every comet that has come back upon predicted time—not that, essentially, there was anything more abstruse about it than is a prediction that you can make of a postman's periodicities tomorrow—was advertised for all it was worth. It's the way reputations are worked up for fortune-tellers by the faithful. The comets that didn't come back—omitted ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... regretted that this task was ever taken up." "The most impossible book of all I ever before tried," and at the close, "Cromwell I must have written in 1844, but for four years previous it had been a continual toil and misery to me; four years of abstruse toil, obscure speculation, futile wrestling, and misery I used to count it had cost me." The book issued in 1845 soon went through three editions, and brought the author to the front as the most original historian ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... title of "Our Land Policy." The temerity which prompted the printing of this pamphlet was evolved through a letter from John Stuart Mill. Henry George knew he was right in his conclusions, but he felt that he needed the corroboration of a great mind that had grappled with abstruse problems; so he sent one of his editorials to Mill, the greatest ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... this a closer, a more intimate revelation, a more exalted symbolism of the Divine Nature and Presence? Just as in the various Greek 'mysteries' the student was gradually advanced from one set of symbols to another even more abstruse and esoteric, so here, on the broad face of heaven itself, vouchsafed for a brief space of time and at long intervals apart, the Deity revealed Himself to the initiated by a higher and more difficult symbol than ordinarily. The symbol would vary in shape. We may ...
— The Story of Eclipses • George Chambers
... bow me down to earth: Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth; But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me at my birth, 85 My shaping spirit of Imagination. For not to think of what I needs must feel, But to be still and patient, all I can; And haply by abstruse research to steal From my own nature all the natural man— 90 This was my sole resource, my only plan: Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his work. He was sitting back in his chair, contemplating his companion with a little smile. It apparently tickled some obtuse Teutonic sense of humor to see this prince doing work which is usually assigned to clerks—working out statistics and abstruse calculations as to how much food is required to keep body and ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... lifeless writings. For this very reason, they say, the Pythagoreans bade that their precepts should not be committed to paper, but rather preserved in the living memories of those who were worthy to receive them; and when some of their out-of-the-way and abstruse geometrical processes had been divulged to an unworthy person, they said the gods threatened to punish this wickedness and profanity by a signal and wide-spreading calamity. With these several instances, concurring to show a similarity in the lives ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... the sun is even as warm and cheering at Sans-Souci as at Cirey, and that we can be gay and happy without the presence of the divine Emilie, who enters one moment with her children, and the next with her learned and abstruse books. [Footnote: Voltaire lived for ten years in Cirey with his friend the Marquise Emilie de Chatelet Samont, a very learned lady, to whom he was much devoted. He had refused all Frederick's invitations because he was unwilling to be separated from this lady. After twenty years of marriage, ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... itself particularly well to this mode of treatment, and on it, therefore, I propose to draw for the materials of the present course. It will be best to begin with the few simple facts regarding light which were known to the ancients, and to pass from them, in historic gradation, to the more abstruse discoveries of modern times. ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... instinctive or automatic! It is just so in learning a foreign language, and it was just the same when in childhood we learned to walk, to talk, and to write. It is just the same, too, in learning to think about abstruse subjects. What at first strains the attention to the utmost, and often wearies us, comes at last to be done without effort and almost unconsciously. Great minds thus travel over vast fields of thought with an ease of which they are themselves unaware. ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... length can transcendental moonshine, cast by some morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life, act magically there, and produce divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments. So dark and abstruse, without lamp or authentic finger-post, is the course of pious genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown. No fixed highway more; the old spiritual highways and recognized paths to the Eternal, now all torn up and flung in heaps, ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... council, and addressing them upon the subject of establishing a mission among them. He felt it his duty to have translated the message sent to the Indians by the Missionary Society. The poor savages listened courteously to this long piece of abstruse theological narrative and argument, but they must have been terribly bored, notwithstanding Mr. Bacon's efforts to 'express the ideas in language better adapted to the capacity and more agreeable to ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... having tasted it fresh from the nut under a tropical verandah), yet it may be safely asserted that for the last three hundred years the philosopher who has not at some time or other of his life meditated upon that abstruse question is unworthy of such an exalted name. The cosmogony and the milk in the coco-nut are, however, a great deal closer together in thought than Sanchoniathon or Manetho, or the rogue who quoted them so glibly, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... fowler having expounded these abstruse points, the Brahmana with great attention again enquired of him about these subtle topics. The Brahmana said, 'Do thou truly describe to me, who now duly ask thee, the respective virtues of the qualities ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Austin are abstruse and philosophical, and Maine's require hard study and a certain amount of special training. The writers also pursue different lines of investigation, and can only be regarded as comprehensive in the departments they confined themselves to. It was left to Amos to gather up the result ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... mother wit, always conspiring with a wild imagination for something to occupy my tune, led me at last to invade the field of invention. With appropriate contrariety, an unfamiliar and hitherto almost detested line of investigation now attracted me. Abstruse mathematical problems which had defied solution for centuries began to appear easy. To defy the State and its puny representatives had become mere child's play. So I forthwith decided to overcome no less a force than ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... staggerer. One of those great simple truths sometimes overlooked by more abstruse thinkers. But the owner of the problem made ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... infallibility in its teaching; and secondly, without such infallibility in its teaching no continuous unity can be maintained among vast multitudes of people, least of all concerning dogmas most abstruse, mysteries most sublime and incomprehensible, and laws and regulations both galling and humiliating to human arrogance ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... foot on Europe and the other on Asia, was influenced by her voluptuous climate in the choice of her marriage institutions; she received them from the East, where her philosophers, her legislators and her poets went to study the abstruse antiquities of Egypt and Chaldea. The absolute seclusion of women which was necessitated under the burning sun of Asia prevailed under the laws of Greece and Ionia. The women remained in confinement within the marbles of the gyneceum. The country was reduced ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... very thing I am doing. I was going to ask you to burn—or, at least, get rid of—all my philosophical literature. It is in the bookcases in your rooms. The fact is, I never cared much for abstruse studies." ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... by the controversies between Buddhists and Brahmans, which in later times led to the total expulsion of the former from India, and to the political re-establishment of Brahmanism. These, no doubt, turn chiefly on philosophical problems, and are of the most abstruse and intricate character. But such was not the teaching of Buddha. If we may judge from 'the four verities,' which Buddha inculcated from the first day that he entered on his career as a teacher, his ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... illustrations." Boston, Esoteric Publishing Company, 478 Shawmut Avenue ($5.00). This is a handsome volume, which, from a hasty examination, appears to be a large fragment of Astrology, containing its simplest portion, requiring no abstruse calculations, and hence adapted to popular circulation. It is meeting with some success, but those who feel much interest in astrology prefer to take in the whole science, which has a much larger number of votaries than is ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... same thing is perceived in judicial documents which often reveal the fact that the dictator permitted himself to be led astray by unskilful witnesses, or that he had himself been responsible for abstruse, indirect memories. The real thinker will almost always be chary of words, because he retains, from among the numberless images which are attached to his idea, only those most closely related to his immediate purpose. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... in all its attitudes and relations by one particular sect of religion, or passing four years of "toil and trouble" in another university, where he is kept wallowing and smothering in the darkness of metaphysics or the more abstruse and higher! branches of mathematics; both sciences as utterly useless to him in any situation of life as a knowledge of the precise language that the devil tempted Eve in, and which some ecclesiastical ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... next day one that was ultra-modern, so that his head would be whirling with the conflict and contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the economists. On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were obsolete. He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to know. He had become interested, in a day, in economics, industry, and politics. Passing through the City Hall Park, he had noticed a group of men, in the centre ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... guess at the longevity of cedars, and thought of asking Margaret, the botanist of the family. Then he yawned, moved the horse a little about, opined that Mr. Rivers must be very prosy, or have some abstruse complaint, considered the sky, and augured rain, buttoned another button of his rough coat, and thought of Miss Cleveland's dinner. Then he thought there was a very sharp wind, and drove about till he found a sheltered place on the lee side of the ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... visited the greater part of the world then known; and resided for many years at the court of the sultan of that hoary Egypt, which still retained its fame for abstruse science and magic lore. He had not in vain applied himself to such tempting and wild researches; and had acquired many of those secrets now perhaps lost for ever to the world. We do not mean to intimate that he attained to what legend and ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book I. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... remarkable instance of Spider industry; to treat it as it should be treated, that is to say, with the whole armoury of scientific formulae, would be out of place in these modest pages. Let us take a middle course, avoiding both abstruse ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... vastness is familiar to every eye. The most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet's thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the illimitable void. The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference; and the mind, even in the obscurity of night, finds a parallel ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... less human process, as if by becoming very abstruse indeed we could hope to become divine. Is it not a commonplace of the schools that to form abstract ideas is the prerogative of man's reason? Is not abstraction a method by which mortal intelligence makes haste? Is ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... I had seen the King of Saxony standing before one of these, representing the torture of a heretic under the Spanish Inquisition, and observed him turn away with a disapproving shake of the head from so abstruse a subject. I was on my way home, deep in conversation with this man, whose pale face and troubled look betrayed that he foresaw the disaster that was imminent, when, just as we reached the Postplatz, near the fountain ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... sexes is suspended. At the marriageable age it is renewed, never with worse consequences than those which attend upon marriage. All arts and vocations allotted to the one sex are open to the other, and the Gy-ei arrogate to themselves a superiority in all those abstruse and mystical branches of reasoning, for which they say the Ana are unfitted by a duller sobriety of understanding, or the routine of their matter-of-fact occupations, just as young ladies in our own world constitute themselves authorities in the ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... questions, "What was he, then? Whence, how? And what did he achieve and suffer in the world?"—such answer as may prove admissible to ingenuous mankind, especially such as may correspond to the Fact (which stands there, abstruse indeed, but actual and unalterable), and so be sure of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... path to the New World which now any little boat can follow. Ages of experience and genius are stored up in a locomotive, but quite an unlettered man can drive it. It is the work of genius to render difficult matters plain, abstruse thoughts clear. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... and other practical pursuits, than defended by their legitimate protectors. It is not to be denied that there is a powerful element of Materialism among us, and that too often we neither appreciate nor respect the earnest, abstruse scholar. The progress of humanity must be shouted in popular catch-words from the house-tops, and the noisy herald appropriates the laudation of him who in pain and weariness traced the hidden truth. We hear men of enlarged ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... its harmonies, and the heart and imagination by its poetical embellishments, and heroic acts and sentiments. Influences still more mysterious are hinted at, if not directly announced. An idea seems to lurk obscurely at the bottom of certain of their abstruse and elaborate speculations, as if the stage were destined to replace some of those sublime illusions which the progress of reason is fast driving from the earth; as if its pageantry, and allegories, and figurative shadowing-forth of things, might supply men's nature with ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... as grave as the occasion requires,' said Anne. 'I believe I ought to have used the word kindness, as that is as active in good as ill-nature in evil. But pray, Lizzie, do not let us get into any of these abstruse metaphysical discussions, or we shall arrive at conclusions as wise as when we reasoned ourselves into saying, nine years ago, that it was better to be naughty than good, because good people ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... standing at the curb till the victoria disappeared. Of what he was thinking I don't know; but he finally muttered "James?" in an inquiring way, and made for the club, shaking his head, as if suddenly confronted by a remarkably abstruse problem. ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... In this abstruse pursuit; in making an account for Peggotty, of all the property into which she had come; in arranging all the affairs in an orderly manner; and in being her referee and adviser on every point, to our joint delight; I passed the week before the funeral. I did ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... the perfect way may'st know, To thee all her specific forms I'll show: He that the way to honesty will learn, First what's to be avoided must discern. Thyself from flatt'ring self-conceit defend, Nor what thou dost not know to know pretend. 20 Some secrets deep in abstruse darkness lie: To search them thou wilt need a piercing eye. Not rashly therefore to such things assent, Which, undeceived, thou after may'st repent; Study and time in these must thee instruct, And others' old ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... Already the Browning library is large. Some of the criticism is good; much of it, regarding the author as philosopher and symbolist, is totally askew. Reams have been written in interpretation of Childe Roland, an imaginative fantasy composed in one day. Abstruse ideas have been wrested from the simple story of My Last Duchess. His poetry has been the stamping-ground of theologians and the centre of prattling literary circles. In this tortuous maze of futile criticism the one thing lost sight of is the fact that a ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... a great desire for knowledge, and often spend their lives in studying abstruse subjects, but always weighing and balancing each point in the most conscientious manner. They make excellent doctors, judges, lawyers, but more as masters of some particular branch than ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... thoughtfully ejected a spent cartridge case from his magazine and pulled back the safety catch. "I'm glad I hit him. It'll be something for the boy to take away with him. I suppose he'll remember it." Shorty's brow wrinkled with the strain of this abstruse theological problem. Then he shrugged his shoulders and gave it up. "So long, son; you made good—you did well. But the old Tank has cleared 'em out, an' I must be toddling on." Then he remembered something, and produced his own patent weapon. ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... Pope obtain even an appearance of success? The problem should puzzle no one at the present day. Every smart essayist knows how to settle the most abstruse metaphysical puzzles after studies limited to the pages of a monthly magazine; and Pope was much in the state of mind of such extemporizing philosophers. He had dipped into the books which everybody read; Locke's Essay, and Shaftesbury's Characteristics, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... asked: What sort of instrument is Chinese for the expression of thought? As a medium for the conveyance of historical facts, subtle emotions or abstruse philosophical conceptions, can it compare with the languages of the Western world? The answers given to this question have varied considerably. But it is noteworthy that those who most depreciate the qualities of Chinese are, generally speaking, theorists ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... reasonings of all kinds, even amongst those, who profess themselves scholars, and have a just value for every other part of literature. By metaphysical reasonings, they do not understand those on any particular branch of science, but every kind of argument, which is any way abstruse, and requires some attention to be comprehended. We have so often lost our labour in such researches, that we commonly reject them without hesitation, and resolve, if we must for ever be a prey to errors and delusions, ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... in Stettin would not give up the place, on any representative or secondary authority; not without an express order in his King's own hand. Which, as his King was far away, in abstruse Turkish circumstances and localities, could not be had at the moment; and involved new difficulties and uncertainties, new delay which might itself be fatal. The end was, the Russians and Saxons had to cannonade the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... The books needed for her instruction were procured by Vose Adams in Sacramento, and she valued such presents more than anything else. The teacher declared many a time, with a certain pride, that she put him upon his mettle to make clear the abstruse problems with which he ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... wife's feelings towards himself, whether those were cold indifference or hidden dislike, that was an abstruse and remote question which Mr. Whitelaw never took the trouble to ask himself. She was his wife. He had won her, that was the grand point; whatever disinclination she might have felt for the alliance, whatever ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... returned she brought her prayer-book with her, and her uncle the Dean's famous book of sermons, out of which she never failed to read every Sabbath; not understanding all, haply, not pronouncing many of the words aright, which were long and abstruse—for the Dean was a learned man, and loved long Latin words—but with great gravity, vast emphasis, and with tolerable correctness in the main. How often has my Mick listened to these sermons, she thought, and me reading in the ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... across our path, and cry: What is the use of these abstruse researches? There is no more an infinite intelligence than a Providence; there is neither me nor will in the universe outside of man. All that happens, evil as well as good, happens necessarily. An irresistible ensemble of causes and effects ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... school, and to teach me all she herself knew— which was little enough, poor soul,—but she studied in order to instruct me,—and often when I slept the unconscious sleep of healthy childhood, she was up through half the night spelling out abstruse books, difficult enough for an educated woman to master, but for a peasant—(she was nothing more)—presenting almost superhuman obstacles. I was very quick to learn, and her loving patience was not wasted upon me;—but when I was about eleven ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... (from sin) senpekigo. Absolve senkulpigi. Absolve (from sin) senpekigi. Absorb sorbi. Absorption sorbo. Abstain deteni sin. Abstemious sobrema. Abstinence deteno. Abstinent detenema. Abstract (abridgement) resumo. Abstract abstrakti. Abstracted abstrakta. Abstruse tre malklara. Absurd absurda. Absurdity absurdo. Abundance suficxego. Abuse trouzi. Abuse trouzo. Abyss profundegajxo. Acacia akacio. Academic akademia. Academy akademio. Accede konsenti. Accelerate akceli. Accent (sign, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... intended to prove that the writer had a command of simple English, correct in sentence structure, spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. The subject is "The Value of Organized Athletics in Schools"—not an abstruse one, or too academic: ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Origin of Language" is typical of his quality. Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,—almost profound, and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our time,—it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... same mental disease; if I had continued to pluck the flower and reap the harvest from the cultivated surface, instead of delving in the unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic lore. And if in after time I have sought a refuge from bodily pain and mismanaged sensibility in abstruse researches, which exercised the strength and subtilty of the understanding without awakening the feelings of the heart; still there was a long and blessed interval, during which my natural faculties were allowed to expand, and my original ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... school boys in Newry also found no difficulty in the exercise, as applied to the abstruse and difficult sciences of anatomy and physiology. The account of that experiment, says, that they were "examined as to the uses which they ought to make of all this information, by drawing practical ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... One would have thought that a person of this description ought, from his knowledge of the thousand ways in which human eyes could be deceived, to have been less than others subject to the fantasies of superstition. Perhaps the habitual use of those abstruse calculations, by which, in a manner surprising to the artist himself, many tricks upon cards, etc., are performed, induced this gentleman to study the combination of the stars and planets, with the ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... man [Hear, hear!]—is not a philosopher. Common sense is good enough for him; and in our business affairs common sense is good enough for me. Well, what is our business here in the Sierra Nevada, chosen by the Moors as the fairest spot in Spain? Is it to discuss abstruse questions of political economy? No: it is to hold up motor cars and secure a ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... work referred to is a curiosity in literature. It exemplifies forcibly the abstruse and mystical researches in which the literati of the ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... been styled "rationalism" because its champions sought to make everything rational or reasonable. Its foremost representatives were to be found in Great Britain between 1675 and 1725. They wrote many books discussing abstruse problems of philosophy, which can have slight interest for us; but certain ideas they had of very practical importance, ideas which probably found their most notable expression in the writings of John Locke (1632-1704). Locke argued (1) that all government exists, or should exist, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... manages to let her best men slip unobserved through her fingers, and so insures a decent crop of them to fill up her share of the passing vacancies in politics, literature, science, and art? Heaven or the Pembroke examiners alone can answer these abstruse and difficult questions; but this much at least is certain, that when Ernest Le Breton went into the Pembroke porter's lodge on the predestined Saturday, he found another name than his placarded upon the notice board, and turned ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... about matters theological for five minutes, David's voice changing to the drone of the liturgist's and his face flushing with uncaged joy. In an hour there were three priests with the boy, and he spoke in Latin to them without faltering. He discussed abstruse ecclesiastical questions and claimed incidentally to be an Italian priest dead a score of years, and, to prove his claim, described Rome and the Vatican as it was before Leo's day. Then he fell asleep and the next day was better and knew no Latin, but insisted ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... so widely and deeply, Dante, too, was largely swayed. With the eye of his imagination he seized objects so distinctly that he could reproduce them in sharp outline. Thence we see before us the most abstruse and unusual, drawn, as it were, after nature." In recognition of the same characteristic, Coleridge says, "In picturesqueness Dante is beyond all other poets, ancient or modern, and more in the stern style of Pindar than of any other. Michael ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... quite the same power of recovery. He stood with his hands in his pockets looking at Miss Klegg's back. His face was white. "It's—it's a difficult question." He appeared to be paralyzed by abstruse acoustic calculations. Then, very awkwardly, he took a stool and placed it at the end of Ann Veronica's table, and sat down. He glanced at Miss Klegg again, and spoke quickly and furtively, with eager eyes ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... Midlands and editor of another on the Riviera. From all his occupations he had gathered amusing anecdotes, which he told with a keen pleasure in his own powers of entertainment. He had read a great deal, chiefly delighting in books which were unusual; and he poured forth his stores of abstruse knowledge with child-like enjoyment of the amazement of his hearers. Three or four years before abject poverty had driven him to take the job of press-representative to a large firm of drapers; and though he felt the work ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... cover so much general ground in defining the relations and contributions of Edison to the electrical arts, that they serve to present a picture of the whole development effected in the last fifty years, the most fruitful that electricity has known. The effort has been made to avoid technique and abstruse phrases, but some degree of explanation has been absolutely necessary in regard to each group of inventions. The task of the authors has consisted largely in summarizing fairly the methods and processes employed by ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... you might be lead to imagine from the first hasty inspection of the characters. These characters, as any one might readily guess, form a cipher—that is to say, they convey a meaning; but then, from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species—such, however, as would appear, to the crude intellect of the sailor, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... men may take their stand together, there is only one platform broad enough for all. This universal stand-point, or common platform, is life. It is our more definite thesis, then, that philosophy, even to its most abstruse technicality, is rooted in life; and that it is inseparably bound up with the satisfaction of practical needs, and the ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... kindness,' said Miss Motley, absently, being just then absorbed in an abstruse calculation as to how many yards of merino would be ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... vorticial motion of a ring is originated has not as yet been suggested, therefore its origination must have been due to a "Divine impulse," is an argument which again uses the absence of knowledge as equivalent to its possession. We are in the presence of a very novel and highly abstruse theory, or rather hypothesis, in physics, which was originally suggested by, and has hitherto been mainly indebted to, empirical experiments as distinguished from mathematical calculations; and from the mere fact that, in the case of such a hypothesis, mathematicians have not as yet ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the public generally, of literary and archaeological material previously existing only in MS. or in unique printed copies, was at the outset very restricted in its zone and its scope; but, in spite of the circumscribed interest felt by general readers in the more abstruse or obscure provinces of research, the movement, at first confined to scholars and patrons of literature, at length became universal in its range and distribution. There is no country pretending to culture without several of these institutions. ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... lips of Jehovah, that he would give power to the faint, and might to those who have no strength. Learning may bring her ample pages and her ponderous records, rich with the spoils of every age, gathered from every land, and gleaned from every source. Philosophy and science may bring their abstruse researches and wonderous revelations—Literature her elegance, with the toils of the pen, and the labors of the pencil—but they are idle tales compared to the truths of Christianity. They may cultivate the intellect, enlighten the understanding, ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson
... favourites, and from the teachings of the pulpit, I had acquired a considerable amount of religious knowledge. I had thought, too, a good deal about some of the peculiar doctrines of Calvinism, in their character as abstruse positions—such as the doctrine of the Divine decrees, and of man's inability to assume the initiative in the work of his own conversion. I had, besides, a great admiration of the Bible, especially of its narrative and poetical parts; ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... (invisible) 447[obs3]; misty &c. (opaque) 426; hidden &c 528; latent &c 526. indefinite, garbled &c (indistinct) 447; perplexed &c. (confused) 59; undetermined, vague, loose, ambiguous; mysterious; mystic, mystical; acroamatic[obs3], acroamatical[obs3]; metempirical; transcendental; occult, recondite, abstruse, crabbed. inconceivable, inconceptible[obs3]; searchless[obs3]; above comprehension, beyond comprehension, past comprehension; beyond one's depth; unconceived. inexpressible, undefinable, incommunicable. unpredictable, unforeseeable. Phr. it's ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... annual premiums and reserves. It is a matter of no very abstruse mathematics (in principle) to find the equivalent of this single premium in any one of many other forms of premium payment. The processes are mainly but variations of present worth and compound interest ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... amazed me to learn how much they are required to do. This is one fair sign of intellectuality. The ease too with which young Japan, educated in Occidental schools and introduced to Occidental systems of thought, acquires abstruse speculations, searching analyses, and generalized abstractions proves conclusively Japanese possession of the higher mental faculties, in spite of the long survival in their civilization of primitive puerility ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... past to an invisible future. We have here a writer who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... seen, however, in the preceding chapter, that the distinction between the essence of a class, and the attributes or properties which are not of its essence—a distinction which has given occasion to so much abstruse speculation, and to which so mysterious a character was formerly, and by many writers is still, attached—amounts to nothing more than the difference between those attributes of the class which are, and those which are not, involved in the signification of the class-name. As applied to individuals, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... shrugged his shoulders, implying that anything so abstruse as young Mrs. Ransome's reasons ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... geometry, and study therein the nature of that curve which the discovery of Kepler has raised to such unparalleled importance. The subject, no doubt, is a difficult one, and to pursue it with any detail would involve us in many abstruse calculations which would be out of place in this volume; but a general sketch of the subject is indispensable, and we must attempt to render it such justice as may be compatible with ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... represented. An older politician would have scented danger from the fact that so many of them had never come out into the arena before; but Jimmy only looked with smiling curiosity on the Ethics major or the Education "shark," dug up somewhere from their abstruse speculations. ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... Ramsay was often accustomed to retreat to the labour of his abstruse calculations; for he aimed at improvements and discoveries in his own art, and sometimes pushed his researches, like Napier, and other mathematicians of the period, into abstract science. When thus engaged, he left the outer posts of his commercial establishment to be maintained by two stout-bodied ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... not believe that the bees indulge in these abstruse calculations; but, on the other hand, it seems equally impossible to me that such astounding results can be due to chance alone, or to the mere force of circumstance. The wasps, for instance, also build combs with hexagonal cells, so that for them the problem ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... careful student of human nature. And never forget that he who has mastered this, the most abstruse of sciences, has a better equipment for practical success than all the abstract learning from the days of Socrates till now ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... acquaintance was able to explain it to me. M. Zola wrote it down in his memorandum-book as an abstruse puzzle. However, while this narrative was appearing in the 'Evening News,' several correspondents kindly informed me that Ly-ee-Moon (at times written 'Lai-Mun') was Chinese, being the name of a narrow passage or strait between the island of Hong-Kong and the mainland ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... the thoughtful calm of the London Sunday. During the night the town seems to have cleaned and preened itself, and the creamy, shadow-fretted streets of the Sabbath belong more to some Southern region than to Battersea or Barnsbury. The very houses have a detached, folded manner, like volumes of abstruse theological tracts. From every church tower sparks of sound leap out on the expectant air, mingling and clashing with a thousand others; and the purple spires fling themselves to heaven with the joy of a perfect thought. In the streets there is an ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt, never to allow his mind to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has a right to promise to do. ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... His father would not, therefore, press him to adopt a course of life for which he was unsuited, and encouraged him in the study of medicine, for which he early manifested a partiality. At the age of twenty-five he proceeded to the Continent; and being fond of the abstruse, the marvellous, and the incomprehensible, he became an ardent disciple of the school of Paracelsus, whom he looked upon as the regenerator, not only of medicine, but of philosophy. He remained six years in Italy, France, and ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... her unless she asked me very pressingly to do so. All compliments and attentions from me to her had ceased. SHE courted me, and I accepted her courtship in unresponsive silence. I played the part of a taciturn and reserved man, who preferred reading some ancient and abstruse treatise on metaphysics to even the charms of her society—and often, when she urgently desired my company, I would sit in her drawing-room, turning over the leaves of a book and feigning to be absorbed in it, while she, from her ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... thought or reason left no room for personal immortality, and his query, "Do you expect a tip for having nursed your ailing mother, and refrained from poisoning your brother?" is well known. A vague conception of a deity whose existence can be proved, if it can be proved at all, only by the abstruse arguments of a Hegel is not a god of practical service to ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... assertion so little intelligence is to be gained, that those who have had the greatest interest in being informed of the real qualities of teas, have most abandoned the enquiry before they obtained the least knowledge of what they sought. Either perplexed with abstruse science, or dissatisfied with assertion equally unfounded and unsupported, thousands have discontinued the research, and committed themselves to fatal experience. Thus have too many acquired a knowledge of the detrimental qualities of teas, by the ruin of their constitution. ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... for freer inquiry than was open to a theological student even of a dissenting church. After a year at Hackney he withdrew to his father's home, where he found nothing more definite to do than to "solve some knotty point, or dip in some abstruse author, or look at the sky, or wander by the pebbled sea-side."[2] This was probably the period of his most extensive reading. He absorbed the English novelists and essayists; he saturated himself with the sentiment of Rousseau; he studied Bacon and Hobbes and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... volumes the whole course of mental struggle and self-evolvement narrated in that odd but interesting work; but he will see the track marked in light; the notions become images, the images glorified, and not unfrequently the abstruse position stamped clearer by the poet than by the psychologist. No student of Coleridge's philosophy can fully understand it without a perusal of the illumining, and if we may so say, popularizing ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... worthy to open the grand procession of modern poets. He had chosen his subject in a region remote from popular thought—too awful for it, too abstruse. He had accepted frankly the dogmatic limits of the Church, and thrown himself with even enthusiastic faith into her reasonings, at once so bold and so undoubting—her spirit of certainty, and her deep contemplations on the unseen and infinite. And in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... had arrived when parliamentary preeminence could no longer be achieved or maintained by gorgeous abstractions borrowed from Burke, or shallow systems purloined from De Lolme, adorned with Horatian points, or varied with Virgilian passages. It was to be an age of abstruse disquisition, that required a compact and sinewy intellect, nurtured in a class of learning not yet honoured in colleges, and which might arrive at conclusions conflicting with ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... a Debating Club, exceeding wise and great; On grave and abstruse questions it would eagerly debate. Its members said: 'We are so wise, ourselves we'll herewith dub The Great Aristophelean Pythagoristic Club.' And every night these bigwigs met, and strove with utmost pains To solve recondite problems that would baffle lesser brains. They argued and ...
— Marjorie at Seacote • Carolyn Wells
... resident here. He has a little house on the foot of the hills two miles out of town; I have a cottage (which was Mr. Geach's) a quarter of a mile farther. He is what you may call a speculative man: he reads a good deal, knows a little and wants to know more, and is fond of speculating on the most abstruse and unattainable points of science and philosophy. You would be astonished at the number of men among the captains and traders of these parts who have more than an average amount of literary and ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... Handsome, enthusiastic, overflowing with vitality, and with a learning broad and deep, his students found in him a real inspiration to intellectual endeavor. His lectures, however technical and abstruse their subjects, were of an incomparable clarity and simplicity. He was one of the first to advocate the teaching of science to women, not in its technical details, but in ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... friend, said that if she tried to recall Robert Browning's words it was as though she had talked to a being apart from other men. "My feeling may seem exaggerated," she smiled, "but it was only natural, when considering my vivid sense of his moral and intellectual greatness. His talk was not abstruse and intricate, like some of his writings. Far from it. As a rule he seemed rather to avoid deep and serious subjects. There was no loss, for everything he chose to say was well said. A familiar story, grave or gay, when clothed with his ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... luxuries of seclusion. 'He was by nature self-absorbed and taciturn. His morning was usually occupied with a long walk, during which he appeared to his simple neighbours to be lost in profound thought, as if working out in his own mind the details of one of his great battles, or busy with some abstruse point of Puritan theology. If accompanied by one of his brothers, or by some other intimate friend, he was still for the most part silent. Always good-humoured, and enjoying sarcasm when of a grave, high class, he yet never talked from the loquacious instinct, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... appearance that I cannot endure it. The old lady has all the vivacity of a young one. She is the most learned woman in France; her house is the resort of all men of literature, with whom she converses upon the most abstruse subjects. She is of one of the most ancient, as well as the richest families in the kingdom. She asked very archly when Dr. Franklin was going to America. Upon being told, says she, "I have heard that he is a prophet there;" alluding to that text of Scripture, "A prophet is not without honor," ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... city is not greater than the prosperity of the largest number of its component individuals," replied the mayor, in a somewhat altruistic and economically abstruse argument on the floor of the council hall. "We ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... the New World which now any little boat can follow. Ages of experience and genius are stored up in a locomotive, but quite an unlettered man can drive it. It is the work of genius to render difficult matters plain, abstruse thoughts clear. ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... rate I came away from the meeting with a stronger personal interest in politics than I had ever felt in my life. Instead of seeming like an abstruse or vague issue it seemed to me pretty concrete and pretty vital. It concerned me and my immediate neighbors. Here was a man who was going to Congress not as a figurehead of his party but to make laws for Rafferty and for me. He was to be my congressman if I chose to help make him ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... fictitious, or imaginary pretences on which men thus combine, meet, and act in concert, are manifest proofs of a social proclivity so strong as to create reasons for its indulgence where such reasons do not already exist. Even in science and in the most abstruse forms of erudition, men of learning seek mutual countenance and encouragement, and readily suspend their solitary research and study for the opportunity of intercommunication on the subjects and objects of their pursuit. ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... of Angouleme was first drawn into sympathy with the reformatory movement. Unsatisfied with herself and with the influences surrounding her, she sought in Briconnet a spiritual adviser and guide. The prelate, in the abstruse and almost unintelligible language of exaggerated mysticism, endeavored to fulfil the trust. His prolix correspondence still exists in manuscript in the National Library of Paris, together with the replies of his royal penitent. Its incomprehensibility may perhaps forever preclude the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... ingenious mathematical approaches for stimulation criteria, in biological research—a very abstruse field—even your multiplex machines with elaborate means of intercommunication are not sophisticated enough—or ever will be—to cope with the complexities inherent in the numerous interacting biosyntheses on the ...
— On Handling the Data • M. I. Mayfield
... that his head would be whirling with the conflict and contradiction of ideas. It was the same with the economists. On the one shelf at the library he found Karl Marx, Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Mill, and the abstruse formulas of the one gave no clew that the ideas of another were obsolete. He was bewildered, and yet he wanted to know. He had become interested, in a day, in economics, industry, and politics. Passing through ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... looked more like a retired man of affairs than the prosy recluse that he was; but he had long since ceased to take any active interest in life, and gave himself up entirely to scientific study and research of a more or less abstruse nature. A useless sort of existence, it seemed to me, as mankind was never destined, nor intended, to reap the benefits of his labor. His sister kept house for him, and had full charge of all his business ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... Gray he had a great and profound love—what they said affected him deeply, and their steadfast kindness at times touched him to tears. For the great, seething, outside world that had not thought along abstruse scientific lines, and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... Catholics were all united, the Protestants were shamefully divided upon the most trivial points of discipline, or upon abstruse questions in philosophy above the reach of mortal minds. It was as true then, as in the days of our Saviour, that "the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... grammar school and in six months had completed the work of seven grades. At the age of seven he had gone so far with his mathematical studies that his father, Professor Boris Sidis, could be of little assistance to him. He worked out the most abstruse and difficult problems with the greatest ease and invented new systems of computation which attracted much attention. When eight years old he entered the Brookline High School and in six weeks had completed the mathematical ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... veil of esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for little. Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us: we should know too much for our present moral or spiritual status. As usual, our own savants are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring everything within the scope of a few thousand ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the scientific inquiries which built up the theology of the Middle Ages. His famous works were the first attempts of any Christian thinker to elicit the idea of God from the very nature of the human reason. His passion for abstruse thought robbed him of food and sleep. Sometimes he could hardly pray. Often the night was a long watch till he could seize his conception and write it on the wax tablets which lay beside him. But not even a fever of intense ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... was he, then? Whence, how? And what did he achieve and suffer in the world?"—such answer as may prove admissible to ingenuous mankind, especially such as may correspond to the Fact (which stands there, abstruse indeed, but actual and unalterable), and so be sure ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... of the mill hand and the Broadway flapper, but equally in weighty judges and godly bishops. It has gone on in all the philosophers, scientists, poets, and theologians that have ever lived. Aristotle's most abstruse speculations were doubtless tempered by highly irrelevant reflections. He is reported to have had very thin legs and small eyes, for which he doubtless had to find excuses, and he was wont to indulge ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... can claim and exercise infallibility in its teaching; and secondly, without such infallibility in its teaching no continuous unity can be maintained among vast multitudes of people, least of all concerning dogmas most abstruse, mysteries most sublime and incomprehensible, and laws and regulations both galling and humiliating to human arrogance ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... some chemical theory, so it is possible that the flame of culture may be cherished without kindling a conflagration, and truth transmitted from sire to son without the construction of edificial monsters too big for the knees, too abstruse for the brains, and too great for the lifetime of humanity. I am not a very constant reader of Mr. Robert Browning, but I own to many a pleasant grin over his Sibrandus Schafnabrugensis dropped into the crevice of the plum-tree, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... lesson; it was a "Composition," i.e., I dictated certain general questions, of which the pupils were to compose the answers from memory, access to books being forbidden. While Mdlle. Eulalie, Hortense, Caroline, &c., were pondering over the string of rather abstruse grammatical interrogatories I had propounded, I was at liberty to employ the vacant half hour in further observing the directress herself. The green silk purse was progressing fast in her hands; her eyes were bent upon it; her attitude, as she sat netting ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... the small pretenders to science talk of the absurdities of alchemy and the dream of the Philosopher's Stone, a more erudite knowledge is aware that by alchemists the greatest discoveries in science have been made, and much which still seems abstruse, had we the key to the mystic phraseology they were compelled to adopt, might open the way to yet more noble acquisitions. The Philosopher's Stone itself has seemed no visionary chimera to some of the soundest chemists that even the present ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... philosopher or moneyed man) than the operation of figures; and when in bed, the effect is irresistible. Sir Geoffrey fell asleep in the act of calculating King Ryence's height, from the supposed length of his mantle. Indeed, had he not stumbled on this abstruse subject of calculation, there is no guessing how long he might have held forth upon the superiority of men of little stature, which was so great a favourite with him, that, numerous as such narratives are, the dwarf had collected almost all the instances of their victories ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... often accustomed to retreat to the labour of his abstruse calculations; for he aimed at improvements and discoveries in his own art, and sometimes pushed his researches, like Napier, and other mathematicians of the period, into abstract science. When thus engaged, he left the outer posts of his commercial establishment to be maintained ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... essay on "The Origin of Language" is typical of his quality. Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,—almost profound, and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our time,—it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves with such ease, grace, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... the club man is not happy. As the ages roll on woman has materially elevated herself in the scale of being. Now she stops at nothing. She soars. She demands the coeducation of the sexes. She thinks nothing of delving into the most abstruse problems of the higher branches of analytical science. She can cipher out the exact hour of the night when her husband ought to be home, either according to the old or the recently adopted method of calculating time. I never knew of but one married man who gained any ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Mr. Bryant was one of uncommon difficulty; one of the most abstruse and difficult which antiquity presents to us; the information to be obtained concerning it must be collected from a vast number of incidental passages, observations and assertions scattered through antient authors, who being themselves but imperfectly acquainted with their subject, ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... and that I should never overtake Katenka. Accordingly, imagining that classical music was easier (as well as, partly, for the sake of originality), I suddenly came to the conclusion that I loved abstruse German music. I began to go into raptures whenever Lubotshka played the "Sonate Pathetique," and although (if the truth be told) that work had for years driven me to the verge of distraction, I set myself to play ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... a year as a relief to the daily monotony of the serious business of the Association—in fact, "for one night only" the British Ass. assumes the Lion's skin. To see learned Professors who have been dilating for hours and days on the most abstruse scientific subjects, with the most solemn faces, amidst the dullest surroundings, suddenly appear wagging their dress-coat tails to represent the tail of the hungry lion, and emitting the most extraordinary mournful, growling sounds, the nearest approach at imitating ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... read long ago; some of them, indeed, almost committed to memory in the process of repeated perusal. No doubt a good many of them must have been as yet too abstruse for her; not in the least, however, from inaptitude in her for such subjects as they treated of, but simply because neither the terms nor the modes of thought could possibly have been as yet presented to her in so many different ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... to theories of this kind, in order to vindicate the value and dignity of Liberal Knowledge. Surely the real grounds on which its pretensions rest are not so very subtle or abstruse, so very strange or improbable. Surely it is very intelligible to say, and that is what I say here, that Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence. Every thing has ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... first the abstruse subtleties of Socrates and his brother logicians were too much for my little brain, but now that I am more familiar with them, I quite delight in following their arguments. These "Dialogues" remind me of a fugue in musical ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... has gone. On January 4th the British Fleet had been at war seventeen months—roughly seventy-four weeks (anyone can count them up; there is nothing abstruse about my statistics). In a word, it might almost be said, with some approach to accuracy, that it has been in the throes of the struggle for a year and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 12, 1916 • Various
... duality in music suggests and say that these general subdivisions are too closely inter-related to be labeled decisively—"this or that." There is justice in this criticism, but our answer is that it is better to be short on the long than long on the short. In such an abstruse art as music it is easy for one to point to this as substance and to that as manner. Some will hold and it is undeniable—in fact quite obvious—that manner has a great deal to do with the beauty of substance, and that to make a too arbitrary division, or distinction between them, is to ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... sir. They soon become working politicians; and the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... the lodging where he had last been heard of, and how should she obtain even workhouse hospitality, whose original parish was unknown to herself or her protector? To Charlotte these shameful experiences would have been as incomprehensible as the most abstruse theories of a metaphysician. Was it any wonder, then, if Charlotte was bright and womanly, and fond and tender—Charlotte, who had never been humiliated by the shabbiness of her clothes, and to whom the daily promenade had never been a shame and a degradation by reason of obvious decay ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... or because it is FALSE, I shall make no other reply to him in this place, than by remarking, that if almanack-makers had not been more judicious than law-makers, the study of almanacks would by this time have become as abstruse as the study of the law, and we should hear of a library of almanacks as we now do of statutes; but by the simple operation of letting the obsolete matter drop, and carrying forward that only which is proper ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... into a long recapitulation of arguments sufficiently familiar to those inquiring minds, whom alone a writer on abstruse subjects can be conceived to address. Perhaps the most clear and vigorous statement of the intellectual system is to be found in Sir William ...
— A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... destiny. "In all other respects, he is only," said the father, "a nobler youth than common; but in this singular endowment he has something supernatural to man. He is without fear—he knows not what it is; and, with a dexterity inconceivable, accomplishes the most abstruse and difficult purposes. In his lessons, such is his aptitude, that he learns as if he had brought knowledge with him into the world; and in field-sports, the chase, and all exercises, he possesses an ardour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... neighbors?" Then it occurred to him that perhaps the architect instinctively felt that a more opulent and elaborate exterior would only bring the poverty of surrounding nature into greater relief. But he was not in the habit of troubling himself with abstruse problems. A nearer recollection of the pretty frock he had seen on the staircase—in whose wearer he had just recognized his vivacious friend—turned his thoughts to her. He remembered how at their first meeting he had been interested in her bright audacity, unconventionality, and high spirits, ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... B.'s party gave the opportunity to see Mr. Buckle again under the inspiration of ladies' society, which he especially enjoys, and in the lighter conversation suited to which he shines with not less distinction than when conversing upon abstruse topics. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... the schoolroom he was quick to show gifts of mind almost phenomenal in one so young. Latin and Italian, mathematics and abstruse sciences came as easily to this scion of the Dudleys as reading and arithmetic to less-dowered boys. And with this precocity of mind he developed physical graces and skill no less remarkable until, by the time he was well in his 'teens, few grown men could ride a horse, couch ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... however, no part of my present purpose to attempt to supply this want. I pass on to consider rapidly a matter less abstruse and of more practical interest, a growing habit among artists to avail themselves of the assistance of photographs in their work. It will not be questioned that many artists of repute do use photographs to—well, to put it briefly, to save themselves trouble, expense, and, in some cases, ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... pension from the state allowed Abel to enter Christiania University in 1821. His first notable work was a proof of the impossibility of solving the quintic equation by radicals. This investigation was first published in 1824 and in abstruse and difficult form, and afterwards (1826) more elaborately in the first volume of Crelle's Journal. Further state aid enabled him to visit Germany and France in 1825, and having visited the astronomer Heinrich Schumacher (178-1850) at Hamburg, he spent six months in Berlin, where ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... however, Mr. Maurice is never obscure—on questions of right and wrong. As with St. Paul, his theology, however seemingly abstruse, always results in some lesson of plain practical morality. To do the right and eschew the wrong, and that not from hope of reward or fear of punishment—in which case the right ceases to be right—but because a man loves the right and hates ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... unbelievers; and to adopt the contrary plan, seems somewhat like that of any one, who having to convince some untutored Indian of the truth of the Copernican system, instead of beginning with plain and simple propositions, and leading him on to what is more abstruse and remote, should state to him at the outset some astonishing problems, to which the understanding can only yield its slow assent, when constrained by the decisive force of demonstration. The novice, instead of lending himself to such ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... own kind of strength. To be compelled to be so quick-minded as the simians would be torture, to cows. Cows could dwell on one idea, week by week, without trying at all; but they'd all have brain-fever in an hour at a simian tea. A super-cow people would revel in long thoughtful books on abstruse philosophical subjects, and would sit up late reading them. Most of the ambitious simians who try it—out of pride—go to sleep. The typical simian brain is supremely distractable, and it's really too jumpy by nature to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... after what I have acknowledged, Pyrophilus, of the Abstruse Nature of Colours in particular, you will easily believe, that I pretend not to give you a Satisfactory account of Whiteness and Blackness; Yet not wholly to frustrate your Expectation of my offering something by way of Specimen towards the Explication of some ...
— Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours (1664) • Robert Boyle
... wit as brilliant as the tongue which was its vehicle; her well-stored brain was more than a match for the most learned men at Court, and she would leave an archbishop discomfited in a theological argument, to cross swords with Sully himself on some abstruse problem of statesmanship. When Sully had been brought to his knees, she would rush away, with mischief in her eyes, to take the lead in some merry escapade or practical joke, her silvery laughter echoing in some remote palace ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... Government;—very dismal to the sane onlooker for the time being; not dismal to him otherwise, his hope, too, being steadfast! But here, at any rate, in this poor Norse theatre, one looks with interest on the first transformation, so mysterious and abstruse, of human Chaos into something of articulate Cosmos; witnesses the wild and strange birth-pangs of Human Society, and reflects that without something similar (little as men expect such now), no Cosmos of ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... would be the customary reference to such a functionary; and "an era of glorious progress" would be the only way of characterising his administration. Indeed, a glance over a Mexican book or article or speech seems to show that the writer has made use of every elegant and abstruse word in the dictionary. In a dissertation upon any subject he seems called upon to begin from the very beginning of things, desde la creacion del mundo—"from the beginning of the world," as the Spanish-American himself sarcastically says at times. Perhaps this is a habit acquired from the early ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... superstition, virtue turns to vice) Let Crassus ghost, and Labienus tell How twice in Parthian plains their legions fell, Since Rome hath been so jealous of her fame, That few know Pacorus, or Monaeses name. And 'tis much safer to leave out than add * * * * * Abstruse and mystic thoughts, you must express, } With painful care, but seeming easiness; } For truth shines brightest, thro' the plainest dress, } Your author always will the best advise, Fall when he falls, and ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... with Key to the Scriptures," and feasting—like a starving, ship-wrecked mariner, on the food that was to sustain him—on truths which ages to come will appreciate, understand, and accept. Many of the theories which at first appear abstruse and obscure, at length become clear and lucid. The candle of intellect requires occasional snuffing to throw the clear light of ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... interest of them increases (compare Introd. to the Philebus). There are no descriptions of time, place or persons, in the Sophist and Statesman, but we are plunged at once into philosophical discussions; the poetical charm has disappeared, and those who have no taste for abstruse metaphysics will greatly prefer the earlier dialogues to the later ones. Plato is conscious of the change, and in the Statesman expressly accuses himself of a tediousness in the two dialogues, which he ascribes to his desire of developing ...
— Sophist • Plato
... verse; the Pali authors of antiquity were accustomed to accompany their metrical compositions with a tika or running commentary, which contained a literal version of the mystical text, and supplied illustrations of its more abstruse passages. Such a tika on the Mahawanso was generally known to have been written; but so utter was the neglect into which both it and the original text had been permitted to fall, that Turnour till 1826 had never met with an individual ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... facts the author came to the opinion that if a course of instruction were prepared which would demonstrate clearly the many abstruse details of the art in an interesting and comprehensible way, it would be appreciated by those who are desirous to learn. Acting upon this impulse, he began the ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer
... paper in the Midlands and editor of another on the Riviera. From all his occupations he had gathered amusing anecdotes, which he told with a keen pleasure in his own powers of entertainment. He had read a great deal, chiefly delighting in books which were unusual; and he poured forth his stores of abstruse knowledge with child-like enjoyment of the amazement of his hearers. Three or four years before abject poverty had driven him to take the job of press-representative to a large firm of drapers; and though he felt the work unworthy ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... question was not so abstruse; it was a practical matter of business to be handled as Weed or Evarts handled their bargains and jobs. Minister Adams held the convenient belief that, in the main, Russell was true, and the theory answered his purposes so well ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... beauty. I only wish I could say more in her favour—for she was my mother—but it is impossible to narrate the history without exposing her conduct. The marriage took place, and my father—having woke up, as it were, at the celebration—again returned to his closet, to occupy himself in abstruse studies—the results of which have been published, and have fully established his reputation as a man of superior talent and deep research. But, however much the public may appreciate the works of a man of genius, whether they be written ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... hoped that he succeeded in settling any medical points of a knotty character that might be hovering in his brain, and certain it is that he had become quite absorbed in an abstruse matter connected with physiology, when his ears were startled, and he was at once aroused to a full consciousness of where he was, and why he had come there, by the distant sound of a ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... said the learned lecturer on geology who had addressed a small but deeply attentive audience at the village hall, "I have tried to make these problems, abstruse as they may appear, and involving in their solution the best thoughts, the closest analysis, and the most profound investigations of our noblest scientific men for many years; I have tried, I say, to make them seem comparatively simple ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... his mouth was suddenly dry. This affair was out of all reason. A producer of television shows should not be the person to discover in an abstruse scientific development the way to reach the stars. A neurotic son-in-law of an advertising tycoon should not be the instrument by which the discovery should come about. A psychiatrist should not be the means of associating ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... minister, and, as a kind of prologue to the bloody comedy of the Fronde, sharpened the malice and even fired the passions of the Parisians. This confusion was not displeasing to them. Indifferent to the causes of the quarrels which were abstruse for them, they were not so with regard to individuals, and already began to regard the party chiefs with affection or hatred, not on account of the interest which they supposed them to take in the welfare of their class, but ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... of his Kantian studies, a time of tremendous political excitement in Europe, was for Schiller a quiet period of intense thinking and of eager debate with like-minded friends, upon the abstruse questions of aesthetic theory. The turmoil of the revolution affected him hardly at all. There was nothing of the democrat about him. With all his devotion to liberty and with all his poetic fondness for republicanism, he remained at heart a devoted monarchist. All his life, nearly, he had lived ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... the relations and contributions of Edison to the electrical arts, that they serve to present a picture of the whole development effected in the last fifty years, the most fruitful that electricity has known. The effort has been made to avoid technique and abstruse phrases, but some degree of explanation has been absolutely necessary in regard to each group of inventions. The task of the authors has consisted largely in summarizing fairly the methods and processes ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... can the understanding be said to have five properties? How again, can the five senses be spoken of as properties (of the five elementary entities)? Expound to me, O grandsire, all this that seems to be very abstruse." ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... not only in the somewhat rarefied atmosphere of abstruse science that international cooperation is vital to the progress of civilization. All our economic problems, all the questions of securing the rights of labor, all the hopes of freedom at home and humanity abroad, rest upon the creation ...
— Political Ideals • Bertrand Russell
... thing lyes very Abstruse, and all the rumaging of the whole House cannot find it; nay, when all the People in the House have given it over, they very often find one thing when they are ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... for a physician, but when compelled to study anatomy and physiology, he would hide his Euclid and Archimedes and stealthily work out the abstruse problems. He was only eighteen when he discovered the principle of the pendulum in a lamp left swinging in the cathedral at Pisa. He invented both the microscope and telescope, enlarging knowledge of the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... belonged still trade on his reputation, and claim an intellectual superiority over the members of other persuasions, which they may once have possessed, but which has long been levelled up by the universal march of education. The richer members publish little dull books in bad English on abstruse subjects, and, like Consuelo's prebendary, have quartos in preparation ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... earliest times; the sun being considered as the vivifying power of universal nature, the moon, represented as a female, deriving her light from the sun, as the passive principle of production. The abstruse doctrines on the origin of things, thus shadowed out by the ancient seers, generated the grossest ideas, expressed in the phallic emblems, the lewdness and obscenities mixed up in the popular worship of the deified principles of all existence. Of the prevalence in Sardinia of the Egypto-Phenician ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... difficult questions. They are about as easy to comprehend as the air-pump, the law of refraction of light, or the atomic theory of chemistry. Distort them by inapposite metaphors, view them in perplexing attitudes, and you may make them more abstruse than the hardest proposition of the "Principia". What is far worse, by involving a simple fact in inextricable contradictions, they have led people gravely to recognise self-contradiction as the natural and the ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... field of science known as geometry, and study therein the nature of that curve which the discovery of Kepler has raised to such unparalleled importance. The subject, no doubt, is a difficult one, and to pursue it with any detail would involve us in many abstruse calculations which would be out of place in this volume; but a general sketch of the subject is indispensable, and we must attempt to render it such justice as may ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... the dialogue I see an expression here and there which might—always solely with a reference to your misgiving—be better away; and I think that the vision, to use the word for want of a better—in the museum, should be made a little less abstruse. I should not say that, if the sale of the journal was below the sale of The Times newspaper; but as it is probably several thousands higher, I do. I would also suggest that after the title we put the two words—A ROMANCE. It is an absurdly easy device for getting ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... intellectual a man. His goods are not yet for you, though in time you may make them your own. Attend at present to your carpets and your grates; furnish your cottage with facts from General Knowledge; a day perhaps may arrive when you will be ready for things more abstruse, and then I'll introduce you myself both to the Ologies and to Mr. Chemistry, which latter will, I have no doubt, display to you all ...
— The Crown of Success • Charlotte Maria Tucker
... in Dorner one of the most acute speculative theologians produced by the later Protestant church. His style is as complex as Ullmann's is simple. It is amusing that, in one place, he even enters into a justification of his technical and abstruse writing. Applying himself to dogmatic investigations, the fruit of his labor is his Doctrine of the Person of Christ. Christianity was the world's great want, and all the religions of the natural man could not supply its ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... obstacles which Horrox had to encounter may be best described by quoting his own words. He writes: 'There were many hindrances. The abstruse nature of the study, my inexperience and want of means dispirited me. I was much pained not to have any one to whom I could look for guidance, or indeed for the sympathy of companionship in my endeavours, and I was assailed by the languor and weariness which are inseparable ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Considering how much we are indebted to the Arabians 358 for the preservation of many of the works of the ancients, which would otherwise have never, perhaps, been known to us, it is really surprising, that their language should be so little known in Europe. It is certainly very difficult and abstruse, (to learners particularly,) but this difficulty is rendered insurmountable by the European professors knowing it only as a dead language, and teaching it without due attention to the pronunciation of the before mentioned synonymous letters, a defect which is not likely to be remedied, ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... you there. From the moment that I conceived the idea of the body being upon the roof, which surely was not a very abstruse one, all the rest was inevitable. If it were not for the grave interests involved the affair up to this point would be insignificant. Our difficulties are still before us. But perhaps we may find something ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to keep faith with the Dean? This was Lord George's first trouble after his reconciliation with his brother. The Dean was back at the deanery, and Lord George mistrusted his own power of writing such a letter as would be satisfactory on so abstruse a matter. He knew that he should fail in making a good story, even face to face, and that his letter would be worse than spoken words. In intellect he was much inferior to the Dean, and was only too conscious of his own ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... style. He follows his theme as an absorbing plot, engaging enough in itself, without gorgeous digressions and pendent pictures. His work has something of the Italian method. A melody or a theme, he seems to think, is only marred by abstruse harmony, and is endangered by diversions. One might almost say that a uniform lack of attention to color-possibilities and a monotonous fidelity to a cool, gray tone characterize him. His fondness for the plain, cold octave is notable. It is emphasized by the ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... abstruse problems, and tugs fiercely to pluck out the heart of their mystery. No difficulty is too great for the author to meet, and none seems able to upset his theory. In truth, the book is one of the most ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... doing was to set himself an abstruse and difficult problem in mathematics, in order to see if his brain would respond. It did so, he solved it and thus had no more fears as to ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... brief account of all his physical researches would require a separate volume; and many of them are too abstruse or mathematical for the general reader. His varied services have been acknowledged by numerous distinctions, including the highest honour a British man of science can obtain—the Presidency of the Royal Society of London, to which he was ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... declaration, that he would be tractable and obedient to his superiors; that he would keep his body pure; govern his tongue, and observe a passive obedience in receiving the doctrines and traditions of the Order; and the firmest secrecy in maintaining inviolable its hidden and abstruse mysteries. Then he was sprinkled with water (whence our baptism); certain words, now unknown, were whispered in his ear; and he was divested of his shoes, and made to go three times around the cavern. Hence our three circuits; hence we were neither barefoot nor shod: and the words ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... fundamental difference between the authors of the Bible and the Chinese sage,—that he did not like to talk of spiritual things; indeed, of them he was ignorant, professing no interest in relation to the working out of abstruse questions, either of philosophy or theology. He had no taste or capacity for such inquiries. Hence, he did not aspire to throw any new light on the great problems of human condition and destiny; nor did he speculate, like the Ionian philosophers, on the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... and discussed their physics and metaphysics with our girl boarders, some of whom had remarkably acute and well-balanced minds. Her own seemed to have turned from its early bent toward the romantic, her taste being now for serious and practical, though sometimes abstruse, themes. I remember that Young and ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... the characters. These characters, as anyone might readily guess, form a cipher—that is to say, they convey a meaning; but then from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species—such, however, as would appear, to the crude intellect of the sailor, absolutely insoluble ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... Nonsuch, and by means of it he had succeeded in ascertaining pretty accurately the longitude of Barbados, Trinidad, and Margarita, and intended also to ascertain the longitude of the islet upon which he proposed to bury his treasure. All this he explained to his crew as well as he could drive so abstruse a matter into their thick heads, and although it is more than doubtful whether any of them understood his explanation, they understood at least that "the Cap'n" was assuring them that he possessed some occult means of finding the islets ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... draw it in, and assimilate it to itself. This voluntary activity, directed towards any subject, is Attention, and so great is the power of mind when in this state, that it dissolves and draws in all food, no matter how abstruse, that may present itself. Thus the problem of mental education, which had seemed so complex, resolves itself very simply. We have first to educate the attention of the child, so that she shall be able to use it at will, and to turn it towards any object desired; and secondly, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... did we get onto this abstruse subject?" he said easily. "Miss Bathurst will vote us all a party of bores, and with reason. What were we talking about before? Iced cake, wasn't it? Are you a cook ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... Europe and the other on Asia, was influenced by her voluptuous climate in the choice of her marriage institutions; she received them from the East, where her philosophers, her legislators and her poets went to study the abstruse antiquities of Egypt and Chaldea. The absolute seclusion of women which was necessitated under the burning sun of Asia prevailed under the laws of Greece and Ionia. The women remained in confinement ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... feelings towards himself, whether those were cold indifference or hidden dislike, that was an abstruse and remote question which Mr. Whitelaw never took the trouble to ask himself. She was his wife. He had won her, that was the grand point; whatever disinclination she might have felt for the alliance, whatever love she might have cherished for ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... Bewildered amid abstruse researches, metaphysical and historical, Mr. Cargill, living only for himself and his books, acquired many ludicrous habits, which exposed the secluded student to the ridicule of the world, and which tinged, though ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... mysterious Frenchman, from whose voice his Shadow had fled on that fateful evening with such sudden precipitancy. The Frenchman, he judged, must have been long on the island, and could probably give him some satisfactory solution of this abstruse problem. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... supplant the works of Plato and Aristotle, and though his method might prove useful in every branch of knowledge,—even in the most abstruse points of logic and metaphysics,—yet there has never been a Baconian school of philosophy, in the sense in which we speak of the school of Locke or Kant. Bacon was above or below philosophy. Philosophy, in the usual sense of the word, formed but a part of ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... fortunately has one taste, and that is for science, and it is more than a taste, it is a real passion. He does not merely dabble about with chemicals, or play tricks with electricity; but he reads dry, hard, abstruse science, and writes elaborate monographs, which I read with more admiration than comprehension. This is almost his only hold on ordinary life, and I encourage it with all my might; I ask about his work, make such suggestions as I can, and praise his successful experiments ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... large body of capitalists, finding no other outlet for their savings, gave an unnatural stimulus to production, by buying up and storing immense quantities of our home manufactures. This they must have done upon some abstruse but utterly false calculation of augmented demand from abroad, making no allowance for change of season, foreign fluctuation, or any other of the occult causes which influence the markets of the world. The result, as is well known, was most disastrous. Trade on a sudden grew ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... won a European reputation. He soared, however, so far beyond ordinary ken that even Europe must be taken to mean a small set of competent judges who might almost be reckoned upon one's fingers. But devoted as he was to these abstruse studies, Smith might also be regarded as a typical example of the finest qualities of Oxford society. His mathematical powers were recognised by his election to the Savilian professorship in 1860, and the recognition of his other abilities was sufficiently ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... that remained was to find a suitable medium for its publication. This was not so easy. Distinguished mediums would not lend themselves to contradictions of Grampus, or if they would, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he would not consent to leave anything out of an article which had no superfluities; for all this happened years ago when the world was at a different stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and not on hard terms, since ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
