|
|
|
More "Crucial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... characteristics. The prophecy which is applied to Jesus might equally be applied to every human being: He trod the wine-press alone. In all its deepest experiences the soul is solitary. Craving companionship, in the very times when it seeks it most it finds it denied. Every crucial choice must at last be individual. When sorrows are multiplied there are in them deeps into which no friendly eye can look. When the hour of death comes, even though friends crowd the rooms, not one of them can ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... into the old manner so well known to his companion as his office style. Piece by piece, he drew from Amidon his story. He dropped back to previous parts of the narrative, and elicited repetitions. He slurred over crucial points as if he did not see their bearing, and then artfully assumed minute variations of the tale, but ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... Some of the forces to the city's aid From the besieged halls. Nor Caesar gave To sleep its season; swifter than all else To seize the crucial moment of the war. Quick in the darkest watches of the night He leaped upon his ships, and Pharos (25) seized, Gate of the main; an island in the days Of Proteus seer, now bordering the walls Of Alexander's ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... profoundly wrong, in so thinking, for the Kruman yearns after, and duns for, as many things for his body as the lamented Faustus did for his soul, and away among the apes this interesting creature would have to go, at once, if the wanting of little were a crucial test for the determination of the family termed by the scientific world the Hominidae. Later, when I got to know the Krumen well, I learnt that they desired not only the vast majority of the articles that they saw, but did more—obtained them- -at all events some of them, without asking me ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... and now he was engaged in describing to every village and to all the country side the prowess of the gentleman in the distinguished-looking khaki clothes. It was the general absurdity of this advance to the frontier and the fighting, to the crucial place where he was resolved to make an attempt to rescue his sweetheart ; it was this ridiculous aspect that caused to come to Coleman a premonition of failure. No knight ever went out to recover a lost love in such a diligence and with such a devil-dog, tinkling his little bells and yelping ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... maintain a certain numerical equality with our opponents. On the contrary, we must strive to call up the entire forces of the nation, and prepare and arm for the great decision which impends. We must try also to gain a certain superiority over our opponents in the crucial points, so that we may hold some winning trumps in our hand in a contest unequal from the very first. We must bear these two points in mind when preparing for war. Only by continually realizing the duties ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... was, crucial though many of the problems he had to solve undoubtedly were, yet the statement may be accepted as approximately true that the last three or four years of Lorenzo's life were spent amid profound peace—at least as far as Florence was concerned. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... have wavered had I not been seeing Tavistock every day. He continued to wear his devil-may-care air; but I observed that he was aging swiftly—and I knew what that meant. Fighting all day to prevent breaks in the crucial stocks; planning most of the night how to prevent breaks the next day; watching the reserve resources of "The Seven" melt away. Those reserves were vast; also, "The Seven" controlled the United States Treasury, and were using ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... strove to find justification for a pursuit which his human instinct told him had no justification. His reason was fully adequate, but something else failed at the crucial point. He felt definitely uncomfortable and wished that Ralph might have avoided the subject. It was none of his business, anyway. But then, ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... ringworm also, occurs in sharply-defined, circumscribed patches, and lupus erythematosus has a peculiar violaceous tint and an elevated and marginate border. A microscopic examination of the epidermic scrapings would be of crucial value in differentiating ...
— Essentials of Diseases of the Skin • Henry Weightman Stelwagon
... were laid.[400] This suggestion appears to have been acted upon; for in the following March it was reported that there were building at St. John's a brig to carry twenty guns, a schooner of eighteen, and twelve 2-gun galleys. However, the Americans also were by this time building, and at the crucial moment came out a very little ahead in point ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... wife how surprising it was that it had not landed him in the hottest of hot water, and how puzzled he was to account for what seemed to have been its effect. Then she confessed to him what had happened on that crucial night, how she had taken the body away and hung it in front of the other house, and what she partly knew and partly guessed about the results of the affair. At once he realized that her instant and audacious retaliation was what had made possible his success and ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... noble and steadfast old Friend, could hardly fail to be known as a friend of the slave. Like her father she was ready to labor, and sacrifice and suffer in his cause, and had already made this apparent, had borne persecution, the crucial test of principle, before the war which gave to the world the prominent idea of freedom for all, and thus wiped the darkest stain from ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... pains us to say such things, but, speaking as we do in the public interests (I plagiarise from Barker's famous epigram), we shall not shrink because of the distress we may cause to any individual, even the most exalted. At this crucial moment of our country, the voice of the People demands with a single tongue, 'Where is the King?' What is he doing while his subjects tear each other in pieces in the streets of a great city? Are his amusements and his dissipations ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... of the German Admiralty for the new program. Admiral von Tirpitz struggled for it. I insisted that fundamental modification was essential if better relations were to ensue. The tone was friendly, but I felt that I was up against the crucial part of my task. The admiral wanted us to enter into some understanding about our own shipbuilding. He thought the Two-Power standard a hard one for Germany, and, indeed, Germany could not make any ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... within an ace of having to leave the boat-hook behind, for he declined to try another bath—this time in his clothes. Just, however, at the crucial moment the bark of the willow gave way, the hook descended with a splash, and Dexter breathed more freely, and sat there with the boat-hook across his knees looking first to right and then to left in search of danger, but seeing nothing but the low-wooded banks of the stream, which ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... cousin, overcome with emotion. She's been counting the hours till you came—been hearing of you from me and others for a good while; and hasn't been able to talk or think of anything else. She's only fifteen, and the crucial moment is too much for her—the Great Harkless has arrived, and ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... over him. He rose awkwardly and went to the window. She rose also, but more leisurely and easily, moved one of the books on the table, smoothed out her skirts, and changed her seat to a little sofa. It is the woman who always comes out of these crucial moments unruffled. ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... Still, the crucial stage of the first action was not over. The Sheikh Ed Din had driven the Egyptian cavalry and Camel Corps from Um Mutragan, inflicting loss upon them and getting temporary possession of several guns of the horse battery. He was following them ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... the expert Squash Tennis players for more and more speed and a higher pressurized ball, a novice quickly became discouraged with his initial efforts at playing the game. For many crucial years, therefore, the game was not adopted by new players and there was no broad base of tyros. Plainly and simply the avid duffers, which every sport must have if it is to survive and retain its popularity, took up a less frustrating, ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... Gloucester to hasten to London without delay. I have conferred with the Lords Howard, Hastings, and Stanley, and we are of the one mind that he must be Lord Protector. Tell him we pledge to him our whole support if he will give us his countenance in this crucial struggle ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... But when the crucial moment comes—when the die is to be cast and the promise asked and given that will bind the two lives together, halt for a moment until one asks and the ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... start building a political organization, here in Pennsylvania. In 1960, I think we can elect you President. The world situation will be crucial, by that time, and we had a good-natured nonentity in the White House then, who let things go till war became inevitable. I think President Hartley can be trusted to take a strong line of policy. In the ...
— Time and Time Again • Henry Beam Piper
... range of heights.[EN131] I would also suggest that the best proof of how empirical is the actual identification, will be found in the fact that the Jews—except only the Rev. Jos. Wolff (1821)—have never visited, nor made pilgrimages to, what ought to be one of their holiest of holy places. This crucial point has been utterly neglected by the officers of the Ordnance Survey of Sinai. It is evident that Jebel Serbal dates only from the early days of Koptic Christianity; that Jebel Mus, its Greek rival, rose ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... peculiar smile would creep across the big fellow's face when he caught Jack's eye. He was depending on this comrade to extricate him from the pit which his own carelessness had dug for his feet. And Bob was finding how good it was at such a crucial time in his life to have a reliable friend upon whom to lean. Again and again he doubtless told himself how lucky he was ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... the crucial moment and she looked at him with dumb appeal in her fine eyes. Then, seeing nothing in his face to reassure her, she dropped her gaze. Her chest heaved with a ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... or the penalties; but practically a reversion to the pre-latitudinarian line of demarcation between heresy and orthodoxy. All or very nearly all of the martyrs of the Marian persecution would have been sent to the stake under Henry for making the same profession of faith. The crucial question was acceptance of Transubstantiation, for the denial of which several victims had perished within the last twenty years, whose doom both Cranmer and Latimer had at the time held to be justified. But in the interval, the conditions had changed. A large proportion of ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... other English poets, seems to have had the power of seizing upon a character at a crucial hour in life and laying bare all the impulses that impel one to high achievement or great self-sacrifice. He seems always to have worked at the highest emotional stress, so that his words are surcharged ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... young lumberman from the upper Columbia, had been sent down with a special word from the manager commending him as a tried hand, equal to any post or service. The ditch superintendent was looking for such a man. He gave him those five crucial miles between the head-gates and Glenn's Ferry, the notorious beat that had sifted Finlayson's force without yet finding a man who could keep the banks. Some said it was the Arc-light saloon at Glenn's Ferry; some said it was the ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... undeveloped mineral resources such as lead, zinc, nickel, and gold. However, severe ethnic violence, the closing of key business enterprises, and an empty government treasury have led to serious economic disarray, indeed near collapse. Tanker deliveries of crucial fuel supplies (including those for electrical generation) have become sporadic due to the government's inability to pay and attacks against ships. Telecommunications are threatened by the nonpayment of bills and by the lack of technical and maintenance staff many of whom have left the country. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thankful to be alone. She knew the crucial moment of her life had passed, and she was glad that she had not fallen below her own ideals. It had been a wonderful experience; and in spite of the tears on her cheeks she was not sorry to have known it. Two facts, ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... moment to steady her voice, for a sudden desperate sense of loneliness and self-pity had overpowered her as she looked into the sea of faces turned to hers and saw—with the intense spiritual insight granted to the few in crucial moments—the conflicting emotions with which they ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... towers and spires of old Bannister were limned against the sky-line. Across the campus, on Bannister Field, the goal-posts, skeleton-like, kept their lonely vigil. On that field, in less than a week, the Gold and Green must face the crucial test—against Ballard's championship eleven, in the Biggest Game; and now, almost on the eve of battle, the shackles had been knocked from him; he was free of the great burden, free to serve his Alma Mater, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... stone of moral eminence, passed through a crucial ordeal, and it is to be greatly wondered at that the Negro woman emerged with even the crudest ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... great national humiliation, the upper classes awoke from their optimistic resignation. They had borne patiently the oppression of a semi-military administration, and for this! The system of Nicholas had been put to a crucial test, and found wanting. The policy which had sacrificed all to increase the military power of the Empire was seen to be a fatal error, and the worthlessness of the drill-sergeant regime was proved by bitter experience. Those administrative fetters which had for more ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... impossible, I told myself, that I had met the man before. His remarkable and uncommon cast of features had no niche in my recollection, and yet I knew that in some crucial moment I had looked into ...
— The House by the Lock • C. N. Williamson
... shaped all his insolent and yet skilful mixture of threats and promises so as to demonstrate the vanity of trust in Egypt or in Jehovah, or in any but 'the great king.' Isaiah had been labouring to lift his countrymen to the height of reliance on Jehovah alone, and now the crucial test of the truth of his contention had come. On the one hand were Sennacherib and his host, flushed with victory, and sure of crushing this puny kinglet Hezekiah and his obstinate little city, perched on its ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... we reach a crucial point, though it has usually been overlooked, in the lives of boys and girls, more especially those whose heredity may have been a little tainted or their upbringing a little twisted. For it is here that the transformation of energy and the resulting possibilities of conflict ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... at the crucial time is not usually a genius; he does not possess any more talent than others, but he has learned that results can only be produced by untiring concentrated effort. That "miracles," in business do not just ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... systematized into the theory of reflex actions, and with which I have attempted to associate this act of reflex vision. My sixth experiment, however, in the communication referred to, appears to me to be a crucial one, proving the correctness of my explanation, and I am not aware that ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... he was face to face with a question which, as lawyers say, required that the answer should be either "yes" or "no." Still, he made one more attempt to avert the crucial inquiry. ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... and with their work illuminated always by the highest intelligence, they moved surely from stage to stage; and at last, when they fitted a motor to their machine, such was their knowledge of the air, and of the control of their craft when in flight, that they were able to make this crucial step, from a glider to a machine driven by power, without any breakage of their ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... abound; and I noticed that numerous insects had been entrapped by the leaves. I carried home some plants, and on giving them insects saw the movements of the tentacles, and this made me think it probable that the insects were caught for some special purpose. Fortunately a crucial test occurred to me, that of placing a large number of leaves in various nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous fluids of equal density; and as soon as I found that the former alone excited energetic movements, it was obvious that here was a fine ...
— The Autobiography of Charles Darwin - From The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin • Charles Darwin
... was a question of history or of cosmogony, or whether he was handling a test-tube or a blow-pipe; what he was about I did not feel sure; but I took it for granted that it was some crucial question or other he was at work on, some point bearing on the thought of the time. For the Master, I have observed, is pretty sagacious in striking for the points where his work will be like to tell. We all know that class of scientific laborers to whom all facts ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... on the instant that he was making a grave mistake. This reference to her past as a mistress was crucial. On the instant she straightened up, and her eyes filled with a great pain. "So that's the way you talk to me, is it?" she asked. "I knew it! I knew it! ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... this chapter, which describes the crucial scene between Mathilda and her father, is the result of much revision from F of F—A. Some of the revisions are in S-R fr. In general the text of Mathilda is improved in style. Mary adds concrete, specific words and phrases; e.g., at the end of the first paragraph of Mathilda's speech, ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... worry. Roused in the earliest dawn by McNeil, they both crawled down to the water's edge and struggled to bind stubbornly resisting saplings together with cords twisted from bark. They reinforced them at crucial points with some strings torn from their kilts, and strips of rabbit hide saved from their kills of the past few days. They worked with hunger gnawing at them, having no time now to hunt. When the sun was well westward they had a clumsy craft which floated sluggishly. ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... when the victorious rangers had returned to Plattsburg it was a town of glad, thankful hearts, and human love ran strong. The thrilling stories of the day were told, the crucial moment, the providential way in which at every hopeless pass, some easy, natural miracle took place to fight their battle and back their country's cause. The harrying of the flying rear-guard, the ambuscade over the hill, the ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... small amount of water upon roasts gives better control by checking the roast at the proper point—the crucial time of its greatest heat; also, it swells and brightens the coffee, and tends to close the outer pores. While the addition of water is open to abuse, few roasters have soaked their coffees enough to offset the natural shrinkage as much as three or four ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... this were the crucial moment in a campaign and you saw that votes for a suffrage amendment were in the balance, you would give of the best that you have, with all the fervency of your heart. But campaigns are not won in a day. They are won ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Look Forward and Back at the Woman's Journal, the Organ of the - Woman's Movement • Agnes E. Ryan
... year, which many an intending missionary before Patteson has found a crucial test which he has not taken into his calculations. The soreness of the wrench from home is still fresh, and there is no settled or regular work to occupy the mind, while the hardships are exactly of the kind that have not been anticipated, ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... as I heard it last time I played at Trent Bridge; it was never in the papers, I believe," said Raffles gravely. "You may remember the tremendous excitement over the Test Matches out in Australia at the time: it seems that the result of the crucial game was expected on the condemned man's last day on earth, and he couldn't rest until he knew it. We pulled it off, if you recollect, and he said it ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... my ancient scientific reading, and I used it now to control some slight emotional weakness, and to explain it to myself. Half-starved, nay more than half-starved, as I was, such weakness was likely; I was amenable to suggestion. I asked myself a dozen crucial questions, and was bitterly amused to know how the preacher would evade answering them if put to him. Such a creature could not succeed, as all great teachers have done, in subduing the intellect by the force of his own ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... whenever possible. If we have to send the same child from the room frequently, a letter is sent to the parent stating the reason. (b) This has worked well with but three exceptions in four years. The crucial point is to find the name of the child. (c) We have never suspended a child for more than two months unless he were arrested for misbehavior. (d) An apology to the librarian ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... them answered. A queer, speculative look crept into Moira's eyes and Cumshaw paled a little beneath his tan. It was the crucial moment of the expedition, and the mere adoption of my suggestion meant that in the next few minutes we would be face to face with either failure or success—none of us knew which. While we were in ignorance there was ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... book, made substantially the same answer. "Mrs. Henderson's work is very interesting, but at my time of life it is not advisable to change life-long habits. I eat flesh moderately, and never drink much wine." They both seemed to overlook the crucial problem as to whether or not animal food contains hurtful poison. If it does, it should not be eaten at all. We never hear of sensible people taking arsenic, strychnine, or other poisons, in moderation, but many foolish women, I believe, take arsenic to pale their complexions, while ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... him, than to lob short and give him confidence by an easy kill. The value of a lob is mainly one of upsetting your opponent, and its effects are very apparent if you unexpectedly bring off one at the crucial period of ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... yet she did it—was, in a manner, surprised into doing it. For the young woman who has not loved, it is easy to doubt the existence of the seventh Heaven, or at least to reckon without its possibilities. At the very crucial moment the clear-sighted inner self was assuring her that this cold-eyed young man, who walked in the paths of righteousness because he found them easier and pleasanter than the way of the transgressor, was at best only a mildly exciting apotheosis of the ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... of calling them was soon suspended, and never has been renewed. The only public office of consequence held by them was bestowed by the Republicans but a year or two ago, when Miss Reel was made State Superintendent of Schools. In our late crucial election, Wyoming and its woman suffrage gave their voices for Populism and Free Coinage. The scale hung in the balance. Why, if woman is a greater political power for good than man, did she not turn it for the principles which the State had held were best? ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... normal consciousness from its seat and permit the subliminal self to take control. In other words, it practically put him back in the identical mental mood of the afternoon of January 9th, and that was the crucial point of the ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... important item of diocesan and divine service, "Hymns, Ancient and Modern," be it well known, has stood the crucial test of a number of years; while its mechanical characteristics have been demonstrated all the way along the metronome number of decades it has served to mollify and assuage the griefs and passions, and ...
— Original Letters and Biographic Epitomes • J. Atwood.Slater
... comprehensive estimate of the mise-en-scene. Enough has been said, we believe, in our discussion of the criticism and acting and in our analysis of his dramatic values, to show that the aberrations of Plautus' commentators have been due to their failure to reach the crucial point: the absolute license with which his plays were acted and intended to be acted is at once the explanation of their absurdities and deficiencies. This was true in a far less degree of Terence, who dealt in plots more stataria and less motoria.[190] Though using the same store of models, ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... cowardly. And don't mind our evading the subject—we always do that on principle, but please don't be scared, or at least don't show it, whatever you may feel. If there is one thing a woman dislikes more than another it is a man who shows cowardice at the crucial point ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the least detail is of importance and that we are nearly attaining our object. But we must hurry. This is a crucial moment." ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... invite the proper people to meet each other, to seat them so that they can have an agreeable conversation, that is the trying and crucial test. Little dinners are social; little dinners are informal; little dinners make people friends. And we do not mean little in regard to numbers or to the amount of good food; ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... wonder why I am moved to say all this? It is, I think, because of your saying "the article sent to St. Nicholas was the best you would be able to do for years to come" and I saw you were going to make it a crucial test of your ability. That is, forgive me, nothing but nonsense. Whatever the article may be, you may write one infinitely superior to it next week or month. Just in proportion as you feel more deeply, or notice more ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... fortitude to his aid; he fell back upon his clear conscience and comported himself with dignity, showing all reasonable courtesy to his successor and only perhaps seeming a little deficient in filial piety in presenting so striking a contrast to the shameful conduct of his father in a like crucial hour. His retirement brought to a close a list of Presidents who deserved to be called statesmen in the highest sense of that term, honorable men, pure patriots, and, with perhaps one exception, all of the first order of ability in public affairs. It is necessary to come far ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... nudging him. It was Johnson's finger diverted his eyes to the crucial place in the prayer-book to ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... McPherson for a week's absence, and meant in the evening to explain to Brace and Lynda the reason for his journey. He was going to start South on the morrow, whether a letter came or not. He had steeled himself for the crucial hour with his friends; had already, in his imagination, bidden farewell to the relations that had held them close through the past years. He believed, because he was capable of paying this heavy price for his love, that no further proof would ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... asked. They had only tried to get even—for the sake of their honour. All this showed a most unsatisfactory spirit from the Government point of view, and it was evident that the brigade could not leave the valley until the tribesmen adopted a more submissive attitude. The matter reverted to the crucial point. Would they give up their rifles or not? To this they replied evasively, that they would consult their fellow-tribesmen and return an answer on the next day. This practically amounted to a refusal, and as no reply was received on the 27th, the ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... things in this good world. Lemon, in fact, has always disagreed with me, as Professor Allen or Sir Robert Sawyer will be able to assure you; so your valuable experiment can be put, in my case, to a crucial test.—Very faithfully yours, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... mistake might be fatal. After a time the man returned to the request, and his master yielded. Both fasted from one week's end to the other and purified themselves, and then went through all the ceremony of summoning the Archangel of the Law, but at the crucial moment of the invocation Rabbi Israel cried out, "We have made a slip. The Angel of Fire is coming instead. He will burn up the town. Run and tell the people to quit their dwellings and snatch up their ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... replied Drillford. "I should say that whatever he is now, he has been a gentleman. He was extremely nervous and so on while we were questioning him about the ring, but when it came to the crucial point, and I charged him and warned him, he turned strangely cool. I'll tell you what he said, in his exact words. 'I'm absolutely innocent of that!' he said. 'But I can see that I've placed myself in a very strange position.' And after that he would say no more—he hasn't ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... emerged from one of those crucial experiences of life, which, more than the turning of the earth upon its axis, serve to age a human being. For perhaps the first time in the brief span of his remembrance, he had scrutinized himself in the pitiless light of an intelligence higher than his own everyday consciousness; ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... to its inadequacy that Mr. Gosse's treatment of Browne as an artist in language is the least satisfactory part of his book: for it is difficult not to think that upon this crucial point Mr. Gosse has for once been deserted by his sympathy and his acumen. In spite of what appears to be a genuine delight in Browne's most splendid and characteristic passages, Mr. Gosse cannot help protesting somewhat acrimoniously against that ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... Observations was the most timely publication in the Rowley controversy. His work appeared just as the debate over the authenticity of the poems attributed to a fifteenth-century priest was, after twelve years, entering its most crucial phase.[1] These curious poems had come to the attention of the reading public in 1769, when Thomas Chatterton sent several fragments to the Town and Country Magazine. The suicide of the young poet in 1770 made his story of discovering ancient manuscripts ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... must be kept Christians, educated and civilized. Here is the crucial point. In reading criticisms upon the Mission system of dealing with the Indians, one constantly meets with such passages as the following: "The fatal defect of this whole Spanish system was that no effort was made to educate the Indians, or teach them ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... religions of the Rose and Grape Have bound us in to their sad Paradise: We dream in crucial symbols, nor escape The cypress-garden where the slain god lies. Daughters of lamentation round the Cross Where Beauty suffers garlanded with thorn, Remembrancers through all the Night of Loss, We bear the spikenard of the ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... On these crucial points the evidence at our disposal is far from complete, and we can do little more than offer suggestions towards the ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... The crucial test was essayed on August 5th, 1908. Accompanied by twelve observers the vessel ascended and travelled without incident for eight hours. Then a slight mishap demanded attention, but was speedily repaired, and was ignored officially as ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... family and friends. And the supreme tragedy of the hour for them was not her approaching dissolution, but it was that one who had testified so often and so victoriously of her faith had lost it at the crucial moment. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... the nerves, when you are suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs of hunger, you are not, to put it mildly, at your best as a member of the social order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed to remember, but both men grew carefuller at crucial moments, and the talkative one more silent ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... the 7th of March speech, he was inconsistent with his past, such inconsistency must appear, if at all, in his general tone in regard to slavery, in his views as to the policy of compromise, and in his attitude toward the extension of slavery, the really crucial question ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... place, was known as the best goal-keeper on record, a reputation which no boy could have gained without promptness and courage. He was also one of the best swimmers in the school, his weakness of ankle being no drawback here, and in his last half passed the crucial test of that day, by swimming from Swift's (the bathing-place of the sixth) to the mill on the Leicester road, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognizing the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus, ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the precedent of the simple Action Film tiny wax models of the figures, toned and costumed to the heart's delight, would tell the high points of the story. Let them represent, perhaps, seven crucial situations from the proposed photoplay. Let them be designed as uniquely in their dresses as are the Russian dancers' dresses, by Leon Bakst. Then to alternate with these, seven little paintings of ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... Thou hast conquered," were the words that came to her when the crucial test had been passed, and she had parted with ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... impromptu solo with trills and embellishments, was taken in hand by the enraptured organist who had played there for thirty years, and developed into a great composer. Omitting a mass of other absurdities scattered through the book, I will criticise this crucial point. There are no organs or organists in Russia; there are no pews, or aisles, or galleries for the choir, and there are never any trills or embellishments in the church music. A boy could skate to church in New York more readily than in ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... irony, as when commending Claudius for "clemency," in allowing a man,—whom he has sentenced to execution, to choose his own mode of death. His close, dry way, too, of saying things savours of harshness, and differs widely from the Greek severeness of manner observable in Tacitus. The crucial test is to be found in a few trifling matters of style. So far from displaying the same care as Tacitus to avoid a discordant jingle of three like endings, he will write bad Latin to get at the intolerable recurrence. Rather than have a similar ending to three words Tacitus will ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... often a failure to distinguish between the possible inheritance of a particular modification, and the possible inheritance of indirect results of that modification, or of changes correlated with it. This is a nice but crucial point on which most popular writers are confused. Let us examine it through a hypothetical case. A woman, not herself strong, bears a child that is weak. The woman then goes in for athletics, in order better ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... 'creation' of the new part of distinctly higher scope in Mr. Gilbert's one act drama, 'Comedy and Tragedy,' produced for the first time on Saturday night. Though passing in a single scene, this piece furnishes a more crucial test of Miss Anderson's powers than any of her previous assumptions in this country. Unfortunately it also assigns limits to those powers which few actresses of the second or even third rank need despair of attaining. Such a piece as this, it will be seen, makes the highest ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... should resist invasion, would be protected, and this word they thought must be kept at all hazards. It made no difference that, aside from her great navy, England was utterly unprepared for the war. Like the decision which Belgium had had to make the day before, this was a crucial step for the British to take, but to their everlasting honor they did not hesitate. In the case of Germany's declaration of war the German laws say that no war can be declared by the Kaiser alone unless it is a defensive war. Therefore, as one American ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment he always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential that his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity, timidity, intolerance. The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were what he sought. He must reveal himself ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... This was always the crucial moment with my Klootchman, when her voice lowers, and she asks if you know things. You must be diplomatic, and never question her in turn. If you do her lips will close ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... only George's wife to her, while George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, soul of her soul. Though her choice was not deliberate, though it was unconscious and instinctive—nevertheless, she had chosen. At the crucial moment instinct had risen superior to reason, and she had chosen, not with her judgment, but with every quivering nerve and fibre of her being. Gabriella was right, but George was her son; and had it been possible to secure George's happiness by sacrificing the right ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... from either cathead to within a couple of feet of the water. A lookout was stationed on the bowsprit end, another in the crosstrees; and the whole ship's company crowded forward, scouting for enemies or friends. It was now the crucial moment of our enterprise; we were now risking liberty and credit; and that for a sum so small to a man in my bankrupt situation, that I could have laughed aloud in bitterness. But the piece had been arranged, and we must play ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... all theories of myth or parable in the scriptural account, and accept the record as it stands; and with equal assurance may we affirm that the temptations were real, and that the trials to which our Lord was put constituted an actual and crucial test. To believe otherwise, one must regard the scriptures as ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... the evidence before the magistrates with great care, and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who followed everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special note of Mr. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and loudly demanding an immediate vote. More than one of the chief orators of the party,—men well known to the country—had in vain attempted to be heard. Chaos seemed to have come again at the crucial moment that McKenzie, standing upon his chair in the centre of the vast enclosure, began: "If I speak longer than two minutes, I hope that some honest half-drowned Democrat will suspend my carcass from one of the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... motive than that of establishing its authenticity. If this man had procured the death of him whose portrait he studied thus, his power over himself was indeed wonderful. But—was not the experiment a crucial one for him? To betray his trouble would be to avow all? How ardently I longed to place my hand upon his heart at that moment ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... from the front line to the middle line, but from the middle line itself to the base line. Leibniz, for example, writes with perfect seriousness and decency about the Christian scheme of redemption, but it hardly looks like being for him a crucial deliverance from perdition. It is not the intervention of Mercy, by which alone He possesses himself of [10] us: it is one of the ways in which supreme Benevolence carries out a cosmic policy; and God's ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... upon the campaign in North America. No wonder the President accepted Castlereagh's offer with alacrity. To the three commissioners sent to Russia, he added Henry Clay and Jonathan Russell and bade them Godspeed while he nerved himself to meet the crucial year ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... species must be chiefly considered, as they have had time to be modified by the conditions. If you can give me the facts, or your general impression from your study of these floras, I shall be much obliged. I see, of course, many other objections to Geddes's theory, but this seems to offer a crucial test.—Believe me yours ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... rebated cross, gammadion, fylfot, saltire, swastika, cross bottony. Associated Words: crucify, crucifixion, crucifier, cruciform, crucial, cruciate, crucigerous, crucifer, vexillum, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... latest example I have selected, it is a crucial one. The Letters of Malachi Malagrowther come from a man who is not often rated high as a political thinker, even by those who sympathise with his political views. But here as elsewhere the politician, no less than the ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... his greatest crisis of responsibility, and his face puckered up as he glanced at his men and grasped the fact that they were looking to him to lead. They were ready enough to obey his orders, but not to give him the advice which he needed at such a crucial time. ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... was grave enough, but it brought a good hope that the crucial moment might be postponed until many of the men would be too far gone in liquor to take any active part. Lidgerwood took the precautions made advisable by Tryon's threat to steal an engine, sending word to Benson to double his guards on the locomotives in the yard, and to Dawson to block the ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... them anew, as often as they returned baffled and discouraged, with his own perennial enthusiasm. Between 1435 and 1460, famous captains in his service—Gil Eannes, Denis Diaz, the Venetian Cadamosto—made those crucial voyages round the Point of Bojador, past the desert to Cape Verde, and beyond as far as Sierra Leone. After 1443 the labors of the Navigator were no longer thought to be wasted; for when the rich traffic in slaves and gold was opened up to Portugal, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... one charge him with weakness? Think of the tragedy of a whole life compressed in that one crucial hour! ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Mr. Hannaway Wells put in, with a very non-committal air, "will probably be America. She will bring her full strength into the struggle just at the crucial moment. She will probably do what we farther north have as yet failed to do: she will pierce the line and place the German armies in ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... And he could recall what Sir James had not seen—the strangeness of Alicia's manner, and the peremptoriness with which she had endeavored to carry him home with her. Had she—after hearing the story—tried to interrupt or postpone the crucial scene with Diana? That seemed to him the probable explanation, and the idea roused in him a hot and impotent anger. What business ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... by which to live. We don't have to talk late into the night about which form of government is better. We don't have to wrest justice from the kings. We only have to summon it from within ourselves. We must act on what we know. I take as my guide the hope of a saint: In crucial things, unity; in important things, ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... that, no doubt, still a few days later, at an hour that has never ceased to recur to me all my life as crucial, as supremely determinant. The travelling-carriage had stopped at a village on the way from Lyons to Geneva, between which places there was then no railway; a village now nameless to me and which was not yet Nantua, in the Jura, where we were to ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... of the words and a sudden movement from Hilton woke her to alarm. David had turned to the window, and she felt that he had heard and understood. The silence pressed on her like a dead weight. For Hilton, this was the crucial moment of his ordeal. He had understood only too clearly, and this second proof of the harm a petty sin could radiate struck through him the same fiery repulsion which had stung him to revolt when he quitted Marston's rooms. ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... have been but brief and such a step would have been equivalent to abandoning the political arena. Only a very strong arm could save him, and with consummate insight he may have appreciated the Tokugawa chief's unreadiness to precipitate a crucial struggle ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... station which the totality of its experiences through many lives entitles it. There is but one law, but one method that abides. It is the spiritual law of evolution; everyone is held by it; all who seem exempt today from its influence upon their lives, have already passed the crucial tests, or are traveling forward ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... inciting "Ulster" to bloodshed in the next. This is not hypocrisy, it is genius. It is also, by the way, the genesis of the Irish Question. If anyone is disposed to underrate the mad passions of which race hatred can slip the leash, let him recall the crucial examples which we have had in our own time. We have in our own time seen Great Britain inflamed by two frenzies—against France, and against the Boer Republics. In the history of public opinion there are no two chapters more discreditable. In the days of Fashoda ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... fling them into the scale. The hitherto timorous light troops and armor bearers rush up to do what they can. Individual bravery and valor count now to the uttermost. Little by little the contest turns against one side or the other. The crucial moment comes. The losing party begins to fear itself about to be surrounded. Vain are the last exhortations of the officers to rally them. "Every man for himself!" rings the cry; and with one mad impulse the defeated hoplites rush off the field in a rout. Since they ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... have gone through a crisis as Paul did, been convicted of sin in some striking manner, and have descended into the depths of humiliation and despair, and then, when all seemed lost, have heard the voice of forgiveness and acceptance and felt indeed that you were now a child of God. This crucial experience the candidate for church membership was called on to relate before the elders of the church, and if the story rang true, he or she was in due time enrolled in the company of the elect few. No doubt about its being a real ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... positively reels before the story that is here revealed; we, who are feebly accustomed to regard the course of recorded history as the crucial and critical period of the life of the world, must be sobered by the reflection that the whole of the known history of the human race is not the thousandth, not the ten-thousandth part of the history of the planet. What does this vast and incredible panorama mean ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... they carried him home and nursed him; but his face grew so thin and his manner so morose that by and by all began to suspect that the true Rickard was gone and a changeling put in his place. Rickard, with all his accomplishments, was no musician; and so, in order to put the matter to a crucial test, a bagpipe was left in the room by the side of his bed. The trick succeeded. One hot summer's day, when all were supposed to be in the field making hay, some members of the family secreted in a clothes-press saw the bedroom door open a little way, and a ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Osiris and Horus, Dr. Alan Gardiner (in a criticism of Sir James Frazer's "The Golden Bough: Adonis, Attis, Osiris; Studies in the History of Oriental Religion," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. II, 1915, p. 122) insists upon the crucial fact that Osiris was primarily a king, and that "it is always as a dead king," "the role of the living king being invariably played by ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... about and not give way until the crucial moment. You must have had a bad time of it, my poor Mazeroux, for of course you agreed ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... "Just at the crucial moment, Terry met an old friend who offered him a political job, organising republican workingmen's clubs, and Terry accepted it. No one can understand how bitter this was to Terry. To work for a political organisation was to him great degradation. ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... you think. I'm a fine specimen of a man to send on a hunt like that. A weak-kneed mollycoddle who passes into a state of coma at the crucial moment. But—I'm going to give you ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... its nature largely restricted to the use of symbolism and having at its disposal a vast store of images endlessly susceptible to influences which combine and alter their form, we reach the crucial question, what initiates the dream? This is by no means a mere purposeless thronging of visual images as occasionally happens in the period preceding sleep when faces, forms and scenes flit aimlessly before the mind's eye, some bare replicas of stimulations ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... line as these words were spoken, and in two minutes we got the word to go, and the great Modena car rushed away like some giant bird upon the wing. This was the crucial stage of that famous race, when we had to climb the Arlberg Mountains and drop down to Innsbruck. It was the day which saw Edge the proud winner of the Gordon Bennett Cup, and the morning upon which Jarrott broke up ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... to the pen is cowardly. And don't mind our evading the subject—we always do that on principle, but please don't be scared, or at least don't show it, whatever you may feel. If there is one thing a woman dislikes more than another it is a man who shows cowardice at the crucial point ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... 88 ranch-house, did not smoke. He did not feel like it. He did not feel like doing anything but facing Lanpher. What he would be moved to do while facing Lanpher he was not sure. Time enough to cross that bridge when the crucial moment should arrive. He knew what he wanted to do, but he knew, too, that he could not do it unless Lanpher made the first break. Otherwise it would be murder, and Racey was ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... literature of American slavery is, indeed, a summary of the literature of the world on the subject. The Bible was made a standard text-book both for and against slavery. Hebrew and Christian experiences were exploited in the interest of the contending parties in this crucial controversy. Churches of the same name and order were divided among themselves and became ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy
... following Nannie's outburst with a mind heavy laden. That had been his mental condition, indeed, much of the time since he turned farmer, and I may add that his thoughts occasionally ran in a sarcastic vein—a course ordinarily foreign to him. Shortly before that crucial point in his career, his marriage to Nannie, Randolph Chance had loaned him a beautiful idyl, termed "Liberty and a Living." Randolph himself had read this as a thirsty man reads of cool, rock-paved brooks; Steve read ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... a superannuated man with an income ample for the modest requirements of himself and Mary. On the subject of his retirement he wrote some touching letters to friends such as Wordsworth and Bernard Barton, and also in his accustomed manner made the crucial event the subject of a delightful "Elia" essay. He had before expatiated on the excellent position of the authors who were not "authors for bread"—men who like himself were employed in business during the day and had to dally with literature in off hours. Certainly Lamb's ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... in the letter? There was the critical and crucial question. No matter how artful and cajoling an apology she wrote, she knew exactly how he would treat it. He would write a civil, formal reply, assuring her that her apology was accepted, and there the matter would stand forever. For she had put herself terribly in the wrong; she had ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Bjoernson's The Father and Maupassant's The Piece of String this simplicity is equal to that of the anecdote, but in no case can an anecdote possess the dramatic possibilities of these simple short-stories; for a short-story must always have that tensity of emotion that comes only in the crucial ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... instrumental than nutrition is, since it serves a soul as yet non-existent, while nutrition is useful to a soul that already has some actuality. Reproduction initiates life and remains at life's core, a function without which no other, in the end, would be possible. It is more central, crucial, and representative than nutrition, which is in a way peripheral only; it is a more typical and rudimentary act, marking the ideal's first victory over the universal flux, before any higher function than reproduction itself ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... omitted labour prima facie under a disadvantage which is all their own. My meaning will be best illustrated if I may be allowed to adduce and briefly discuss a few examples. And I will begin with a crucial case;—the most conspicuous doubtless within the whole compass of the New Testament. I mean the last twelve verses of St. Mark's Gospel; which verses are either bracketed off, or else entirely severed from the rest of the Gospel, by ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... here, now that the smoke of battle has rolled away. An epic could be written upon the conflict, if there were space: Canto One, the first position carried triumphantly, though at some expense, by the Worthington forces, who elect the Speaker. That had been a crucial time before the town meetings, when Jethro abdicated. The Worthington Speaker goes ahead with his committees, and it is needless to say that Mr. Chauncey Weed is not made Chairman of the Committee on Corporations. As an offset to this, the Jethro forces ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... recognize the hour when laziness begins to set in. Some people it attacks after dinner; some after lunch; and some after seven o'clock in the evening. There is in every person's life a crucial hour in the day, which must be employed instead of wasted if the day is to be saved. With most people the early morning hour becomes the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... "what you think. I'm a fine specimen of a man to send on a hunt like that. A weak-kneed mollycoddle who passes into a state of coma at the crucial moment. But—I'm going to give you ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... he next enters is for a thoughtful man in a sceptical and corrupted age the crucial phase, whereby will be determined, not indeed the fate of his soul, but the justice, and therefore the advantage to others, of ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... reverent record of those crucial moments when men burst through their habits, a love of the past would not be the butt on which every sophomoric radical can practice his wit. But almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... talk late into the night about which form of government is better. We don't have to wrest justice from the kings. We only have to summon it from within ourselves. We must act on what we know. I take as my guide the hope of a saint: In crucial things, unity; in important things, ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... play for the public and not at it, although such a change would be highly desirable. I dare not even dream of beholding the actor's back throughout an important scene, but I wish with all my heart that crucial scenes might not be played in the centre of the proscenium, like duets meant to bring forth applause. Instead, I should like to have them laid in the place indicated by the situation. Thus I ask for no revolutions, but only for a few minor modifications. To make a real ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... are all crucial. For the first law of all learning is self-activity. There is no possibility of teaching a child who is not mentally awake. Only the active mind grasps, assimilates, remembers, applies. The birth of new ideas, the reaching ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... assistance, for every one who clung to the worship of the old gods was to assemble in the sanctuary of Isis; and the more brilliant and splendid the ceremony could be made the more would that enthusiasm be fired which, only too soon, would be put to crucial proof. On quitting the temple the crowd of worshippers, all in holiday garb, were to pass in front of the Prefect's residence, and if only they could effect this great march through the city in the right frame of mind, it might confidently be expected that every ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the new map of Europe will be drawn.... Each of the diplomatists will come to that business with a certain pre-occupation. Each will be thinking of his country as one thinks of a patient of doubtful patience and temper who is coming-to out of the drugged stupor of a crucial, ill-conceived, and unnecessary operation ... Each will be thinking of Labour, wounded and perplexed, returning to the disorganised or nationalised factories from which Capital has gone a-fighting, and to which ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... dovetail, splice, link; lace, tat. mat, plait, plat, braid, felt, twill; tangle, entangle, ravel; net, knot; dishevel, raddle[obs3]. Adj. crossing &c. v.; crossed, matted &c, v. transverse. cross, cruciform, crucial; retiform[obs3], reticular, reticulated; areolar[obs3], cancellated[obs3], grated, barred, streaked; textile; crossbarred[obs3], cruciate[obs3], palmiped[obs3], secant; web-footed. Adv. cross, thwart, athwart, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... problem of African slavery was the incidental issue of Free Trade and Protection,—apparently only economical and industrial in character, but in reality fundamentally crucial. And behind this lay the constitutional question, involving as it did not only the conflicting theories of a strict or liberal construction of the fundamental law, but nationality also,—the right of a Sovereign State to withdraw from the Union created ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... good. The ship was, however, still in the comparatively spacious lagoon inside the reef. The crucial test of Ned's ability would come when she passed into the narrow tortuous channel leading through the reef to the open sea. But that one trial had sufficed to demonstrate to Ned that the ship, even under the comparatively small amount of canvas then set, was ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... have refrained from quoting Radisson's names for the different Indian tribes because it would only be "caviare to the general." If Radisson's manuscript be consulted it will be seen that the crucial point is the whereabouts of the Mascoutins—or people of the fire. Reference to the last part of Appendix E will show that these people extended far beyond the Wisconsin to the Missouri. It is ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... master of Senlis's heart weakened when the crucial moment came. He was at the Hotel du Grand Cerf, where a dinner was being prepared by scared servants for thirty German officers. The order was about to be signed when suddenly a cure, small and pale, but lion-brave, entered the room. How he got in no one knew! Surprise held the general ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... uncertain this sterility is, how unknown the conditions on which it depends, I say that we have no right to affirm that those conditions will not be better understood by and by, and we have no ground for supposing that we may not be able to experiment so as to obtain that crucial result which I mentioned just now. So that though Mr. Darwin's hypothesis does not completely extricate us from this difficulty at present, we have not the least right to say it ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... and posterior, are situated between the femur and tibia, and according to Smith,[34] the crucial ligaments are necessary to properly join the two bones, because of the character of the structure of the articular ends ...
— Lameness of the Horse - Veterinary Practitioners' Series, No. 1 • John Victor Lacroix
... my little finger, people ran after me and that one experience with her has broken me. Oh, don't think,' he went on quickly, 'that I am broken in love. I never loved her very much, it was just a passing passion, but she killed my self-confidence. After then, whenever I came to a crucial moment in my affairs, when the big manner, the big certainty was absolutely necessary for me to carry my way, whenever I was most confident of myself and my ability and my scheme, a vision of this damned girl rose and I felt that momentary weakening, that memory of defeat, which made ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... done much, but in your close application to the conquest of difficulties you have missed many things by the way. I give you credit for patience and faith—these have accomplished much for you- -and now you are at a crucial point in your career when your Will, like the rudder of a ship, trembles in your hand, and you are plunging into unknown further deeps where there may be storm and darkness. There is danger ahead for any doubting, proud, or rebellious soul,—it is ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... was a chaos of conflicting emotions, but a single abiding conviction never once left him—he retained implicit faith in her, and he purposed to fight this matter out with Hampton. Even in that crucial hour, had any one ventured to suggest that he was in love with Naida, he would merely have laughed, serenely confident that nothing more than gentlemanly interest swayed his conduct. It was true, he greatly admired the girl, recalled to memory her every movement, her slightest glance, her most ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... the interests of education, and for the purpose of reviving Scottish learning, that Melville had been induced to come back to his native land, and it will be convenient to devote a chapter to this subject before we consider the graver, more crucial interests in which he was destined to take a decisive part. He had not been many days in the country when Regent Morton offered him an appointment as Court Chaplain, with the ulterior view of attaching ...
— Andrew Melville - Famous Scots Series • William Morison
... attention to the West Indies as the great theater in which was played the drama of history in the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sugar is presented as king. The author is chiefly concerned with the crucial test to which the company was subjected, the establishment of the Brandenburgers at St. Thomas, the leasing of Guinea and St. Thomas, the governorship of John Lorentz, the plantation colonies of St. Thomas and St. John, the introduction of slavery, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... show you a means of escape should the worst happen—a stout door which will hold back pursuers for a long time. It opens from a room which shall be yours for the time. The key shall be in your possession. Study to look innocent, Hannah, when you are questioned, and in a crucial moment you may prove a far better defence than ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... crucial question—so appealing in unselfish love, so vividly portraying her impending desolation, that for an instant her resolution departed. What would she do without him? God knew! ...
— The Mother • Norman Duncan
... second the intense, peering effort of his stare. Each of them was as if utterly alone with his task. It did not occur to them to speak. There was nothing in common between them but the knowledge that the damaged lighter must be slowly but surely sinking. In that knowledge, which was like the crucial test of their desires, they seemed to have become completely estranged, as if they had discovered in the very shock of the collision that the loss of the lighter would not mean the same thing to them both. This common danger brought their differences ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... child Edward, aged 18 months, with some swinepox virus, and as nothing untoward happened, he inoculated him again with swinepox on April 7, 1791. The child had a slight illness, very like vaccinia, from which he rapidly recovered. The moment for the crucial experiment was not yet; it came in due time, but Jenner had to wait five years for it, and five years are a long time to a man who is yearning to perform his crucial experiment. Happily for suffering humanity, in the early summer of 1796 ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... and consentaneity of such a mass of varied recorded matter. The age, indeed, breathes sublimity, and abounds with the marvellous, the romantic, and the grotesque. But as I have already stated, the presence or absence of these qualities has no crucial significance. Love and reverence and the poetic imagination always effect such changes in the object of their passion. They are the essential condition of the transference of the real into the world of art. ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... extensive as it was, did not altogether satisfy me. I made little of the inconsistencies betrayed by the various counsels of the Areopagus, but I closed the whole solemnity with one crucial interrogatory: "What the dickens does Fortnoye come prowling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... was she not Brian Wendover's affianced wife? How far was she to trust in him, to lean upon him, in this crucial hour of her life? There had been so much playfulness in their love-making, his tone had been for the most part so light and sportive, that now, when she stood, as it were, face to face with destiny, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... skillful and daring sailors of Italy and Portugal, and inspired them anew, as often as they returned baffled and discouraged, with his own perennial enthusiasm. Between 1435 and 1460, famous captains in his service—Gil Eannes, Denis Diaz, the Venetian Cadamosto—made those crucial voyages round the Point of Bojador, past the desert to Cape Verde, and beyond as far as Sierra Leone. After 1443 the labors of the Navigator were no longer thought to be wasted; for when the rich traffic in slaves and gold was opened up to Portugal, the greed of gain was added to scientific ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... You don't think she eloped with your Jap or stole the spoons, do you?" snapped Carson. He had been interrupted at the crucial point in a game of cribbage with Poker Face and the cattleman's weak spot was cribbage. He ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... at that critical and crucial moment we cannot tell, but the professor's thoughts were swift, varied, tremendous—almost sublime, and once or twice ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... taking the hint, had said 'Yes!' By May 1754 Adamson and Mrs. Myers, who was in the cab with Elizabeth, would believe that Adamson had asked 'What kind of place is it?' and that Elizabeth then spoke, without suggestion, of the hay. The point would be crucial, but nobody in 1754 appears to have remembered that on February 21, three weeks after the event, at the trial of Mother Wells, Adamson had given exactly the same evidence as in May 1754. 'I returned to ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... the ice of Caina, the region where traitors are immersed up to their heads, Dante hits his foot violently against the face of Bocca degli Abati who betrayed the Florentines at the crucial battle of Montaperti. "Weeping it cried out to me: 'Why tramplest thou on me? If thou comest not to increase the vengeance for Montaperti, why dost thou molest me?' I said: 'What art thou who thus reproachest others?' 'Nay who art thou' he answered 'that through the Antenora ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... analytical apparatus, of a sufficiently delicate nature, was then wholly unknown. Indeed it is only within the last few years that it has been possible to carry out experiments which may be regarded as at all crucial. A short sketch of the development of our knowledge of the relation of nitrogen to the plant ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... irrepressible conflict; statesmanship of his course; challenges Douglas to joint debate; misrepresentations of his position on slavery; his appeal to "the fathers"; his accusation against the South; his crucial question to Douglas; Douglas's reply; his position on Dred Scott decision; accused of duplicity; his views as to slavery under the Constitution considered; on Abolitionists; on negro race; his freedom from animosity ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... manifest as his self-consciousness when he says in my text, 'This is what I was saved for. Not merely, not even principally, for the blessings that thereby accrue to myself, but that in me, as a crucial instance, there should be manifested the whole fulness of the divine love and saving power.' So he puts his own experience as giving no kind of honour or glory to himself, but as simply showing the grace and infinite ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to the masses, to the peasant, and the peer; He is calling to all classes, that the crucial hour is near; For each rotting throne must tremble, and fall broken in the dust, With the leaders who dissemble, ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... you fool!" The Colonel dodged rapidly out of the door to evade the human tornado within, and the situation became crucial. Even the tinsmith, who arrived at that moment, a man of phlegmatic disposition, was moved out of his habitual calm and ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... return for a moment to Shakespeare, and to observe in one crucial instance the effect of the quest for logic in a single line. In the fine scene where John hints to Hubert at Arthur's murder, he speaks these lines (in ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... realize the crucial importance of freshness when it comes to produce. In the same way that seeds gradually die, fruits and vegetables go through a similar process as their nutritional content gradually oxidizes or is broken down by the vegetables own enzymes, but vegetables lose nutrition hundreds of times ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... our spirit." Hungary liberated was to become the centre of freedom for all the races under the Austrian crown, and the outcome was to be a new "fraternization of the Austrian peoples." In the enthusiasm of the moment the crucial question of the position to be occupied by the conflicting nationalities in this "fraternal union" was overlooked. Germanism had so far served as the basis of the Austrian system, not as a national ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... is but one law, but one method that abides. It is the spiritual law of evolution; everyone is held by it; all who seem exempt today from its influence upon their lives, have already passed the crucial tests, or are traveling ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... realization, then, why had she told? Cry the woman a fool! She was a fool. Most good women are. But just as the matter is vital in the mind of a man, so is it in the woman the crucial test of honour. A thousand reasons—her happiness—the happiness of content,—the sheltering of her name, the sheltering of her position, all the cared-for security of her life to follow—these can be placed in the scale, weighty arguments against that little drachm of abstract ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... accustomed. The one restraint she had was fear of what he might do; and that fear was beginning to decline in face of stronger impulses towards the opportunity which marriage with Gaga would produce. And just in this crucial stage of her reflections came a most striking fresh influence. It was brought by Miss Summers, who returned from the telephone with a solemn expression upon ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... of recent oceanographic research has shown that the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), an ocean current that flows from west to east around Antarctica, plays a crucial role in global ocean circulation. The region where the cold waters of the ACC meet and mingle with the warmer waters of the north defines a distinct border - the Antarctic Convergence - which fluctuates with the seasons, but which encompasses a discrete ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... by the expert Squash Tennis players for more and more speed and a higher pressurized ball, a novice quickly became discouraged with his initial efforts at playing the game. For many crucial years, therefore, the game was not adopted by new players and there was no broad base of tyros. Plainly and simply the avid duffers, which every sport must have if it is to survive and retain its popularity, took up a less frustrating, ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... Vicksburg and its consequences gave them the Mississippi, the first attempt to invade from that side under Rosecrans had suffered defeat in the bloody battle of the Chickamauga. Sherman and Thomas resolved to reverse this unfavourable decision and attacked at the same crucial point. An action lasting four days and full of picturesque episodes gave them the victory which was the starting-point of all that followed. To that action belongs the strange fight of Look Out ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... Independence neared, the stress grew greater. George Washington's Mt. Vernon overseer during the crucial years, his distant relative Lund Washington, addressed a ...
— The Bounty of the Chesapeake - Fishing in Colonial Virginia • James Wharton
... to speak of woman's tenderness, but there is no tenderness like that of a man for the woman he loves when she is tired or troubled, and the man who has learned simply to love a woman at crucial moments, and to postpone the inevitable idiotic questioning till a more auspicious time, has in his hands the ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... is the most important tattoo of the Igorot, since it marks its wearer as a taker of at least one human head. It therefore stands for a successful issue in the most crucial test of the fitness of a person to contribute to the strength of the group of which he is a unit. It no doubt gives its wearer a certain advantage in combat — a confidence and conceit in his own ability, and, likely, it tends to unnerve a combatant who has not the same emblem ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... angles to the apparent axes of elevation, would be the one to examine. If you go to the head of Glen Roy, attend to the apparent shelf above the highest one in Glen Roy, lying on the south side of Loch Spey, and therefore beyond the watershed of Glen Roy. It would be a crucial case. I was too unwell on that day to examine it carefully, and I had no levelling instruments. Do these fragments coincide in level with Glen ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... all other English poets, seems to have had the power of seizing upon a character at a crucial hour in life and laying bare all the impulses that impel one to high achievement or great self-sacrifice. He seems always to have worked at the highest emotional stress, so that his words are surcharged with feeling. In many of his poems ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... varieties of the palmell you described in the boxes, and I kept them for several years and demonstrated them as I had opportunity. You also showed me on this visit the following experiments that I regarded as crucial: ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 384, May 12, 1883 • Various
... stirring of a curiosity to see what the closing hour of such an occasion might be like. Everything, thus far, had been most seemly, most decorous, full of a pleasant informality and a friendly, trustful goodwill; but the crucial point, he had read, always came about supper-time, after which the rout ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... moral eminence, passed through a crucial ordeal, and it is to be greatly wondered at that the Negro woman emerged with even the ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... the same way that the appearance of the Merrimac had brought destruction to the wooden fleet until she was herself forced to flee before Ericsson's Monitor at Hampton Roads, so now at Port Townsend on May seventh a new weapon was made to stand the crucial test. Only this time we were not the ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... content until they obtain it." In the end, he predicted, Negroes would be on every man-of-war in direct proportion to their percentage of the population. The Commandant of the Marine Corps, Maj. Gen. Thomas Holcomb, echoed the bureau's sentiments. He viewed the issue of black enlistments as crucial. ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... in his former tone: "Then take Melrose. He too is determined by his relation to wealth. Wealth has just ruined him—burnt him up—made out of him so much refuse for the nether fires. Faversham again! Wealth, the crucial, deciding factor! The testing with him is still going on. He seems, from your account, to be coming out badly. And lastly, the girl—who, like you, is indifferent to wealth, but for different reasons; who probably hates and shrinks from it; like ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... were sitting in the twilight. No one would have guessed that the forlorn, drooping little figure by the window was the bride of the morrow, and the idea of an elopement was as far removed from her as from a Jenny Wren. For, as the crucial moment approached, poor Miss Arabella's small courage had dwindled away. To get married would have been a tremendous undertaking in itself, but to elope! For the first time, she realized the magnitude of the enterprise. To get away ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... Congress assembles in one of the great moments in the history of the Nation. The past year was perhaps the most crucial for modern civilization; the coming year will be filled with violent conflicts— yet with high ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... education, this lesson was to be crucial; it would decide the law of life. All these gentlemen were superlatively honorable; if one could not believe them, Truth in politics might be ignored as a delusion. Therefore the student felt compelled to reach some sort of idea that should serve to bring the case within a general ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... that the fate of a Ministry and the destiny of the Empire depend upon the Whip. A bad division, even though it be plainly due to accidental circumstances, habitually influences the course of a Ministry, sometimes giving their policy a crucial turn, and at least exercising an important influence on the course of business ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Mr. [287] Cunningham's physiological studies will have informed him that the process of "shutting the eyes," in the literal sense of the words, is not always wilful; and I propose to illustrate, by the crucial instance his own letter furnishes, that the "shutting of the eyes" of the mind to the obvious consequences of accepted propositions may also be involuntary. ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... This was the crucial point in the interview. If Lord Belpher did not now freeze him with a glance and order him from the room, the danger would be past, and he could speak freely. His light blue eyes were expressionless as they met Percy's, but inwardly he was feeling much the same sensation ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... them into the scale. The hitherto timorous light troops and armor bearers rush up to do what they can. Individual bravery and valor count now to the uttermost. Little by little the contest turns against one side or the other. The crucial moment comes. The losing party begins to fear itself about to be surrounded. Vain are the last exhortations of the officers to rally them. "Every man for himself!" rings the cry; and with one mad impulse the defeated hoplites ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... doctor who failed in a crucial operation—and had only himself to blame. Could the woman he loved ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... watched breathlessly. Joe knew Helen was there, praying for him, though he could not see her. In the window stood the figure in black, a silent, hopeful but much worried woman. She kept her promise not to scream, but Joe realized that the crucial moment was ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... early. The whole question of the development of the drum still awaits treatment at the hands of an investigator who has thoroughly studied the buildings themselves, and perhaps the publication of the results obtained by Mr. George at S. Sophia, Salonica, and S. Irene, Constantinople, two crucial examples, will throw some light on the subject. For the present the date here given for the drum of S. Irene (i.e. towards the middle of the eighth century) ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... She felt all at once that in coming to Piping Tree she had yielded herself to an emotion against which she ought to have struggled to the end. Simple as the incident of the ride had appeared to her in the morning, she saw now that it was, in reality, one of those crucial decisions, in which the will, like a spirited horse, had broken control and swerved suddenly into a diverging road in spite of the pull ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... 'Sonnets' were printed then in a different order from that which was followed in the volume of 1609. Thus the poem numbered lxvii. in the original edition opens the reissue, and what has been regarded as the crucial poem, beginning ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... investigations in the neighbourhood of the Green Man, Collingwood was out at Normandale Grange, discussing certain matters with Nesta Mallathorpe. He had not only thought long and deeply over his conversation with Cobcroft the previous evening, but had begun to think about the crucial point of the clerk's story as soon as he spoke in the morning, and the result of his meditations was that he rose early, intercepted Cobcroft before he started for Mallathorpe's Mill and asked his permission to re-tell the story to Miss Mallathorpe. Cobcroft ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... devoted as he was, the son of the wild Jacksons and the facile Jenkins might have been led far astray. By one of those partialities that fill men at once with gratitude and wonder his choosing was directed well. Or are we to say that, by a man's choice in marriage, as by a crucial merit, he deserves his fortune? One thing at least reason may discern: that a man but partly chooses, he also partly forms, his helpmate; and he must in part deserve her, or the treasure is but won for a moment to be lost. Fleeming chanced, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man, cold, Philistine and even mean in certain ways, towers into a sublimity unknown (to me, at least), in fiction when he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive with dignity. There is something crucial, and something triumphant, not beyond the power, but hitherto beyond the imagination of men in this effect, which is not solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic, but comes naturally, almost inevitably, from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Finisterre, and but for personal friction and repulsion, the cohesion between the Mediterranean and Cadiz concentrations would have been equally strong. Finally, there was a masterly provision made for all the concentrations to condense into one great mass at the crucial point off Ushant before by any calculable chance a hostile mass ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... us is the battle of the books. War rages along the entire line. No work of antiquity is free from this belligerency. Mars has the field. The investigation has been crucial. In so far as it has been learning coupled with wisdom, this is well. Truth never flinches before the charge of a wise investigation. But no truth can stand as such before a system of inquiry the canons of which are empirical, fallacious, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... "why do you pause? It is not late. This is an irritating trick of yours to leave off at the crucial juncture." ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... needs special qualities and special effort quite other than the average range of hospital devotion is obvious. But it saves time in the end, and without it success is more than doubtful. The crucial period is the time spent in hospital; use that period to re-create not only body, but mind and will-power, and all shall come out right; neglect to use it thus, and the heart of many a sufferer, and of many a would-be healer, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... of Korea being invoked as an example of the fate of divided nations. Fear of Japan and the precedent of Korea, being familiar phenomena, are given a capital in all this debate, being secondary only to the crucial business of ensuring the peaceful succession to the supreme office. The transparent manner in which the history of the first three years of the Republic is handled in order to drive home these arguments will be very apparent. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... enacted into law, the Government will find itself crippled in respect of taxable resources during the second year of the war; the very year which, if the war does last beyond the present one, will presumably be the crucial period. ...
— War Taxation - Some Comments and Letters • Otto H. Kahn
... moment you let go of them. How well I remember when I was little, the colossal effort of blowing up the dark red, floppy India rubber until it got brighter and brighter and more and more transparent, though it always stayed opaque enough to hold the promise of still greater bigness. And then the crucial moment when ambition demanded an extra puff and a catastrophe ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... under that flood of roofs, Joe was struggling with that crucial problem. He finally settled it by deciding to smoke lots of cigars, and proceeded to light one as a beginning. He smoked one, then a second, then a third—which was certainly bad for his health. He was in the ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... but the outcome of her innate desire for home and a mate. It is this which lies at the root of most of her little vanities and weaknesses—and of all the big sacrifices of which she is capable as well. So she may be forgiven the former, and trusted to fall short but rarely of the latter when the crucial test comes. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... these writers to fall back, not only from the front line to the middle line, but from the middle line itself to the base line. Leibniz, for example, writes with perfect seriousness and decency about the Christian scheme of redemption, but it hardly looks like being for him a crucial deliverance from perdition. It is not the intervention of Mercy, by which alone He possesses himself of [10] us: it is one of the ways in which supreme Benevolence carries out a cosmic policy; and God's benevolence is known by pure reason, and ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... the most critical single day of the four years' course at the University. It shows to the world whether or no a boy, after three years of college life, has in the eyes of the student body "made good." It is a crucial test, a heart-rending test for a ...
— The Courage of the Commonplace • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... but that the convictions of eighteen centuries in this respect must be surrendered. But if Tischendorf and Tregelles are wrong in this particular, it follows of necessity that doubt is thrown over the whole of their critical method. The case is a crucial one. Every page of theirs incurs suspicion, if their deliberate verdict in this instance ...
— The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel According to S. Mark • John Burgon
... she will keep it; though, I grant you, circumstances are against her. And neither she nor her mother will try to find out, if they believe I see them dimly. That is where you come in. Only make them believe that. Don't let them suppose I am all in the dark. Say nothing of your crucial experiment just now. Irene—dear girl—has been a good sister to me, and has told many good round lies for my sake. But she will explain to God. I cannot ask you, Lord Ancester, to tell stories on my behalf. My petition ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... Latin the observance of quantity and of pitch are the two most difficult points of attainment; and they are the crucial test of good reading. ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... of these antagonistic streams of migration to the West was a struggle between the Lake and Prairie plainsmen, on the one side, and the Gulf plainsmen, on the other, for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. It was the crucial part of the struggle between the Northern and Southern sections of the nation. What gave slavery and State sovereignty their power as issues was the fact that they involved the question of dominance over common ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... difficult occasions the old serpent brought up Ill-pause. As also when our Lord was in the wilderness; when He set His face to go up to Jerusalem; when He saw certain Greeks among them that came up to the passover; as also again and again in the Garden. As also on crucial occasions in your own life. As when you had been told not to eat, not to touch, and not even to look at the forbidden fruit, then Ill-pause, the devil's orator, came to you and said that it was a tree to be desired. And, you shall not surely die. As also when you were moved to terror and to ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... Indians must be kept Christians, educated and civilized. Here is the crucial point. In reading criticisms upon the Mission system of dealing with the Indians, one constantly meets with such passages as the following: "The fatal defect of this whole Spanish system was that no effort was made to educate the Indians, ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... the social relations of the school are to be reorganized; only later does he pass to the detail of curricula and teaching methods. It is a clear recognition of the fact that the community is the crucial factor in the making of a school. The State by sound fiscal and legislative policies may do much to make possible a better country school; but only the local authorities can realize it. The trained teacher with modern notions of efficiency may attempt ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... were the words that came to her when the crucial test had been passed, and she had parted with ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... dozing off, when she suddenly saw something round and dark rise on the top of a wave. "Seals! Seals! Seals!" cried Akka in a high, shrill voice, and raised herself up in the air with resounding wing-strokes. It was just at the crucial moment. Before the last wild goose had time to come up from the water, the seals were so close to her that they made a ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... of Baal here consists in a belief in the practical virtue of a mode of address and form of ritual associated with the traditions and customs of a certain social group. The prophets of this cult agree to regard the experiment proposed by Elijah as a crucial test, and that which is disproved from its failure is a plan of action. These prophets relied upon the presence of a certain motivity, from which a definite response could be evoked by an appeal ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... reach a crucial point, though it has usually been overlooked, in the lives of boys and girls, more especially those whose heredity may have been a little tainted or their upbringing a little twisted. For it is here that the transformation of ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... seemed perfectly obvious that her share in the salvation of wayward children was to care for this particular boy and she had asked the Juvenile Court officer to commit him to her. She invited the boy to her house to supper every day that she might know just where he was at the crucial moment of twilight, and she adroitly managed to keep him under her own roof for the evening if she did not approve of the plans he had made. She concluded with the remark that it was queer that the sight of the boy himself hadn't appealed to her, but that the suggestion had come to her in such ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... rich men of their loads, to give a rakeoff to the poor. I am the hero of the crowds, as, on my trusty aeroplane, I cleave a pathway through the clouds, to Milky Way and Charles's Wain. I am the pitcher known to fame; I pitch as though I worked by Steam, and in the last and crucial game I win the pennant for my team. I am the white man's final hope, on whom his aspirations hinge, and, notwithstanding all the dope, I knock the daylights ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... tangled and tortuous past which still claimed him as its own. And now all that remained for him was to slip quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed and gnawed at his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from the first, had been too crucial. He might, in time, even find some solacing thought in the fitness between the act and its environment—here he could fling himself into an obliterating Niagara, not of falling waters, but of falling men and women. Yes, it was a stage all prepared and ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... as they lived when the Westerner remained still in the primeval forest stage. But despite the scepticism and the cynicism of certain writers, whose pessimism is due to a lack of foresight, and despite the fact that she is being constantly accused of having in the past ignominiously failed at the crucial moment in endeavors towards minor reforms, I am one of those who believe that in China we shall see arising a Government whose power will be paramount in the East, and upon the integrity of whose people will depend ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the tale as I heard it last time I played at Trent Bridge; it was never in the papers, I believe," said Raffles gravely. "You may remember the tremendous excitement over the Test Matches out in Australia at the time: it seems that the result of the crucial game was expected on the condemned man's last day on earth, and he couldn't rest until he knew it. We pulled it off, if you recollect, and he said it would make him ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... yet skilful mixture of threats and promises so as to demonstrate the vanity of trust in Egypt or in Jehovah, or in any but 'the great king.' Isaiah had been labouring to lift his countrymen to the height of reliance on Jehovah alone, and now the crucial test of the truth of his contention had come. On the one hand were Sennacherib and his host, flushed with victory, and sure of crushing this puny kinglet Hezekiah and his obstinate little city, perched on its rock. On the other was nothing ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... French rifles answered the challenge of the Germans, though, because of the fact that the ranks of the defenders had been sadly depleted, their weapons spoke not so often. But when they did speak, men fell; for, at this crucial stage of the battle, they were ...
— The Boy Allies At Verdun • Clair W. Hayes
... sheltered new and expanding States, it had fostered higher forms of civilization, and represented peoples and interests that were complex and varied; but in our Civil War it was assailed as never before. The test was crucial, but nobly was it borne. Men died in ranks as the forest goes down before the cyclone. What sharp agony in death, and what long-continued suffering and bereavement this implies. But the result was decisive—a strengthening of the power and grandeur of the nation ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... fact that children have bodies. The first duty of the schools, therefore, is to recognize the existence of these bodies by giving them due attention, particularly at the crucial periods of physical growth. Therefore every school must provide as much physical training as is necessary to insure normal body ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... shrieked, giving him a vigorous push backwards. The four of us, his three men and myself, laughed outright. Tipton's rage leaped its bounds. He returned to the attack again and again, and yet at the crucial moment his courage would fail him and he would let the widow thrust him back. Suddenly I became aware that there were two new spectators of this comedy. I started and looked again, and was near to crying out at sight of one of them. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... commanding power. He was indeed fortunate in his biographer; his story is told with great dramatic and literary art. In its account of the struggle with the greed of Ahab and the licentiousness of Baalism, it sheds a brilliant light upon one of the most crucial epochs of Hebrew history. Even this story, however, is not all of a piece. There is linguistic and other evidence that the chapter (2 Kings i.), in which two companies of fifty men are consumed by fire from heaven at the word of Elijah, is very late. In the story, which is rather mechanical and ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... As a consequence of the coexistence of A and a in consciousness, they can later be recalled reciprocally, although the two original occurrences A and a have previously never existed together, and sometimes, indeed, may not possibly have existed together. It is evident that the crucial moment is the second, and that it consists of an act of active assimilation. Thus James maintains that "it is a relation that the mind perceives after the fact, just as it may perceive the relations of superiority, of distance, of causality, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... in the room—a crucial moment, it seemed to both of them. Elfrida sat against the table with her elbows among its litter of paged manuscript, her face hidden in her hands. Janet rose and took a step or two toward her. Then she paused, and looked at the little bronze image on the table ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two gentlemen who are now Master of Balliol and British Minister of Education. The Balliol don attributed the British defeat in this international tourney to the fact that his tennis shoes (shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. But though Major Putnam and his young ally won the set of patters (let us use the Wykehamist word), the Major allowed the other side to gain a far more serious victory. They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him in England ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... there's any chance of that?" asked Nick, looking as though he half felt like begging Herb to take him aboard at the crucial time, only that he hated to ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... was anxious to have Romilly ready for publication in the coming autumn. Nevertheless, he did not intend to force its production. Should it demand longer in the doing, so much the worse; he realised its importance, its crucial importance, in his artistic development, and it must have its own length and time. In the workroom he had recently left he had been making excellent progress; Romilly had begun, as the saying is, to speak and act of herself; and he did not doubt she would continue to do so the moment the ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... to rush to Gaston's shack; his second thought restrained him. If Gaston had returned, he would rightfully resent any outside interference with this crucial time of his life. If Joyce were decided in the course she had laid out for herself—how dared he, how could he, divert her from it without involving them ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... of the squalls, sometimes by a faint flash of lightning like the signal of a lighted torch waved far away behind the clouds, the shift of wind comes at last, the crucial moment of the change from the brooding and veiled violence of the south-west gale to the sparkling, flashing, cutting, clear- eyed anger of the King's north-westerly mood. You behold another phase of his passion, a fury bejewelled with stars, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of the fighting. Had he let his eyes go out the gun port before which he stood, it might have been possible for El Hassan to have picked out the bodies of David Moroka and Fredric Ostrander amidst those of the several hundred Haratin serfs who had swarmed out of the souk area at the crucial moment and stormed the half manned fort—unarmed save for knives ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the word "facts" in an occult ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... It was Johnson's finger diverted his eyes to the crucial place in the prayer-book to ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... hoarse shout from Ewen and the boys released the pulley chain while Miller slapped the regulator between the guide rods. As the three young men again threw themselves upon the chain and forced the regulator into place, the crucial moment had arrived. The controlling valve of the regulator was open, of course, and as the rushing gas was again concentrated into one stream, a new fiery jet shot upward. But the lateral streams had been controlled and again Ewen ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... stiffly in the living-room, her hands folded upon her stomach. So gradual had been the crucial middle-life change in Fanny that no one had noted it. This evening Susan, become morbidly acute, suddenly realized the contrast between the severe, uncertain-tempered aunt of today and the amiable, altogether and always gentle aunt of two ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... Later, the crucial fact was established {239} that sense organs (the "muscle spindles") existed in the muscles and were connected with sensory nerve fibers; and that other sense organs existed in the tendons and about {240} the joints. This sense accordingly might better be called the "muscle, tendon and joint ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... God as well as my parents for the extraordinary physical strength and courage with which I was endowed, and during my life of trials and hardships that courage had never been shaken by man or beast, but now I felt that the crucial test was about to be applied. Would the courage the Almighty gave me weaken when about to face Him who had ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... syllables passed from his lips with a faint, far echo which he found vaguely but unidentifiably familiar. But into the group around the long table the utterance fell with cryptic, crucial solemnity. Only Mr. Green, stubbornly contentious to the last, and thinking anxiously of both horns of the dilemma at once, found voice ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... it's a little of both. Possibly if she wasn't rich he wouldn't care so much when she fell ill. That's the trouble with these New-Englanders, anyhow—they've always got grandmothers to fall down at crucial moments. Next time I go into this sort of thing it'll be with a crowd without ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... she saw an unrelenting, unimpassioned, and yet all-powerful Being, from whom there was no escape, calmly subjecting one human life after another to the severest crucial tests. If one could endure them, all might be well. If, in the composition of one's character, there existed good metal, it would come out of the furnace fine gold perhaps; but if, as she feared might be true of herself, there was only dross, then the fiery trials awaiting ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... were able to get their collective strength in the field, while the superior preparedness, training, general military efficiency of the smaller nation still enabled it to put the superior numbers at the decisive point at the crucial moment. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... with certain intonations is a serious impediment to conversation. The young gentleman seemed unable at this crucial instant to think of a fitting reply. Finding himself unequal to a response in her own ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... thoroughly satisfied with the position which they occupied under the earlier Persian kings, and strove zealously to maintain and extend the empire to which they owed so much. Their fidelity was put to a crucial test after they had been subjects of Darius Hystaspis for a little more than twenty years, and had had about fourteen or fifteen years' experience of the advantages of his governmental system. Aristagoras of Miletus, finding himself in a position of difficulty, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Erasmus and his fellow-workers as leaders of civilization on a wrong track? Was it true reality they were aiming at? Was their proud Latinity not a fatal error? There is one of the crucial points ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the triforium gallery, which encircles the building, and in the two galleries which encircle the central lantern. From the lantern galleries visitors can obtain fine interior views of the building, and comprehend the crucial form of the plan ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... aloneness, through love, is made impossible for us by the ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very age dangereuse, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillment into maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new lover. At the very crucial time when she should be coming to a state of pure equilibrium and rest with her husband, she turns rabidly against rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any shape or form, and demands more love, more love, a new sort of lover, one who will "understand" her. And as often ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... Excelsior half a dozen times. Every second of glancing at the door seemed a minute, and the minutes hours. After the disillusionments she had suffered she actually was beginning to think that he, too, would fail her in the crucial moment, when, at last, the portieres parted, and Derby entered carrying—the celebrated ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... ought to be," returned Raffles, sympathetically. "Of course you're speaking of the crucial letter in ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... from a version that preceded our own. His rules of self-discipline and spiritual culture, while wholly free from unwholesome asceticism, nevertheless required the curbing of all desires, and the utter subjection of every natural prompting to a crucial test, before its innocent or edifying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... matter as crucial as this matter, concerning "the invisible companions of men," not to advance a step beyond our starting-point till we have apprehended it from several different aspects and have gone over our ground again and again—even as builders of a bridge might test the ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... In studying these crucial periods in the history of European architecture it is possible to trace a gradual growth or unfolding as of a plant. It is a fact fairly well established that the Greeks derived their architecture and ornament from Egypt; the Romans in turn borrowed ...
— The Beautiful Necessity • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... second-class from engaging a carriage by the day at Baireuth, since that clearly was worth while, and they found it waiting for them by the theatre. There was still time to drive to Falbe's lodging and get through this crucial ordeal before the opera, and they went straight there. A very venerable instrument, which Falbe had not yet opened, stood against the wall, and he struck ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... was known to all that the crucial moment had come. The English had made a great coup. They had landed; they had stormed the heights; they were said to be intrenching themselves and bringing up their guns; and although this was not true at the moment, the very thought ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... attitude, Lizzie," she said. "He's likely to giggle or do something silly, just at the crucial moment. I cannot understand why he thinks it is funny, but he does. We'd be ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... take his dogmas and go through them one by one, comparing each with his own life. This, it may be said, is a crucial test to which but few philosophers would be willing to accede; but if it shall be found that he never even dreamed of squaring his conduct with his professions, then we may admit that he employed his time in writing these things because it did not ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... bench in the House of Commons with the right sort of men. Thus his qualifications for the leadership depend upon the choice which may be made of a leader for the Lower House. Everything points to that as the one crucial business. The "Two Conservatives" seem to have a special grudge against Mr. Gibson, perhaps because, unlike Sir Stafford Northcote, he is not too amiable for his ambition, and has lately been making a formidable bid for power. Hence we are told how absurd it is to think for a moment of Mr. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... enlisted and in fifteen minutes the task of transforming a remonstrating, excited, and occasionally tearful Harriet into the school beauty, was going gaily forward. Kid McCoy was supposed to be an irreclaimable tomboy, but in this crucial moment the eternal feminine came triumphantly to the fore. She sat herself down, with Patty's manicure scissors, and for three-quarters of an hour painstakingly ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
