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More "Impersonal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... antiquaries do not know whether the Ludovisi Mars was not an Achilles,—perhaps nobody ever knew. But in all our veneration of Washington, it is not his person we revere, but his virtues,—precisely the impersonal part of him, or his person only from association. There is nothing incongruous in this association as it exists in the mind, any more than there would have been in his presence, because of the overpowering sense of his character ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... is itself only a complex of aims and memories, which once had their direct objects, in which he had taken a spontaneous and unselfish interest. The gratifications which, merged together, make the selfishness are each of them ingenuous, and no more selfish than the most altruistic, impersonal emotion. The content of selfishness is a mass of unselfishness. There is no reference to the nominal essence called oneself either in one's appetites or in one's natural affections; yet a man absorbed in his meat and drink, in his houses and lands, in his children and dogs, is called ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... to retrace the history of a great statesman's career. That statesman's name, but for the dark and tragic scenes with which it was ultimately associated, might after the lapse of two centuries and a half have faded into comparative oblivion, so impersonal and shadowy his presence would have seemed upon the great European theatre where he was so long a chief actor, and where his efforts and his achievements were foremost among those productive of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sat quite still, the head bent a trifle, the disturbing gray eyes fixed contemplatively an him—accusingly. And yet the accusation did not seem personal with the clergyman, whose eyes were nearly the medium, the channels of a greater, an impersonal Ice. It was true that the man had changed. He was wholly baffling to Mr. Plimpton, whose sense of alarm increased momentarily into an almost panicky feeling as he remembered what Langmaid had said. Was this inscrutable rector of St. John's gazing, knowingly, at the half owner of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... woman beside him. They joined us in the bare little parlor of the jail, and if Mattison needed any further proof that the end had come, Polly's greeting furnished it. An embarrassed flush rose to her face as she saw him, but she shook hands in a studiously impersonal way and ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... been very strange and un-Riseholme-like to have gone to a friend's door, even though the errand was so impersonal a one as bearing somebody else's note, without enquiring whether the friend was in, and being instantly admitted if she was, and as a matter of fact, Georgie caught a glimpse, when the knocker was answered (Mrs Quantock did not have a bell at all), through the open door ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... shrugged his shoulders, angry that he should have slipped so easily into the character of a sullen boy, hating a benefactor for no reason other than his benefactions; but the same vicious impulse made him study the face of Sally Fortune with an impersonal, coldly critical eye. It was not easy to do, for she sat with her head tilted back a little, as though to take the warmth of the fire more fully. The faint smile on her lips showed her comfort, ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... technically. The bare fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as religion's all-sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... authorities on Zoroaster and Parseeism scarcely justify us in thinking the religion of the Zendavesta to be Pantheistic in our sense of the term. For though it would appear that Ormuzd (or Ahuramazda), the God of light and goodness, originated in, or was born from and one with a nameless impersonal Unity, such as may answer to Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable," it cannot be accurately said that, according to the Persian view of the world, there is nothing but God. For, to say nothing of the apparently independent existence ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... did not know why she absented herself. She only knew two things: that the young man seemed to disapprove of the old man; and when she saw the young man in the pulpit, impersonal and holy, she suffered. Therefore she would not go to ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... later a slender, dark skinned man with impeccably waxed moustaches entered, regarded Bell with an entirely impersonal interest, took one of the revolvers from one of the six frock-coated gentlemen, and seated himself comfortably. He waved his hand and they filed uneasily from the room. So far, not one ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... to him as if she was watching him curiously; her lips were parted, and her head was a little on one side; her face interested and impersonal. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... mean that we must show loyalty to life as opposed to death, or to health as against disease. It is more than that. The lifeward effort of some beings clashes with the corresponding attempt to live on the part of others, and the actualization of one impersonal ideal of beauty, truth, or society exacts the sacrifice of one set of human lives and favors the survival of another, so that an opposition in ideals may mean an antagonism in the struggle of classes and masses of men for existence. There is a combat, ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... Whatever dress Of thought you take to royalize your nature,— Gorgeous shawls of kingship, a world's fear, Or ample weavings of imagination, Or the spun light of wisdom,—like a gust Of flame, that weather of impersonal thought You strut beneath, that hanging storm of Love, Strikes down a terrible swift dazzling finger, Sight of some woman, on your clothed hearts, And plucks the winding folly off, and leaves Bare nature there. And hear another likeness. Look, if the priests have made an altar-fire, They can have ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... originality and its infinite sensibility. Nor are these random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A quite impersonal ego seems then to detach itself from the particular ego that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious Intelligence controls. ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. These are so frequently brought before us as to seem almost like products of our own day. The earlier ones seem (as ever) the purer art, the less sensual, appealing to the more impersonal side of man, dealing in battles and in classic subjects. Later, the drawings, becoming more directly personal, in the time of Louis XIV portrayed events in the Life of the King; in the next reign, slipping into the pleasures of the Royal Hunts, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... innocently, that I never could remember whether it was George II. or James II. who was so fond of that particular story, and now he regards me with politely-draped dislike. I'll do my best for you, if the opportunity arises, but it will have to be in a roundabout, impersonal manner." ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... rate is much higher in the cities than in small towns or rural regions. Fortunate that couple who start their married life in a town small enough so that neighbors are interested and helpful. The city apartment house is the most impersonal form of dwelling mankind has devised. If the first home does not have all the modern improvements, it is no great tragedy. More marriages are wrecked by too much free time than by too many home ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... part, and also the impression that either of them might be insulted or unkindly treated by the men and women about them. People had been rough perhaps, but thoroughly business-like. And if Polly were told to hurry, or to move on, or corrected for some mistake in her work, it was all done in so impersonal a fashion that both girls had learned valuable lessons from the experience. Esther had been amazed at the spirit in which Polly had accepted the discipline and hard work. Perhaps, after all, she had been making a mountain out of a mole hill ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... her thoughts had been busy with a graver matter, but she smiled when she saw the big bunch of dark red carnations in a water-jug on the table, and the little cylinder-shaped parcel which certainly contained a dozen little boxes of the chocolate 'oublies' she liked, and the telegram, with its impersonal-looking address, waiting to be opened by her after having been opened, read, and sealed again by her thoughtful maids. Such trifles as the latter circumstance did not disturb her in the least, for though she was only a young woman of four and twenty, a singer and a musician, she had ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... sparkling review of a new book the writer had just read, and passed from this to crisp comments on the great events, political, scientific, artistic, of the day. The whole letter was pungent, interesting, delightful—an impersonal essay on a dozen vital topics of life and thought. Only at the end was a personal ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... my uncle wrote down my age on the pad. I was deeply impressed. What was this ceremony? Was this personage too great to be spoken to? Again he glanced at the pad, and again gave a nod, and again that impersonal, mechanical voice was heard: ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... buttoning his coat, and looking at her. He felt the different tone that had got into their talk. It had been impersonal a few minutes before. ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... of God embraces every good quality of masculine and feminine character, as also the impersonal life Principle. It is therefore proper to use the masculine, feminine or neuter pronoun when referring to Deity. As different phases of the one Love, we see manifested, the strong, all-protecting, intelligent father-love, the ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... were giving him her promised aid he had no means of discovering, and herein lay another cause of his general vexation. He had dined every day at the Commandante's, danced there every night. Concha had been vivacious, friendly—impersonal. Not so much as a coquettish lift of the brow betrayed that the distinguished stranger eclipsed the caballeros for the moment; nor a whispered word that he retained the friendship she had offered him on the day of their meeting. He had not, indeed, ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... not attempt a reply. He looked with a sort of impersonal curiosity at his hand and forearm, where the dog had bitten him in several places. That had happened a good while ago, he reasoned; the blood had dried, the marks of the dog's teeth were bruised-looking ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... how little Victoria counts for in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan poetry the maiden queen is really the central figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's Gloriana, and even Shakspere, the most impersonal of poets, paid tribute to her in Henry VIII., and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the little allegory introduced ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... oecumenical^; transcendental; prevalent, prevailing, rife, epidemic, besetting; all over, covered with. Pan-American, Anglican^, Pan-Hellenic, Pan-Germanic, slavic; panharmonic^. every, all; unspecified, impersonal. customary &c (habitual) 613. Adv. whatever, whatsoever; to a man, one and all. generally &c adj.; always, for better for worse; in general, generally speaking; speaking generally; for the most part; in the long run &c ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he said, with a slight, half-mocking bow. "I was under the impression that we were merely exchanging impersonal opinions. I sincerely regret having annoyed ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... followed a discussion on "struts," roof timbers and tie-rods, Jack describing in a modest, impersonal way the various methods used by the members of the staff with which he was connected, Morris, as usual, becoming so absorbed in the warding off of "cave-ins" that for the moment he forgot the table, his hostess ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... he spoke, down into the studio below, still dim, since the screens covered the large windows. Her glance followed his motion in an abstracted, impersonal way. ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions—in his hearty animal appetites, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... bold, broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures are, indeed, but the component features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character,—that of the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... blushed no more. I endured the cool, level, impersonal glances of the girl I had fallen ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Inquiri. Impersonalinvestigation to be made. E. suggests inquirenti, agreeing with Germanico. But T., unlike the earlier Latin authors, not unfrequently places an infin. after a ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Marion, the accidents of my social position and personal tastes, have placed me in a position to give a very full account of what actually happened. The first two chapters of this book will therefore be written in the impersonal manner of the ordinary history; I myself occupying the position of unseen spectator. The rest of the book is largely founded upon the diary ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... which is both ancient and absolute, tracing the line of duty for all men, clear and indisputable, without any possibility of hesitation or compromise—against and in the face of all comers. And this principle is one which calls forth the proudest devotion, seeing it is impersonal, for the king is not the elected leader of conquerors, oppressing the conquered, but a living flag, the national rallying-point for all the defenders of the mother country against her enemies, whether within or without ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... he outstrips Buffon and his descriptions of animals—so general, so vague, so impersonal—his records unreliable and his entire erudition ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... he continued soothing his daughter's pride, and yet speaking in an even, impersonal tone, as if ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... the looks of admiration which Mr. Orville cast at the beautiful girl. It seemed to me that with the exception of Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Porter, who were family friends, the jurors should have maintained a formal and impersonal attitude. ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... needn't have worried a bit, for the bogey-man isn't a likely rival of any one. In fact, he isn't a man at all, but a System—just as impersonal as if he wrote his name, "Base Censor, Inc." Also, he is pretty well-nigh fool-proof and puncture-proof—which again removes him ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... stood off to measure the effect, it seemed to Peter that the Spirit of the House had received him; it was so men dream of home-coming, without sensible displacement of a life going on in it, lovely and secure, as a bark slips into some still pool to its moorings. He yielded himself naturally to the impersonal intimacy of her welcome and all the sordid ways of his life ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... sort of strong, protective force between him and anguish, without any desire to give it a name, or realize an individual. But now he saw that he had been nursed by hands as refined as they were skilful, and he dimly perceived that he owed his life mainly to the wholly impersonal yet absorbed devotion of two women—gentle, firm-faced, women—who had fought death for him and won. Just a professional service for a professional fee; yet his debt was measureless. These are the things, he feebly understood, that women do for men; and what had been ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... involuntary; reflection is personal, spontaneity is impersonal; reflection is analytic, spontaneity is synthetic; reflection begins with doubt, spontaneity with affirmation; reflection belongs to certain ones, spontaneity belongs to all; reflection produces science, spontaneity gives truth. Reflection is a ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... throes, The more austere, impersonal, wide faith, The urge that drives Christs to the cross Not for the love of one beloved, But for the love of all? If so, she wakes! Wakes and demands a share in all man's bolder destinies, The high, audacious ventures of the soul That thinks ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... it she blushed and hid her face. When asked whether she worried about anything, she denied this. When questions were asked, she sometimes answered promptly and in normal voice, again simply remained silent in spite of repeated urging. On the whole, it seemed that simple impersonal questions were answered promptly; whereas difficult impersonal questions or questions which referred to her condition were not answered at all. She proved to be oriented. Thus she gave the day ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... to the core of his being. The Hotel Cosmopolis was his own private, personal property, and the thing dearest to him in the world, after his daughter Lucille. He prided himself on the fact that his hotel was not like other New York hotels, which were run by impersonal companies and shareholders and boards of directors, and consequently lacked the paternal touch which made the Cosmopolis what it was. At other hotels things went wrong, and clients complained. At the Cosmopolis ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... beauty was added an adorable friendliness and confidence, free from the slightest taint of self-consciousness or the least blemish of coquetry. Intelligent, yet modest to the verge of shyness, eager yet reserved, warm hearted yet charmingly impersonal with him, he realized that she was finding, with him, only the happiness of speech with mankind in the abstract. And so she poured out to him her heart, long stifled in the abyss of her isolation; and, gazing into his eyes, she was gazing merely ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... I put in, contritely. "Please don't be so dreadful about it. After all, you asked me, didn't you? Perhaps I've hurt your vanity. There, I didn't mean that, either. Oh, dear, let's talk about something impersonal. We get along wretchedly ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... language, metre serves for banks and gives form and beauty and character. Just as the banks give each river a distinct personality, so does rhythm make each poem an individual creation; prose is like the featureless, impersonal beel. Again, the waters of the river have movement and progress; those of the beel engulf the country by expanse alone. So, in order to give language power, the narrow bondage of metre becomes necessary; otherwise it spreads and ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... not still a small, impersonal fraction of this great stream which day after day mechanically followed the same round in the mill? Solitude had made his view of mankind a new and wondering one; he now, in every strange face he met, involuntarily ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... has been impersonal to me, except as the wrongs and sorrows of a friend can hurt. But I come now to my own personal interest. And where that is concerned a man ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... perceives the searchlights of the world's assembled navies in act to converge on one minute fragment of wreckage—one only in all the black and agony-strewn sea. Then those beams focussed themselves. Earth as we knew it—the full circuit of our orb—laid the weight of its impersonal and searing curiosity on this Huckley which had voted that it was flat. It asked for news about Huckley—where and what it might be, and how it talked—it knew how it danced—and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the zealous, merciless press, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... as Densher saw it, meanwhile went on—amplified soon enough by the advent of two other guests, stray gentlemen both, stragglers in the rout of the season, who visibly presented themselves to Kate during the next moments as subjects for a like impersonal treatment and sharers in a like usual mercy. At opposite ends of the social course, they displayed, in respect to the "figure" that each, in his way, made, one the expansive, the other the contractile effect of the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... before, San Bonito was full of young Mexicans who wore Stetson hats and favored horsehair bands around them. Starr glanced at the fellow sharply, got the uninterested, impersonal look of the perfect stranger who neither knows nor cares who you are, and who has troubles of his own to occupy his mind; the look which nineteen persons out of twenty give to a stranger on the street. Starr went on unconcernedly whistling under his breath, but at ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... quite impersonal trend of thought is offered for consideration by Shakespeare's majestic eloquence. The dramatist bids us bear in mind that his lines do no more than suggest the things he would have the audience see and ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... greeted him with a smile of apprehension which plainly amused him. Beatrice was frankly impersonal in her attitude; he represented a new species of the genus man, and she, too, evidently regarded him in the light of a strange animal, ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we feel our way backwards to that engaging picture of the poet-people, with which the ingenuity of modern theory has filled the void in our knowledge. The abstract poet of that first period of mythology, creating in this wholly impersonal, intensely spiritual way,—the abstract spirit of poetry itself, rises before the mind; and, in speaking of this poetical age, we must take heed, before all things, in no sense ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... for he had marked down the point on Roddy's jaw where his first blow would fall, and just where to plant a coup-de-savate most surely to incapacitate the minion of the Prefecture; and all the while was looking the two over with a manner of the most calm and impersonal curiosity. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... perfectly than even Reed, its victim and by no means of doubtful understanding, could ever do. She heard him talked about in a fashion that she found revolting. Her old-time comrade was as much a man as ever, despite his injuries, as sane in all his outlook, as whimsical and impersonal in his fun. She therefore resented the universal attitude of regarding him as a crushed archangel, a candidate for repeated and unlimited doses of mental gruel. If ever a man needed solid social nutriment, it was this energetic young engineer who was temporarily ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... publication. He began his stories without seeing the end; in one of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making this manner of fiction. While "Vanity Fair" is, of course, written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is put into the mouth of a character in the book: an extraordinary slip for ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last, personal character." (Chips, vol. ii., p. 55.) Here the concrete is derived from the abstract—the personal conception is represented as coming after the impersonal conception; and through such transformation of the impersonal into the personal, Prof. Max Mueller considers ancient myths to have arisen. How are these propositions reconcilable? One of two things must be said:—If originally ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... furnished, extremely plain and tidy. It was impersonal, neutral, like the room in a hotel. And yet he had spent in it twelve years of his life. Most people collect no end of trifles during such a period; presents, little superfluous nothings, ornaments. Not a single engraving, not a supplement to an illustrated magazine even, which at some ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... intensive farming on any large scale practicable. But the intensive system of farming not only gives regular employment and good wages; it also fits the labourer of to-day—in a country where a man can strike out for himself—to be the successful farmer of to-morrow. Nor, in these days of impersonal industrial relations, should the fact be overlooked that under an intensive system of agriculture, we find still preserved the kindly personal relation between employer and employed which contributes both to the ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... when she presently appeared, in the wake of the impersonal and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and efficient. A melting grace ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... name, clubs, syndicates, &c., constitute perhaps the most redoubtable danger resulting from the power of crowds. They represent in reality the most impersonal and, in consequence, the most oppressive form of tyranny. The leaders who direct the committees being supposed to speak and act in the name of a collectivity, are freed from all responsibility, and are in ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... any one ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid he is going to spoil it all. He has taken into his Scotch-Stevenson head that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and historical, impersonal thing, comparing the different languages (of which he knows nothing really) and the different peoples, the object being to settle the question as to whether they are of common Malay origin or not.... Think of a small treatise on the Polynesian races being offered to people who ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... and then soothe your conscience with platitudes. You will take hold of pleasure with both hands, but your shoulders are not broad enough for the pack of responsibility. Don't look at me as though I were a mile off, Lawrence, as though this were simply an impersonal discussion. I am speaking to you—of you. You avoid me whenever you can. I don't often get a chance of speaking to you. You shall listen now. You live the life of a poet and a scholar, they tell me. You live in a beautiful ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... comes out more tenderly and touchingly than in Eph. iv. 30, "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption." Here grief is ascribed to the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not a blind, impersonal influence or power that comes into our lives to illuminate, sanctify and empower them. No, He is immeasurably more than that, He is a holy Person who comes to dwell in our hearts, One who sees clearly every act we perform, every word we ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... for a space. Somebody was singing in the room behind them, and through the open window he could see the stars in the soft indigo above the great sweep of prairie. He noticed them vacantly and took a curious impersonal interest in the two dim figures standing close together outside the window. One was a young English lad, and the other a girl in a long white dress. What they were doing there was no concern of his, but any trifle that diverted his attention a moment was welcome ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... down the avenue at a speed that brought them very rapidly in sight of the gates. A figure was waiting there, and again Juliet was conscious of the hard beating of her heart. Then she knew that the car was stopping, and looked forth with an impersonal smile of welcome. ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... into silence. Old Wetherbee was sometimes given to half-audible and impersonal grumblings, but this was the first time he had ever gone so far as to voice a specific objection to ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... rhythms and more urgent colors. Many endure it in frivol and violence, the majority in bored, sullen submission. Chopin, the New Chopin, is a foe to ennui and the spirit that denies; in his exquisite soul-sorrow, sweet world-pain, we may find rich impersonal relief. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... shows, that, as time runs on, matter tends more and more to become goods, the blind forms of motion in nature to become useful labor and useful sustenance, impersonal and objectless existence to be transformed into personal property and personal culture, Schaeffle inclines to the belief that the whole mechanism of unconsciously governing nature is destined ultimately to aid in the realization of moral good, which alone is ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as many years as it was necessary to obtain ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... ordinarily slightly askew, had straightened; his steel-gray, impersonal eyes had lit up behind the bowed glasses and were seeing things beyond the wall at which they gazed. Orde looked up at him with a ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... the family with impersonal efficiency, discussing the symptoms loudly with Harkness. "It's a good thing ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... slowly together, and when he spoke his voice was sharp and quick and wholly impersonal. "Tell ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... well as men. But the Buddha is not an object of worship. If the Buddhist can be said to worship any higher power, it is the moral order which never fails to reward men according to the deeds done in this or former existences. That is for him a real and tremendous, though impersonal power, and in contemplating it he may be said to worship after a fashion. But he has no aid to look for from any power in heaven or earth in working out his salvation. Buddhism is the most autosoteric of all religions; it declares ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... did a brief little Southern note arrive informing him of the ordinary vital truths concerning a comfortable journey, and expressing a chaste hope that he would not forget her. Not even surprise, not even curiosity, tempted Stanton to wade twice through the fashionable, angular handwriting. Dully impersonal, bleak as the shadow of a brown leaf across a block of gray granite, plainly—unforgivably—written with ink and ink only, the stupid, loveless page slipped through his ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... photograph of the faces would have resulted in a type at once alarming and reassuring—alarming to the student of individual endeavour, reassuring to the historian of impersonal issues. It would have presented a countenance that was unerringly Anglo-Saxon, though modified by the conditions of centuries of changes. One would have recognised instinctively the tiller of the soil—the ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... particulars as compared with men. The individual circumstance seems to them very important; and it is hard for them to get away from the concrete. On the other hand, a man's thinking is more impersonal and general; and he is more easily drawn into abstractions. It is true that woman's domestic life would naturally develop this quality but we are not now concerned with the question of origins. Most women find ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... the hand Max held out, and then did nothing with it, in the aloof, impersonal way that had always irritated Max, and made him want to fling away the unresponsive fingers. Now, however, for the first time in his life he did not notice. He was lost in his desire for and fear ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... was the limitless interest and curiosity in our civilization, purely impersonal, and held by an order of mind beside which we ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... peculiar to every great master, there is in art something still superior and impersonal, which is style proper. Style is truth aggrandized, simplified, freed from all insignificant details, restored to its original essence, its typical aspect. This "style" par excellence, in which instead of recognizing the soul of an artist we feel the breath of the universal ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... his eyes on her as she spoke, and though she did not meet them, her far gaze, fixed ahead, seemed in its impersonal gravity to commune with him, for his consolation, more than an answering glance would have done. She was giving him her word for something, and the very fact that she kept it impersonal, held it there before them ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... she had to admit that he did not even pretend much. He wanted her because she was a step up in the social ladder, and, in his opinion, the most attractive girl he knew. That he was not in love with her relieved the situation, as Miss Balfour admitted to herself in impersonal moods. But there were times when she could have wished he were. She felt it to be really due her attractions that his pulses should quicken for her, and in the interests of experience she would have liked to see how he would make love if he really ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... a blow in the back or the face. The laughter of Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile; often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs it; and it might be called ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of which, reiterated and emphasized in pamphlet, broadside, poster, and stump speech, Shelby said publicly never a word, professing himself a believer in the policy of dignified silence. He touched the matter after an impersonal fashion with Bowers, however, as ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... is wise to restrict the use of postals to impersonal communications; but if they must be used, the message should be brief with an apology for its use. It is a good plan in addition to omit the usual My dear, and to sign with the initials only ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds its peace, and ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... who have not met him, it may appear paradoxical to say that his tastes were at the same moment acutely fastidious and widely sympathetic; but anyone who has talked with him will recall the blend of high impersonal ideas with a remarkable personality which seldom failed to stimulate other minds—even if those others shared few if ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... is, all which would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme to which his love will allow him. All is general, impersonal, indirect,—the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the occasion which had produced them; and ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... relationship between "The New York Idea" and Henry Arthur Jones' "Mary Goes First;" there is the same free air of sporting life, so graphically set forth in "Lord and Lady Algy." But the American play is greater than these because of its impersonal strain. ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: The New York Idea • Langdon Mitchell
... realized, very nearly in love with her: what he meant by that inaccurate term was that if the affair had continued a little longer he would have insisted on marrying her. Nettie was not indifferent to him. An impersonal feeling had attracted him to her—a resentment of her treatment by the larger part of Salem, particularly the oblique admiration of the men. His supersensitiveness to any form of injustice had driven him into the protest of ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... spoken law, forthwith attained the first degree of holiness: he emptied as it were, the sea of birth and death, one drop alone remaining. By practising, apart from men, the banishment of all desire, he soon attained the one impersonal condition, not as common folk do now-a-day who speculate upon the mode of true deliverance; for he who does not banish sorrow-causing samskaras does but involve himself in every kind of question; and though he reaches to the highest form of being, yet grasps not the one and only truth. Erroneous ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... may be Admiral Dupont's waltz of fire around the two forts of Hilton Head. Another, who laughs at both of these amateur statements, has a Grub-Street one; but, except to a favored few, to everybody in this country he is only an impersonal existence. In this general dearth of useful information, there are, however, one or two biographical sketches afloat,—possibly hints of those waiting their chance in the pigeon-holes of the Thunderer,—of which we are tempted to give the reader a sample, brought ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... that I shall be a good deal like an old rock jutting out of the quiet earth: never ruffled, never changing either on the surface or at heart, bearing whatever falls upon me, be it frost or sun, and warranted to waste away only by a sort of impersonal disintegration at the rate of half an inch to the thousand years. Meantime she exacts for herself the privilege of dwelling near as the delighted cave of the winds. The part of wisdom in me then is not to heed each sallying ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... branches of the family the old maid appeared thus providentially, without warning, on days of sorrow, ennui and suffering. She was never seen except when her hands were needed to heal, her devoted friendship to console. She was, so to speak, an impersonal creature, because of her great heart; a woman who did not belong to herself: God seemed to have made her only to give her to others. Her everlasting black dress which she persisted in wearing, her worn, dyed shawl, her absurd hat, her impoverished appearance, were, in her eyes, ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... lack of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter," he said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being kind to old friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people who've held out helping hands to you. Well, and women have been trained for hundreds of years to see things in that private and personal way, and to exalt the private and personal virtues. Just as ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... swept over Christopher, pervading his entire body—repulsion that was but a recoil from his exhausted rage. In this new emotion there were both weariness and self-pity, and to his mental vision there showed clearly, with an impersonal detachment, his own figure in relation to the scenes among which he moved. "That is I yonder," he might have said had he been able to disentangle thought from sensation, "plodding along there through the red mud in the road. Look at the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... there stricken, almost paralyzed with the suddenness of the blow, wondering dumbly why Joan's hand should have inflicted it. The frightened Frenchwoman dared not speak or move. She watched him with that impersonal fear so readily aroused in one of her class by the terrifying spectacle of a strong man in his agony. At last he moved listlessly, as though his limbs had just been released from the rack. He held the letter under the lamp again and read it a second time, word for word. He seemed to be forcing ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... party with weary grace, and a general salute that might have included all the national schools in the kingdom, so wide and so impersonal was its manner. She impressed the children as much as Madame Valtesi frightened them by examining them with a stony and sphinx-like gravity through her tortoise-shell eyeglass. The teachers conducted the programme of games—in which, however, Lady Locke, Tommy, and Lord Reggie fitfully ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... the light, and Louise mechanically try to defend herself from the strangle hold of the woman who stood next to her. It seemed minutes to Betty that the car was falling, and she watched the others' behavior with a curious, semi-detached interest that was oddly impersonal. One of the men passengers began to claw at the gate frantically and the other kept muttering under his breath, softly and steadily, biting off his words crisply and quite unconscious of what he was saying. The woman who had clutched Louise ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... though he had heard him, Phadrig came towards them at the moment, and said in his polite, impersonal tone: ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... really supplies its own answer. It will be obvious to every one who considers that the drafting of statutes and the formulating of legal decisions is almost as impersonal a procedure as that of drawing up the rules to govern a game; and it offers hardly more opportunity for discriminating between man ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic, impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter must see to the newcomers. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... to many of His slothful followers the pleading question, as from His own lips, 'Dost thou not care that thou hast left me to serve alone?' Surely to us all it should bring inspiration and strength, courage and confidence, deliverance from man, and elevation above the reverence of blind impersonal forces. Surely we may all lay to heart the grand lesson that union with Him is our only strength, and oblivion of ourselves our highest wisdom. Surely he has best learned his true place and the worth of Jesus Christ, who ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the sound of his own voice. He thought that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical stature; and, as he attached the fervent nature of his companion more and more closely to him, he heard the strange impersonal voice which he recognised as his own, insisting on the soul's incurable loneliness. We cannot give ourselves, it said: we are our own. The end of these discourses was that one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... keep her." He gathered up his reins. "Boyd told me about Grandfather," he added in a rush. "I'm sorry." And he was, he told himself, sorry for Aunt Marianna, who had to stay at Red Springs now, and even a little in an impersonal way for the old man, who must find inactivity a worse prison than any stone-walled room. But it was being polite about a stranger. "Major Forbes ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... also in result a materially useful passion. It allows us to see in the deeds of Henry VIII's Parliament not the blind working of political development, the impersonal and inevitable action of economic laws, but the hot greed of a king and the astuteness ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... the heart of the ancient faith was atrophied by the indifference of the people, and the zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. No definite creed succeeded in gaining a permanent ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... not make her out at all. She seemed to single him out, to encourage him as far as a self-respecting woman might, yet an instinct warned him not to bank on it. There was an unflattering impersonal quality in her encouragement; behind it one glimpsed formidable reserves. She was wrapped in reticence like a mantle. Evan had a feeling that if she had been really drawn to him she would not have been so nice to him. On the ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... incongruous subjects; and by turns I detected myself laughing, singing, praying, apostrophising the sun, the clouds, the distant land, and even the spirits of my drowned companions, whom I imagined to be crowding round me and trying to drag me off the floating hatch. I was aware, in a vague, impersonal fashion, of the gradual decline of the sun toward the west, of his disappearance beneath the horizon, and of the fact that just as the outlines of the land ahead were fading into the gathering darkness a small spark of light sprang into view ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... Parts method of publication. He began his stories without seeing the end; in one of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making this manner of fiction. While "Vanity Fair" is, of course, written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is put into the mouth of a character in the book: an extraordinary ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... idea of God or mind is both personal and impersonal. Nor in ascribing, as appears to us, both these attributes to him, and in speaking of God both in the masculine and neuter gender, did he seem to himself inconsistent. For the difference between the personal and impersonal was not marked to him as to ourselves. We make a fundamental distinction ...
— Philebus • Plato
... manner of men who seek to influence a young girl's mind and heart, he lent her books to read, and he marked his favorite passages, which he discussed afterward. They were not passages of abstract thought and impersonal sentiment, like the penciled notes in Alick Corfield's literary loans, but scenes of passion or of pathos, going straight to the heart of youth, which feels rather than reflects, or descriptions of places which were equal to pictures of human life. Under Alick's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... enthusiasm faded from Raffles's face; clearly I had reminded him of some prime anxiety, forgotten in his impersonal joy over the exploit of a fellow-criminal. He looked over his shoulder towards the ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... vision, as he had seen her in these places from the time of her first coming. At church he created her form in her accustomed seat, and his worship was a little confused. She had asked him to write, and he made home life and the varying aspects of nature real to her. His letters, however, were so impersonal that she could read the greater part of them to Gertrude, who had resolved to be pleased out of good-will to Webb, and with the intention of aiding his cause. But she soon found herself expressing genuine ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... directly challenges comparison with Quentin Durward. While, though Scott's jeunes premiers are not, as he himself well knew and frankly confessed, his greatest triumphs, he has never given us anything of the kind so personally impersonal as Phoebus de Chateaupers. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... for yourself, perhaps not even for your son, but you look on smiling; and when you recall their images—again, it is with a smile. I defy you to see or think of them and not smile with an infinite and intimate, but quite impersonal, pleasure. Well, either I know nothing of women, or that was the case with Bethiah McRankine. She had been to church with a cockade behind her, on the one hand; on the other, her house was brightened by the presence of a pair of good-looking young fellows of the other sex, who were ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... replied the nurse, with the calm impersonal manner of her kind. "I heard the ring and heard what he said to the maid; and, like her, I was surprised to hear that it was Miss Burton's father. However, I paid little attention, but went ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... the modeling room but Naskowski, the silent, heavy-shouldered Slav who toiled early and late making up for his lost youth. Him Patricia held to be as impersonal as any of the other furnishings of the room, and she readily took ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... of Religion to Science is the demonstration of the supernaturalness of the Natural. Thus, as the Supernatural becomes slowly Natural, will also the Natural become slowly Supernatural, until in the impersonal authority of Law men everywhere recognize the Authority ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... the painter's rock of endeavor, but a master of the craft gazing from some high pinnacle at a territory he had won. If you know anything of painting, Miss Manning, you will go with me so far as to admit that my indiscretion was impersonal. I, a poet who expressed his emotions in terms of color, was alone with Aphrodite and a nymph, on a June morning, in a leafy English park. I don't think I should be blamed, but envied. I should not be confessing a fault, but claiming recognition as ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... has been said of M. Sainte-Beuve, that "what chiefly interests him in a book is the author, and in the author the very mystery of his personality." In other words, each looks upon a literary work, not as the production of certain impersonal intellectual faculties, but as a manifestation of the author in the totality of his nature. But while the point of view is thus identical, there is little similarity in the treatment. In the one case a powerful imagination causes the figure to stand out in bold relief, while a luminous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... for all to enjoy without effort? For—here is the point—an American, the American of today—accustomed to high speed, constant energy, nervous tenseness, the uncertainty, and the fight, cannot cultivate the leisurely German method, the almost scientific and impersonal spirit that informs every profession and branch of art. It is our own way ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... not be misused for whom or whose, e. g., "Who (whom) did you wish to see?" "Washington, than who (whose) no greater name is recorded." Impersonal objects should be referred to by ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... with Pop to the car," he commanded, and Julia trotted contentedly beside him to Market Street. There she gave him a child's soft, impersonal kiss, staring up at the buildings opposite as she did so. George jumped on a cable car, wedged his bag under his knees as he took a seat on the dummy, and looked back at the little figure that was moving toward the dingy opening of O'Farrell Street, and at the spring sunshine, ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... which investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. iii. part i. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... by a giggle and by the deepening dimple in her cheek, but all the same she sighed with a sort of impersonal regret at the prospect of any unpleasantness. "It would be too bad if I got mad, wouldn't it?" she said thoughtfully. The others looked at one another in consternation. They knew so well what it meant to have Elizabeth "mad," that Nannie Maitland, the oldest of the little ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... Eddy's German wife, and it came from a pair of strong lungs in a well-developed chest, and was actuated by a strong and indignant spirit. Arthur Carroll, listening to her, was conscious of an absurdly impersonal sentiment of something like admiration. The young woman was really in a manner superb. The occasion was trivial, even ignoble. Carroll felt contemptuous both for her and for himself, and yet she dignified it to a degree. Minna Eddy was built on a large scale; she was both muscular ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... insisted on their reading parts of it together. Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns, Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on primitive law, and Emerson! The relation of the men was almost impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life. Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole, sharper angles of mental refraction—breaking ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... translate freely, the battle is fought, or the contest rages. The verb pugno in Latin is intransitive, and so does not have a personal subject in the passive. A verb with an indeterminate subject, designated in English by it, is called impersonal.] ...
— Latin for Beginners • Benjamin Leonard D'Ooge
... past—to reject it on scientific or critical grounds—and who was to prove to him that the universe had been created a few thousand years ago by a remote and external Deity? As for him, he professed, and professed candidly enough, that he could see nothing in nature but the operation of impersonal forces; there was natural law, and there was the process of evolution, but beyond these——? Now the only really telling reply that can be made to those who argue in this fashion is that which reasons from the Divine immanence as its terminus a quo—the doctrine which beholds God first of all present ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... that we should mind them so? They come to everybody in turn, and they are as relentless and impersonal as the sun marching around the sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers, and the streetcar conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the Kaiser ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... not mean that they actually reasoned it out: they were the average Teutonic crowd, with an inborn respect for law and order and for traditions bequeathed to them by generations of ancestors: the reasons that made them act as they did were impersonal, instinctive, hereditary. ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the power of great forces that cared nothing for family or class or creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to inscrutable ends. This was how it struck young Jolyon, who had the impersonal eye. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... an air about it,—if not precisely menacing, at least portentous, with its gaping windows and towering roof. I was a little tired from a hard day; I had the odd feeding of having raised up something with which—momentarily at least—I doubted my ability to cope: something huge, impersonal; something that ought to have represented a fireside, a sanctuary, and yet was the embodiment of an element quite alien to the home; a restless element with which our American atmosphere had, by invisible degrees, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... here are finer than music," Helen remarked, fleeing to an impersonal theme. "To walk in the moonlight, without wraps and with no sense of discomfort, in the middle of December, is a wonderful experience to me. Last night I heard a mocking-bird singing; and my aunt has been asking Mrs. Haley if watermelons ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... supreme power swings between the Emperor and the impersonal General Staff, all are interested, since even an Emperor is mortal, in learning something about the heir who succeeds in case of death. And we who face with the rest of the world the forces of Kaiserism desire to ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... grown bigger and more complex in America, as the forces that shape our lives seem to have grown more distant and more impersonal, a great feeling of frustration has crept across ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... personal profit. It must always be remembered that the personal privilege so received was very small in comparison with the total revenue to be administrated, and that the vast mass of public work as carried on by the judiciary, the officers of the Treasury and so forth, continued to be quite impersonal and fundamentally imperial. This governmental world of clerks and civil servants lived its own life and was only in theory dependent upon the Rex, and the Rex was no more than the successor of the chief local Roman official. [Footnote: ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not obviously imply ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fibre of his faith, there were strands of a strange philosophy; he held strongly the doctrine of Illusion, by which the one impersonal Spirit, "in the illusion which overspreads it, is to the external world what yarn is to cloth, what milk is to curds, what clay is to a jar, but only in that illusion," that is, "he is not the actual material cause of the world, as clay of a jar, but the illusory material cause, ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... to restrict the use of postals to impersonal communications; but if they must be used, the message should be brief with an apology for its use. It is a good plan in addition to omit the usual My dear, and to sign with the initials ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... never made her a present there was nothing of this kind to discard. It had been part of his non-committal, impersonal attitude toward her that he had never given her a concrete sign that she meant anything to him whatever. He had thanked her on occasions for the comforting quality he found in her presence. He had, in so many words, recognized the fact that when he got into a tantrum of nerves ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... harvest, the dispenser to man of ten thousand blessings, the sustainer of his life and health and happiness. With some the worship was purely and wholly material—the sun was viewed as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life, unintelligent, impersonal; but with others, sun-worship was something higher than this: the orb of day was regarded as informed by a good, wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through it, and was the true benefactor of mankind and sustainer of life and of the universe. Sun-worship ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... she is a complainer about nothing, and then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband's folly and of hopeless disease. The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of the masterful mill-owner in Shirley) is uncertain and impersonal: and the minor characters are null. One hopes, for a time, that Margaret herself will save the situation: but she goes off instead of coming on, and has rather less individuality and convincingness at the end of the story than at the beginning. In short, Mrs. Gaskell seems to ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... power perfectly, and after one or two memorable lessons had put from her the temptation to give it active exercise. It should be the instrument of unqualified happiness when her hour came; meanwhile she cultivated an impersonal attitude which baffled men unable to propose and tempered the wind to those ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... a steady mechanical creep which had in it an impersonal quality—the movement of the wave, or of the breeze, or of the cloud. He followed his directions literally, without an inquiring gaze at anything. It could have been seen that the boy's ideas of life were different from those of the ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... new thought which was first imparted to him by the vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing stimulus to the ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... umbrella-stand and stared vacantly before her. It had fallen at last—this blow in which she now saw that she had never really believed! And yet she had imagined she was prepared for it, had expected it, was already planning her future life in view of it—an effaced impersonal life in the service of somebody else's children—when, in reality, under that thin surface of abnegation and acceptance, all the old hopes had been smouldering red-hot in their ashes! What was the use of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any experience, ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... humor is a mixture of love and surprise, and both appeal to the child completely. Humor brings joy into the world, so does the little child, their very existence is a harmony. Humor sees contrasts, shows good sense, and feels compassion. It stimulates curiosity. Its laughter is impersonal and has a social and spiritual effect. It acts like fresh air, it clarifies the atmosphere of the mind and it enables one to see things in a sharply defined light. It reveals character; it breaks up a situation, reconstructs it, and so views life, interprets it. It plays with ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... that's all. I telephoned Enid." He unhooked his team, and he and his mother started down the hill together, walking behind the horses. Though they had not been alone like this for a long while, she felt it best to talk about impersonal things. ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... that his acts evidently affect the whole of society. Finally, training in the social sciences will insure the development of true moral freedom in our social life, for these sciences involve a searching but impersonal criticism of social institutions and public policies. Now the very breath of life of a free society is intelligent public criticism of its institutions and policies. Without this, there can be ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... came up to bid Miss Rangely good-bye on the eve of her departure from Harbour Hill, he looked like a man who was being led to execution without benefit of clergy. But he kept himself well in hand and talked calmly on impersonal subjects. After all, it was Katherine who made the first break when she got up to say good-bye. She was in the middle of some conventional sentence when she suddenly stopped short, and her voice trailed off in a ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... however, there is a possibility of some real Providence or impersonal Governance of the world, to which here, for a moment, Hecuba makes a passionate approach. If there is any explanation, any justice, even in the form of mere punishment of the wicked, she will be content and give worship! But it seems that there is not. Then at last there ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... have taken the unusual course of arresting the reference to the committee of finance of the memorial of the Chamber of Commerce of New York, in order to discuss, in an impersonal and nonpartisan way, one of the questions presented by that memorial, and one which now fills the public mind and must necessarily soon occupy our attention. That question is, 'Ought the resumption ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... continuous change needs to be balanced by a recognition of the catastrophic element in experience, and also by a recognition of the exceptional significance for us of events which may be perfectly regular from an impersonal point of view. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... themselves; one another, each other, to one another, to each other; equivalent to the passive in English, or to the impersonal ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... personal agents at work, in place of our simple elemental ones; the result is the same. Take the mythic cosmogonies of ancient Greece, Scandinavia, and India, and the geologies and astronomies of the present day, and compare their pages, changing things personal into things impersonal. The expulsion and banishment of the old shapeless mundane deities by a new and more beautiful race of gods, the cosmical divinities, the powers and rulers of an ordered world, are intelligible enough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... but will realise that it is the most graphic way in which to sketch out the points which are likely to occur to any other inquirer. When I have passed over this ground, it will be possible to get on to something more general and impersonal in its nature. ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... cheerfully. I was now merely a spectator, and from my couch in the big room I could lie and watch the human interplay with that detached, impassive, impersonal feeling which French writers tell us is so valuable to the litterateur, and American writers to ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... a black spell I found expressed by other men, and by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one of them in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: "This war was not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell." This belief was due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern warfare, in which gun-fire is at so long a range that shell-fire has the quality of natural and elemental powers of death—like thunderbolts—and men killed twenty miles behind the lines while walking over ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... spectator into the privacy of the tomb. In some ways these two angels are among the noblest creations of the master. They are comparatively small, their position is subordinate, and they have been repaired by a clumsy journeyman. Yet they have a majestic solemnity. They are calm impersonal mourners—not shrouded like the bowed figures which bear the effigy of the Senechal of Burgundy.[97] They stand upright, simply posed and simply clad guardian angels, absorbed by watching the dead. The three large figures which ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... knowledge I do not hope to taste in this life. But all creation was remodelled on a grander scale by the utterances of my teachers; and my problems, though they deepened with the expansion of all nameable phenomena, were carried up to the heights of the impersonal, and ceased to torment me. Seeing how life and death, beginning and end, were all parts of the process of being, it mattered less in what particular ripple of the flux of existence I found myself. If past time was a trooping of similar yesterdays, back ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... concerned, naturally, with wholly impersonal verse, and in it the aged poet is never wholly absent from English thought. As the youthful singer suggests the southland, so the aged bard seems indigenous to the north. It seems inevitable that Gray should depict the Scotch bard as old, [Footnote: The ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Beck are just the sort of audacious public-interest performers that a man like him should be after. He seemed to have an insatiable capacity for picking out little filaments of dry-as-dust technique from which on behalf of an impersonal client like the city of Toronto he could manage to inveigle a web of silk about any anti-civic despot who regards a city as a thing to be worked for dividends, and people merely as common ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... with a smile of apprehension which plainly amused him. Beatrice was frankly impersonal in her attitude; he represented a new species of the genus man, and she, too, evidently regarded him in the light of a strange animal, viewed unexpectedly ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... and Holland, followed Calvin and not Luther. And Calvin was a Frenchman; an unpleasant Frenchman, it is true, but one full of that French capacity for creating official entities which can really act, and have a kind of impersonal personality, such as the French Monarchy or the Terror. Luther was an anarchist, and therefore a dreamer. He made that which is, perhaps, in the long run, the fullest and most shining manifestation of failure; he made a name. Calvin made an active, governing, persecuting thing, ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions—in his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... farmer had suffered most by the changed order. The old personal relationship and kindly feeling between employee and employer had passed away. The great aggregations of capital which had taken the place of the former employers were impersonal forces, which knew the worker no longer as a man, but as a unit of force. He was merely a tool in the employ of a machine, the managers of which regarded him as a necessary nuisance, who must unfortunately be retained at the least possible expense, until ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... susurrus of insects nor the music of birds. He moved onward slowly and quietly. The hum grew and strengthened. It became a sound. It divided into component parts, whistlings, trillings, twitterings, callings. Bird-like they were—but they could come only from the human throat. Impersonal they were—and yet they were sexed, female and male. Frank looked about him carefully. A little distance away, the trail sent off a tiny feeler into the jungle. It dipped into one of the pretty glades ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... I found, to my disappointment, that the "Guardian" exhibited more than the usual dearth of domestic intelligence, although it was singularly oracular on "The State of Europe," and "Jeffersonian Democracy." A certain cheap assurance, a copy-book dogmatism, a colloquial familiarity, even in the impersonal plural, and a series of inaccuracies and blunders here and there, struck some old chord in my memory. I was mutely wondering where and when I had become personally familiar with rhetoric like that, when the door of the office opened and ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... a matter of surprise to many to find the work in sheds and quarries proceeding with its accustomed regularity; to find that to the new comers in Flamsted the affair was an impersonal one, that Champney Googe held no place among the workmen; that his absconding meant to them simply another one of the "high rollers" fleeing from his deserts. Little by little, during that first week, the truth found its way home to each man and woman personally interested in this erring ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... have been welcome enough. But this impersonal method of knocking the ground from under his feet goaded him to exasperation. He had not even the satisfaction of knowing that he had wrought jealousy or friction between husband and wife. Desmond had practically ignored ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... choose for my Judge? the earnest, impersonal reader, Who, in the work, forgets me and the world and himself! You who have eyes to detect, and Gall to Chastise the imperfect, Have you the heart, too, that loves,—feels and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... him with those blue, ecstatic eyes, so oblivious to his pain that for a moment a sort of impersonal amazement at such self-centredness held him silent. But after the first shock he spoke with a slow fluency that pierced Athalia's egotism and stirred an answering astonishment in her. His weeks of vague misgiving, deepening into keen ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... events, self looms large, even in the crisis of supreme self-sacrifice. In the passive part, which even the most active among us play for the greater portion of our lives, self is merged in the detached and impersonal interest which we take in what passes before our eyes. Yet must we describe these things only as they are designed and coloured by our proper eyes, and therefore, with no greater hope of accuracy than to approximate to the general and ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... looked her over with an impersonal air, lending weight to the resulting judgment—"I should ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... complicated thing to do to separate an individual from his qualities. The most one can say is that one might like him if he were different from what he is; but as long as that remains what the grammarians call an unfulfilled condition, one's liking is of a very impersonal nature. Such a statement as that one would like a person well enough if he were only not what he is, is like the speech that was parodied by Archbishop Whately in the House of Lords. A speaker was recommending a measure on the ground that it would be a very satisfactory ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Blacksmith" by Whistler shows you the blacksmith, not Whistler; Rembrandt's pictures of his mother show the woman; Franz Hals gives you the Burgomaster, not himself. Shakespeare of all writers is the most impersonal—he does not give ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... result of the old Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a woman. This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always her secret pride of fancy—the belief in her ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... on the thought of shadowed brightness and Marjory, fresh, young, deeply rooted in respectability, seemed suddenly more significant than she had ever been before. In no way Augustine's equal, of course, except in that impersonal, yet so important matter of roots; Amabel had known a little irritation over Mrs. Grey's open manoeuvreings; but on this morning of rudderless tossing, Marjory appeared in a new aspect. How sound; how safe. It was of Augustine's insecurity rather than of Augustine himself that she was thinking ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... mere result of will, not an outcome of faculty, not an unsupported impulse of heart. It was character living itself out, an utterance of its entire unity, something drawn from the solemn depths of those life-convictions which all the personal and impersonal powers of a man, aglow and welded, unite in producing. Hence, their work was not apart from them, even so far as to be called ahead of them; nor parallel with them; it was one with them by a necessary spiritual inclusion. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... of her attitude to Harding Powell. It was passionless, impersonal. She wanted nothing of Harding Powell except to help him, and to help Milly, dear little Milly. And never before had she been given so complete, so overwhelming a sense of having helped. It was nothing—unless ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... foreseen, and deliberately though unsuccessfully guarded against. The American revolutionists were almost as much under the influence of classical antiquity as the French. From it they drew the noble conception of "the Republic," the public thing acting with impersonal justice towards all citizens. But with it they also drew an exaggerated dread of what they called "Caesarism," and with it they mixed the curious but characteristic illusion of that age—an illusion from which, by the way, Rousseau himself was conspicuously free—that the most ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... merry world, my masters, as has been said before," resumed Warner, "but I should add that it's also a mad wag of a world. Here we are face to face for forty miles, at some points seeking to kill one another in a highly impersonal way, and at other points conducting sale and barter according to the established customs of peace. People at home wouldn't believe it, and later on a lot more won't believe it, when the writers come to write about it. But it's ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... rich; let them be blood-suckers; so much, God willing, shall they regorge into the treasury of the empire. Let but Heaven smile upon our party, and the Cassiani shall return to the republic its old impersonal supremacy." ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... what a fool he was, he had grown to an astonishing charm of manner. The lonely man smoking his idle pipe at his tent door in the canon looked back at him across such a distance of time and fate that his inspection of the youth was almost impersonal. The lad passed for a piece of naive nature, and not altogether unjustly. He was eager and ardent, and absurdly tender-hearted. He loved all his friends, and he had a crowd of them. 'Because,' as Balzac says, 'he had known a time when a sou'sworth of ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... her sister, just once, and then averted her eyes. Hers was the understanding which springs from love, and she realised that her simple question had struck a tender spot. Instead of waiting for an answer she switched the conversation to ordinary, impersonal topics, and kept it there until the house ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... brooding over mysteries; if he is lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal thoughts. In the dawn of science, when there was a danger of life becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps of swiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were no solutions at all, but only ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who Jack Swing was. Most likely he really was more than one person, or rather an impersonal being, worked up as a sort of shadowy puppet to act in the cause of ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... not trust himself to discuss the matter further. He rose precipitately with an outraged, impersonal bow, and left the table, abandoning his biscuit and cheese, his half finished bottle of Rudesheimer and the figs that were to follow, with the ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... they themselves had unconsciously read into it. Mediocre as critics, and as psychologists contemptible, they were too single-minded, too full of themselves and their passions, even when they were the most enamored of truth. Italian idealism cannot forget itself: it is not interested in the impersonal dreams of the North; it leads everything back to itself, its desires, its pride of race, and transfigures them. Consciously or unconsciously, it is always toiling for the terza Roma. It must be said that for many centuries it has not taken much trouble to realize it. These splendid Italians, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... line of applicants filling out blanks. Here he did not have to plead with some one man for the chance to work. He was handled quickly and efficiently. On a blank he gave his age, his experience, how much he expected; and a brisk, impersonal clerk told him to ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... have long labored, and carries them out even more vigorously than they had been planned originally. The initial reformers are glad that their ideals have been realized, but their zeal must be uncommonly impersonal if the success brings them quite so much joy as it logically ought. It is not likely that the Toleration Act filled the soul of William Penn with great jubilation. Indeed, we know that he insisted to the end of his life that James, if he had been let alone, would ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... him I was willing to share poverty with him," she said, with a quiet dignity, as if telling an impersonal tale, "but he insisted that ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... of the data reported. Belonging as dreams do to the most personal and private life of the individual it is nevertheless true that continued and careful study of this form of mentation insensibly alters one's attitude so that at length the dream appears as a fact of nature, impersonal ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... circumscription. Now, we have no evidence, nor are we able to conceive, of the external world as limited; consequently we are not able to conceive, of the world-eject as personal. But, inasmuch as personality arises only from limitation, the conclusion that the world-eject is impersonal does not tend to show that it is of lower psychical value than conscious personality: on the contrary, it tends to show that it is probably of higher psychical value. True, we are not able to conceive actually of mind as impersonal; but we ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter," he said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being kind to old friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people who've held out helping hands to you. Well, and women have been trained for hundreds of years to see things in that private and personal way, and to exalt the private and personal virtues. Just as they've ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... remoteness was terrifying. He carved with appalling courtesy. "Is there another chicken, Genevieve?" he asked, as if he had only an impersonal interest in her kitchen. No, there was only the one. And plenty, too, said the guests pleasantly. Genevieve hoped there were eggs and bacon for Marie and ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... cause for which he was fighting. That must suffice; it must take the place of wife and love. Cold, impersonal, inadequate as it seemed now, he knew that in the end it would suffice to fill great part of that inner heart which she had occupied. He turned to it with the kindling affection which a man ever has for the ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... me at the end with the broken, shadowy legend, Broken and shadowy still, as in the beginning. I linger, Teased with its vague unfathomed suggestion, and wonder, As at first I wondered, what happened about Violante, And am but ill content with those metaphysical phrases Touching the strictly impersonal nature of personal effort, Wherewithal Titian had fain ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... fixed on the new dean with grave regard. Was this salutary speech purely impersonal or did a spice of malicious meaning lurk within it? Not since those far-off days when Miss Leece, a disagreeable teacher of mathematics at Oakdale High School, had made her algebra path a thorny one had she encountered ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... but I don't care much for women except in an impersonal sort of way, or perhaps I don't attract them. I might enjoy falling in love if it were not ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... observation shows, that, as time runs on, matter tends more and more to become goods, the blind forms of motion in nature to become useful labor and useful sustenance, impersonal and objectless existence to be transformed into personal property and personal culture, Schaeffle inclines to the belief that the whole mechanism of unconsciously governing nature is destined ultimately to aid in the realization of moral ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... the case of martyrs that enthusiasm is contagious. However highly we may estimate the impersonal forces that operate for 'the furtherance of the gospel' we cannot but see that in all ages, from the time of Paul down to to-day, the main agents for the spread of the gospel have been individual souls all aflame with the love ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... was brief and able, eloquent from the simplicity and earnestness of her heart, logical from the well disciplined vigor of her mind. She was followed by Miss Anthony, morally as inevitable and impersonal as a Greek chorus, but physically and intellectually individual, intense, original, full of humor and good nature—anything but the roaring lioness of newspaper reports some years ago. Mrs. Davis, of Rhode Island, spoke briefly in support of the demand for franchise. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... tried to impress on you, from the beginning, that odd sort of optimism which has ruled all the people about me, even under the most trying episodes of the war. Up to now, the hatred of the Germans has been, in a certain sense, impersonal. It has been a racial hatred of a natural foe, an accepted evil, just as the uncalled-for war was. It had wrought a strange, unexpected, altogether remarkable change in the French people. Their faces had become more serious, their bearing more heroic, their laughter less frequent, ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... news of his apparent defeat. Laughingly he said: "Well, Tumulty, it begins to look as if we have been badly licked." As he discussed the matter with me I could detect no note of sadness in his voice. In fact, I could hear him chuckle over the 'phone. He seemed to take an impersonal view of the whole thing and talked like a man from whose shoulders a great load had been lifted and now he was happy and rejoicing that he was a free man again. When I informed him of the drifts in our favour from other parts of the country and said that it was too early ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... we sat thus talking, the Doctor doing the most of it, and giving full rein to his philosophically impersonal views of the immediate questions involved in the national struggle. He rose at last, and left me thinking of his strange personality and wondering why, holding such views, be should throw his ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... and consumingly interested in humanity—both in the mass and as individuals, whether of his own race or any other—Booker Washington thought and acted to an uncommon degree on the impersonal plane. This characteristic was perhaps most strikingly illustrated in his attitude toward race prejudice. When, many years ago, he had charge of the Indian students at Hampton, and had occasion to travel with them, he found they were free to occupy in the hotels any rooms they could pay ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... lists and parted them. Father feared a similar exhibition on my part and did not wish me to attend your combat. He says now that I shall go to no more. I certainly made myself ridiculous. I enjoy a fair fight, whatever the outcome may be, but I despise murder. My act was entirely impersonal, ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... Max held out, and then did nothing with it, in the aloof, impersonal way that had always irritated Max, and made him want to fling away the unresponsive fingers. Now, however, for the first time in his life he did not notice. He was lost in his desire for ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... little of one another; you will be shooting most of the time," she said—with the very faintest hint of challenge—too delicate, too impersonal to savour of coquetry. But the germ of it ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... proportionately disappointed. An emotional friendship she had not desired; her scheme had been to pass with her visitor as a placid creature with a good deal of leisure which she was disposed to devote to profitable conversation of an impersonal sort. She liked him extremely, she felt in him the living force of something to which, when she made up her girlish mind that a needy nobleman was the ripest fruit of time, she had done too scant justice. They went through the little gate in the garden-wall and approached ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... through the air? Indistinguishable the particle was in the cloud whence it came; indistinguishable it will become again in the ocean whither it is bound. Its personality is but its passing phase from a vast impersonal on the one hand to an equally vast impersonal on the other. Thus seers preached in the past; so modern science is hinting to-day. With us the idea seems the bitter fruit of material philosophy; by them it was looked upon as ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... means of doubtful understanding, could ever do. She heard him talked about in a fashion that she found revolting. Her old-time comrade was as much a man as ever, despite his injuries, as sane in all his outlook, as whimsical and impersonal in his fun. She therefore resented the universal attitude of regarding him as a crushed archangel, a candidate for repeated and unlimited doses of mental gruel. If ever a man needed solid social nutriment, it was this ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... How impersonal he sounded. She longed for the creeping music of jealousy in his voice. If only Claude would be ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... Arian limitation of it to the sphere of time. Nor had Marcellus escaped the difficulties of Arius. If, for example, the idea of an eternal Son is polytheistic, nothing is gained by transferring the eternity to an impersonal Word. If the generation of the Son is materializing, so also is the coming forth of the Word. If the work of creation is unworthy of God, it may as well be delegated to a created Son as to a transitory Word. So far Athanasius. Indeed, to ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I was filled with pride that I knew a man who held converse with great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced over happenings across the sea. I never recall those early conversations ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... It is imprudent to predict a permanent place for even the best of Alice Carey's gentle songs; but Phoebe's utterance may very possibly be quoted, from her unpretending station as adviser and alleviator of every-day life, after her name shall be forgotten and her religion shall have become impersonal. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... lust of battle, but I don't for my part experience anything like it, though gunners tell me they do, which is natural. One feels one is taking part in a game of skill at a dignified distance, and any feeling of hostility is very impersonal and detached, even when concrete signs of an enemy's ill-will are paying us noisy visits. The fact is—and I fancy this applies to all sorts and conditions of private soldiers—in our life in the field, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work and love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document. My only sorrow is that amateurs of whom I have spoken above will not do this; they rather turn to external and impersonal impressions, relate definite things, what they see on their travels, for instance, describing just the things which anyone can see. They tend to indulge in the melancholy labour of translation, or employ customary, familiar forms, such as the novel or the play. If only they would ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... own private, personal property, and the thing dearest to him in the world, after his daughter Lucille. He prided himself on the fact that his hotel was not like other New York hotels, which were run by impersonal companies and shareholders and boards of directors, and consequently lacked the paternal touch which made the Cosmopolis what it was. At other hotels things went wrong, and clients complained. At the Cosmopolis things never went wrong, because ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... or mode of operation. The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative action was universal, inasmuch as it contemplated only cosmical issues; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... to overestimate the value of these benefactions to men of talent and genius. Where would Wordsworth have been, what could he have done, without the gift bestowed upon him by Raisley Calvert! In America such assistance is oftener given in the more impersonal way of endowment of chairs or creating of scholarships. No method less personal or more elevating for the development of the scholar and man of genius ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... extremely plain and tidy. It was impersonal, neutral, like the room in a hotel. And yet he had spent in it twelve years of his life. Most people collect no end of trifles during such a period; presents, little superfluous nothings, ornaments. Not a single engraving, not a supplement to an illustrated ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... killing the aged and infirm, had died out, but the symbol of them remained. To explain the symbol a myth was created, which kept sufficiently near to the original idea as to retain evidence of its close connection with the descent of property; and thus was launched the dateless, impersonal, unlocalised story which Mr. Campbell has given as a specimen of vagrant traditions, which "must have been invented after agriculture and fixed habitations, after laws of property and inheritance; but it may ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... said Mr. Philip, which was a sure sign that he was upset, for in business he reckoned to say "Yes, yes." The two men began by exchange of politenesses about Mr. Frank Gibson, to whom they referred in the impersonal way of business conversations as though he were some well-known brand of integrity, and then proceeded to divest the property in Rio de Janeiro of all interest in a like manner. It was a house, it appeared, and was at present let to an American named Capel on a five years' lease, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... turned from their course by persuasion and entreaty as by threats and intimidation. The distinction between the two conflicting views of the universe turns on their answer to the crucial question, Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as a conciliation of the superhuman powers, assumes the former member of the alternative. For all conciliation implies that the being conciliated is a conscious or personal agent, that his conduct is in some measure uncertain, and ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... jeune fille is, but I do know——" He sprang up. He did not look at her. He paraded back and forth, three steps to the right, three to the left, his hands in his pockets, his voice impersonal. "I know you're the finest person I ever met. You're the kind—I knew there must be people like you, because I knew the Joneses. They're the only friends I've got that have, oh, I suppose it's what they ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... had returned from their deliberate excursion about the gymnasium just in time to meet halfway that utterly impersonal scrutiny. For a long moment or two that mutual inspection endured; then the boy's lips moved—open with a smile that was far graver than his gravity had been—and he started slowly across the floor toward the table. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... Supernatural, so the gift of Religion to Science is the demonstration of the supernaturalness of the Natural. Thus, as the Supernatural becomes slowly Natural, will also the Natural become slowly Supernatural, until in the impersonal authority of Law men everywhere ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... lives to himself, and that his acts evidently affect the whole of society. Finally, training in the social sciences will insure the development of true moral freedom in our social life, for these sciences involve a searching but impersonal criticism of social institutions and public policies. Now the very breath of life of a free society is intelligent public criticism of its institutions and policies. Without this, there can be no change, no progress. But intelligent criticism implies scientific ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... forms of matter—are neither deities themselves, nor their embodiments and expressions, nor the work of conflicting deities. From it we learn that the universe is not self-existent, nor even (as the pantheist thinks of it) the expression of one vague, impersonal and unconscious, but all-pervading influence. It was not self-made; it did not exist from all eternity. It is not God, for ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... one impersonal glance, saw that she had destroyed him utterly, relented, and graciously acquiesced. When they left the office Matt Peasley was stepping high, like a ten-time winner, for he had suddenly made the discovery that life ashore was a wonderful, wonderful thing. There ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... copying,—there remains as his most individual quality a longing.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} And this is what the dissatisfied of all kinds, and all those who yearn, divine in him. He is much too little of a personality, too little of a central figure.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} The "impersonal," those who are not self-centred, love him for this. He is especially the musician of a species of dissatisfied women. Fifty steps further on, and we find the female Wagnerite—just as we find Wagner himself fifty paces ahead of Brahms.—The female Wagnerite is a more definite, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... through everything, the retreat from Mons, the Battle of the Aisne, the great rush north, and the Battle of Neuve Chapelle on the 17th of March. I listened, fascinated, to his tale, which he told with a true soldier's impersonal modesty. ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... others, we see Him still fulfilling His ministry of mercy and of sympathy, we are certain that His eyes would rest upon one group which could not fail to pierce His heart with its pathos and tragedy. Our Lord's love is not a general, impersonal love of humanity; it is always love of a person. He no doubt felt a special love for this thief who appealed to Him from the cross by His side. In the whole course of His life our Lord had shown His oneness with us in that He loved special people in a special way. He ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... it with an impersonal tone as if there were complete detachment between herself as an observer and as a guest ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... far as your eyes are concerned, between you and me. Make the best instead of the worst of your strange position here. It offers you a new sensation to amuse you while you are ill. You have a nurse who is an impersonal creature—a shadow among shadows; a voice to speak to you, and a hand to help you, and nothing more. Enough of myself!" she exclaimed, rising and changing her tone. "What can I do to amuse you?" She considered a little. ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... insinuating reptile. One speaks, the other rejoins, and the third fills up the chasm of interest. The plot thickens, the passions are displayed, and the tragedy hastens to its end. Then is heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the cool (the wind) of the garden, the impersonal presence of Jehovah is, as it were, felt in the passing breeze, and a shadow falls upon the earth,—but such a shadow as their own patient toil may dissipate, and beyond the confines of which their hope, which has now taken the place of enjoyment, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of the cause for which he was fighting. That must suffice; it must take the place of wife and love. Cold, impersonal, inadequate as it seemed now, he knew that in the end it would suffice to fill great part of that inner heart which she had occupied. He turned to it with the kindling affection which a man ever has for the resource that is ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... been welcome enough. But this impersonal method of knocking the ground from under his feet goaded him to exasperation. He had not even the satisfaction of knowing that he had wrought jealousy or friction between husband and wife. Desmond had practically ignored his existence. There lay the sting that roused all the devil in Kresney; ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... Unnefer ("Hare God"). These are the lines upon which investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. iii. part ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... suspicion of policy has surrounded the tract must be ascribed to the well-intentioned letter of the Earl of Berkeley above quoted; and the Earl would not have written thus had he felt Swift's motive to be any other than a purely impersonal one. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... a smile of apprehension which plainly amused him. Beatrice was frankly impersonal in her attitude; he represented a new species of the genus man, and she, too, evidently regarded him in the light of a strange animal, viewed ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... Cakhetine wines, and some railroad agent, a very proud and very poor nobleman, with shirt cuffs the colour of a cabbage rose, and with an eye which had been replaced by a black circle on an elastic. Pasha, passive in everything save her impersonal sensuality, would go with anybody who might call her, but the administration of the house vigilantly guards its interests in her. A near insanity already flits over her lovely face, in her half-closed eyes, always smiling with some heady, blissful, meek, bashful and unseemly smile, ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... which the traveller in distress may transmit his appeal. I fill it with incoherent sounds, and sounds more incoherent yet come back to me. I gather at last their meaning; they appear to constitute a somewhat stern inquiry. A hollow impersonal voice wishes to know what I want, and the very question paralyses me. I want everything—yet I want nothing—nothing this hard impersonality can give! I want my little corner of Paris; I want the rich, the deep, the dark Old World; I want to be out of this horrible place. Yet I can't confide ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... thoroughly honest craftsman, he felt that he ought to keep his thoughts to himself, until he knew how to express them. After proving it on an impersonal romance, he was then ready to speak his mind. No poet has spoken ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... ones; the result is the same. Take the mythic cosmogonies of ancient Greece, Scandinavia, and India, and the geologies and astronomies of the present day, and compare their pages, changing things personal into things impersonal. The expulsion and banishment of the old shapeless mundane deities by a new and more beautiful race of gods, the cosmical divinities, the powers and rulers of an ordered world, are intelligible enough when translated into our modern geological nomenclature. The leaves of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... meeting. The dinner, prefaced inauspiciously, failed to remove the awkwardness, since the reticence under which Drake and Mallinson laboured, gradually spread and enveloped Conway. A forced conversation of a curiously impersonal sort dragged from course to course. Absolute strangers would have exhibited less restraint; for the ghost of an old comradeship made the fourth at the feast and prated to them in exiguous voice of paths that had diverged. Drake noticed, besides, an undercurrent of ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... thing goes on, but whether their outlook be wide or narrow, personal or impersonal, they work in their way and something is ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... supplies its own answer. It will be obvious to every one who considers that the drafting of statutes and the formulating of legal decisions is almost as impersonal a procedure as that of drawing up the rules to govern a game; and it offers hardly more opportunity for discriminating between man ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... depredation and riot should be as far as possible checked. Murder and pillage are comparatively infrequent, massacre is seldom heard of, and torture is almost or quite as extinct as cannibalism. The mass of citizens escape physical suffering, the angry emotions are so directed upon impersonal objects as to acquire a strong ethical value, and the intervals of strife may find individual soldiers of hostile armies exchanging kindly services. Members of a complex industrial society, without direct experience ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... different result, even through any deep feeling in the matter; but while she owned, with her half-sad, half-comical consciousness, that she had been tacitly claiming and expecting too much, she softly pitied herself, with a kind of impersonal compassion, as if it wore some other girl whose pretty dream had been broken. Its ruin involved the loss of another ideal; for she was aware that there had been gradually rising in her mind an image of Boston, different alike from the ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... of melancholy, like all those of her type whose emotional natures are an enchanted mirror, reflecting visions that have no place in reality. We talked about blondes and brunettes, tall men and short men, our favourite man's name; and gradually the impersonal became personal, the ideal took form. Her voice, like a broken lute that might have given sweet sounds, related the story. It was inevitable that she should love a dreamer like herself. Nature had imbued her with a hopeless yearning. She slipped a gold locket from a chain ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... laughing protests of their parents. Flood Rawley called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed she had a voice that fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note, that the hardest faces softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the few. She was impartial, almost impersonal; no woman was her enemy, and every man was her friend—and nothing more. She had never had an accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her. Every man except one had given up hope that he might win her; and though he had been gone from Jansen for two years, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... self, tend to make all my personal life a matter of doubt and uncertainty. I am afraid of the subjective life, and recoil from every enterprise, demand, or promise which may oblige me to realize myself; I feel a terror of action, and am only at ease in the impersonal, disinterested, and objective life of thought. The reason seems to be timidity, and the timidity springs from the excessive development of the reflective power which has almost destroyed in me all spontaneity, impulse, and instinct, and therefore all boldness and confidence. Whenever I am forced ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... surprised into silence. Old Wetherbee was sometimes given to half-audible and impersonal grumblings, but this was the first time he had ever gone so far as to voice a specific objection to an ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... came into the world with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried to think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this vital truth into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled with the possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of living is suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can go on taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and body in ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... Nowadays young people cannot understand how anyone could ever have taken Meyerbeer's influence seriously. Those who remember how his reputation stood half a century ago, and who realize what a nothoroughfare the path he opened proved to be, even to himself, know how inevitable and how impersonal Wagner's attack was. ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... high-pitched but sonorous. It was the voice of little Willy Eddy's German wife, and it came from a pair of strong lungs in a well-developed chest, and was actuated by a strong and indignant spirit. Arthur Carroll, listening to her, was conscious of an absurdly impersonal sentiment of something like admiration. The young woman was really in a manner superb. The occasion was trivial, even ignoble. Carroll felt contemptuous both for her and for himself, and yet she dignified it to a degree. ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... impossible to sustain such a serious view of the very special service to which I was foresworn: the more I thought of it, in one sense, the less in another, until my only chance was to go forward with grim humour in the spirit of impersonal curiosity which that attitude induces. In a word, and the cant one which yet happens to express my state of mind to a nicety, I had already "weakened" on the whole business which I had been in such ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung
... the comfort she dispenses is with men from the earliest hour of day, and never leaves them. Wherever he turns, the individual realises only too clearly his own shortcomings, his insufficiency and his incompetence; what courage would he have left were he not previously rendered impersonal by this consecration! The greatest of all torments harassing him, the conflicting beliefs and opinions among men, the unreliability of these beliefs and opinions, and the unequal character of men's abilities—all these things make him hanker after art. We cannot be happy so long as everything ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... hands behind her, glancing at him, unable to see anything else. And he was scarcely conscious but of her. His eyes were still strained and staring, and as they followed the girl, when, long-limbed and languid, she moved away, it was as if he saw in her something impersonal, the female, ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... this breath which she had felt pass, this broad current of sympathy, that he had introduced naturally into his exact scientific lesson. He did not seem to be moved; he preserved the impersonal and correct attitude of the demonstrator, but within him what tender suffering, what a fever of devotion, what a giving up of his whole being to the happiness of others? His entire work, constructed with such mathematical precision, was steeped in this fraternal suffering, even in its most cruel ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... replied unhesitatingly. "But why am I going to live with you? Sieur Hugh isn't dead, too, is he?"—with impersonal interest. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... but by means of the bold, broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures are, indeed, but the component features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character,—that of the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic illustration as being ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a polite recognition of the newest arrival. A bit flustered by the calmly impersonal scrutiny with which her greeting was received, she addressed Miss ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... suppose," asked his companion in an impersonal tone, "that it was really a hard thing for Dickie to do—to give it ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... evidently not trust himself to discuss the matter further. He rose precipitately with an outraged, impersonal bow, and left the table, abandoning his biscuit and cheese, his half finished bottle of Rudesheimer and the figs that were to follow, with the indifference of ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... a condition of that old, secure society which we have not yet lived long enough to have known, and which we very probably never shall know. Such civilization as we have will continue to be public and impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its specific events will remain within walls. It could not manifest itself outside without being questioned, challenged, denied; and upon reflection there might appear reasons why it is ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... mysteries; if he is lightly said to be Early Victorian, it is not because he was typical of his age, but because he contributed so much to make it what it was. While Browning lived an eager personal life, full of observation, zest, and passion, Tennyson abode in more impersonal thoughts. In the dawn of science, when there was a danger of life becoming over-materialised, contented with the first steps of swiftly apprehended knowledge, and with solutions which were no solutions at all, but only the perception of laws, Tennyson was the man of all others who saw ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... gave a few lucid directions in the quiet impersonal voice of a man in a trance. Razumov made ready without a word of answer. As he was leaving the room the voice on the ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... isn't a brute," Lindsay went on with most impersonal solicitude, "and can support her. I suppose there isn't any way one could do anything for her. I heard a story only yesterday about a girl changing her mind on the way out. By Jove, I didn't suppose ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... night. I grew so absorbed in Eleanore and in all that was waiting just ahead, that it was hard not to shut out everything else, most of all impersonal things. It was hard to write, and for days I wrote nothing. I remember only intimate talks. Everyone I talked to seemed to ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... we represented. This arrangement secured us against personal rivalry, kept up a tremendous interest in first-class cricket and enabled matches to continue, if necessary, for weeks at a time. It encouraged, too, a fair, impersonal and unprejudiced view of ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; "not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought—silk! And he's got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Pantheism!" we ought to recollect that for Eckhart the being of God is quite different from His personality. Eckhart never taught that the Persons of the Holy Trinity become, after the mystical Union, the "Form" of the human soul. It is the impersonal light of the divine nature which transforms our nature; human personality is neither lost nor converted into divine personality. Moreover, the divine spark at the centre of the soul is not the soul nor the personality. "The soul," he says in one place, ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... individual personality is not called out. With the exhaustion of the means in the attainment of perfection a new stage is reached, in which individual expression is prominent, and seems to take the place of the scientific impersonal interest which aimed at nothing but beauty: so that the chief distinction between early and late art is that the former is impersonal, the ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... away from Pearce still more amazed. Some strange, deep undercurrent was working here. There had been unmistakable hate for Kells in his dark look and a fierce implication in his portent of fatality. What had caused this sudden impersonal interest in her situation? What was the meaning of the subtle animosity toward the bandit leader? Was there no honor among evil men banded together for evil deeds? Were jealousy, ferocity, hate and faithlessness ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... razor; his eyes were a cold and steady blue. He carried his left arm somewhat away from his body, for pearl-handled .45s are frowned upon by town marshals, and are a little bulky when placed in the left armhole of one's vest. He looked beyond Captain Boone at the gulf with the impersonal and expressionless dignity of a ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... that I never could remember whether it was George II. or James II. who was so fond of that particular story, and now he regards me with politely-draped dislike. I'll do my best for you, if the opportunity arises, but it will have to be in a roundabout, impersonal manner." ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... No premisses, no arguments therefore, can so accommodate this truth to us as not to leave the belief in it an act of mental ascent and trust, of faith as distinguished from sight. Divest reason of its trust, and the universe stops at the impersonal stage—there is no God; and yet, if the first step in religion is the greatest, how is it that the freest and boldest speculator rarely declines it? How is it that the most mysterious of all truths is a universally accepted one? What is it which guards this ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... is little worthy to be countenanced, though often used by Dryden, Pope, Addison, and other good writers. Our lexicographers call it an impersonal verb, because, being compounded with an objective, it cannot have a nominative expressed. It is nearly equivalent to the adverb apparently; and if impersonal, it is also defective; for it has no participles, no "methinking," and no participial construction of "methought;" though Webster's American Dictionary, whether quarto or octavo, absurdly suggests that the latter word may be used as a participle. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... task in the little study in as impersonal a manner as a true father confessor. "You are twenty-six and growing set in your ways," she would mentally accuse—"always wanting a certain table at the cafe and a certain waitress. Old Maid! Must have your little French book to read away at as you munch your ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... real pang of compunction. He had gripped the back of a chair; his face had lost its heaviness. A dull flush coloured his cheeks. Noel had a feeling, as if she had been convicted of treachery. It was his silence, the curious look of an impersonal pain beyond power of words; she felt in him something much deeper than mere disapproval—something which echoed within herself. She walked quickly past him and escaped. She ran upstairs and threw herself on her bed. He ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... impress on you, from the beginning, that odd sort of optimism which has ruled all the people about me, even under the most trying episodes of the war. Up to now, the hatred of the Germans has been, in a certain sense, impersonal. It has been a racial hatred of a natural foe, an accepted evil, just as the uncalled-for war was. It had wrought a strange, unexpected, altogether remarkable change in the French people. Their faces had become more serious, their bearing more heroic, their laughter ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... with his reserve, lent him the false attitude of a rather cold, self-centered man, discouraging suggestions at first only to adopt them later in the most inexplicable fashion, and conferring favors in a ready-made impersonal manner which destroyed utterly their quality as favors. In reality his heart hungered for the affection which this false attitude generally repelled. He threw the wet blanket of doubt over warm young enthusiasms because his mind worked with a certain deliberateness ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... is so," said Tarling quietly. "But my interest in the property is more or less impersonal at the moment. The manager of the ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... few passionate words came back to his memory, linked with a hundred other recollections, the desire of her eyes, of her lips raised for his, the caressing touch of her fingers. He found himself wondering, in an impersonal sort of way, that these things should so little affect him. His blood ran no less coldly, nor did his pulses beat the faster, for this ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a woman, she was beautiful, and he loved her! Do what he would, all ideal and impersonal considerations fell utterly away from him. Day by day he knew more of his own heart; day by day the philosopher grew weaker in him, and the man's claim fiercer. Before him perpetually were two figures of a most ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... keep always to impersonal subjects. He behaved just as if they were good friends out for an evening of enjoyment. When they left the theatre Christine looked brighter than he had seen her for weeks. Jimmy was profoundly grateful. He was delighted that Sangster should see her with that little flush in her ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... own comments or those of Miss ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING, the author. Because for my part, reading these, I formed the idea (entirely wrong) that the book would be in some way pretentious and affected; whereas it is the simple truth to call it the most mercilessly impersonal piece of fiction that I think I ever read. There is far too much plot for me to give you any but a suggestion of it. The story is of the lives of two sisters, Frances and Minnie; mostly (as the title implies) of Minnie. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... enough to know that such proceedings were not seemly in a man bearing the commission of an officer. But Sancho little knew how many a congressman along at the close of the war, finding himself compelled to provide some kind of living for political "heelers," or some impersonal reward for services rendered, had foisted his henchmen into the army, then being enlarged and reorganized, and Nevins was one of the results ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... placed man in nature: man is perfectly at liberty to do as he pleases; only, he must adapt himself to the law of gravitation, to the resistance of matter, to hot and cold, wet and dry, and to the other impersonal necessities by which the material universe is conditioned. The control of these natural laws, as they are called, could not advantageously be given in charge to man; even had he the brains to manage them, he could not spare the ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... there were anything golden about the mountain, except its name. If we were doomed to disappointment I could then give the tale a humorous turn, easier to do in retrospect than anticipation. Now, when in blinding light of noon we pointed out, in an impersonal manner, to all who cared to see, the pyramid-field of Meroee, it seemed strange to think that no heart but Anthony's and mine beat the faster. The sun was so hot that most people, blinking dazedly, retired behind their screens ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... psychologists contemptible, they were too single-minded, too full of themselves and their passions, even when they were the most enamored of truth. Italian idealism cannot forget itself: it is not interested in the impersonal dreams of the North; it leads everything back to itself, its desires, its pride of race, and transfigures them. Consciously or unconsciously, it is always toiling for the terza Roma. It must be said that for many centuries it has not taken ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... long and tense to Mary, the wheel revolved, the ivory ball dashing wildly around until the croupier proclaimed in his calm, impersonal voice: "Rien ne va plus!" Some people reluctantly ceased their feverish staking of louis, notes, and five-franc pieces, but others dashed on money up to the last instant. The wheel slackened speed; the ball lost momentum, and, rolling down the slope, struck one ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... long before 1863, when its announcement opened the memorable year for freedom, not only had its demonstration been implored by his friends, but some of his subordinates had tried to launch its lightning with not so impersonal a sentiment. To a religious body, pressing him to verify his title of Abolitionist, ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... The impersonal character of Nephthys, her artificial origin, and her derivation from Isis, have been pointed out by Maspero (Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 362-364). The very name of the goddess, which means the lady (nibit) of the mansion ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... plainly-furnished little room, with the inevitable gilt ikon in one corner, and the samovar hissing and gurgling on the table, and the thrumming music of a balalaika orchestra coming up from the restaurant below; the next coherent thing I can remember was weeks and weeks later, discussing in an impersonal detached manner whether I was strong enough to stand the fatigue of the long ...
— When William Came • Saki
... separation. The informing Principle is One, and is marked by unity. By overcoming the senses and the selfishness within, which is the overcoming of nature, man emerges from the chrysalis of the personal and illusory, and wings himself into the glorious light of the impersonal, the region of universal Truth, out of which all ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... disconcerted by this sudden turn. The situation had become almost impersonal. "I'm sorry," she said. She wished that she could have thought of a better remark—a better one came in the night, when she was going over the whole affair—but he seemed grateful even ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... ears were as quick of hearing as they were well shaped; and if so whether he would guess what was up, and take enough impersonal interest in a pretty girl far removed from his sphere ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... Augustine, Ruysbroeck, and the Sf poet Jallu'ddn Rm are perhaps the chief—who have achieved that which we might call the synthetic vision of God. These have resolved the perpetual opposition between the personal and impersonal, the transcendent and immanent, static and dynamic aspects of the Divine Nature; between the Absolute of philosophy and the "sure true Friend" of devotional religion. They have done this, not by taking these apparently incompatible concepts one after the other; but by ascending to a height ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... of ruthlessness. The selfless man, by dealing with others in the same extraordinary way in which he deals with himself, may easily under the pressure of extreme conditions become impersonal in his thinking upon duty. The morality of such a state of mind is a question for the philosopher. The historian must content himself with pointing out the only condition that redeems it—if anything redeems it The ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... shall have rather poor pickings for supper, my dear," he said apologetically. He called her "my dear" from the first; it seemed more non-committal and impersonal than the use of her name. He had not called a young lady by her first name ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... had converted it to the purposes of a dark-room, for he had been a skilful and enthusiastic amateur of photography; but that it had at some period of its history served other ends, Paul's uncanny instinct told him. A sense of chill, not physical, indeed almost impersonal, attacked him as he entered, hurricane-lantern aloft. For the poet that informed his lightest action dictated that the ray of a lantern and not the glare of a modern electric appliance should illuminate ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... thing," she laughed back. "Don't use 'you' when you are impersonal. 'You' is very personal, and your use of it just now was ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... charm of the romance is over, then they are ready for another, perhaps more fantastic than the last. But the plot is always the same: our beloved ones—shall we meet them, and how? Isn't it pitiful? Why cannot we be more impersonal? These puny, petty minds of ours! When will ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... when men not only gambled and rode and drank, but found leisure to cultivate poetry, and Greek, and music, all the fine things of life. He talked to her about such matters as had interested them, large impersonal matters, taking for granted her intelligent understanding. This flattered the girl, though she had no ambition ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... mental phrase was not so much his own as an echo from Father Leadham. In Helbeck's mind it was spoken very much as the priest had spoken it—with that strange tenderness, at once so intimate and so impersonal, which belongs to the spiritual relations of Catholicism. The girl's soul—lonely, hostile, uncared for—appealed to the charity of the believer. At the same time there was something in her defiance, her crude disapproval of his house and his faith, that stimulated ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... day of frost and sun to sleep before evening" is the one intolerable misuse of life.[5] Sometimes the feeling is expressed with the vivid passion of a lyric:—"To what profit? for thou wilt not find a lover among the dead, O girl";[6] sometimes with the curiously impersonal and incomparably direct touch that is peculiar to Greek, as in the verses by Antipater of Sidon,[7] that by some delicate magic crowd into a few words the fugitive splendour of the waning year, the warm lingering days and sharp nights of autumn, and the ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... catholical[obs3]; common, worldwide; , ecumenical, oecumenical[obs3]; transcendental; prevalent, prevailing, rife, epidemic, besetting; all over, covered with. Pan-American, Anglican[obs3], Pan-Hellenic, Pan-Germanic, slavic; panharmonic[obs3]. every, all; unspecified, impersonal. customary &c. (habitual) 613. Adv. whatever, whatsoever; to a man, one and all. generally &c. adj.; always, for better for worse; in general, generally speaking; speaking generally; for the most part; in the long run &c. (on ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... as always happens when two persons find themselves much together, became more and more personal. It is only in books that dialogues are abstract and impersonal. The Englishman told her about his family, about the set in which he moved—and he had the English frankness in setting it out unreservedly—about the life he led at Oxford, about his travels, and so on to what he meant to do in the world. Margaret in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Jack Swing was. Most likely he really was more than one person, or rather an impersonal being, worked up as a sort of shadowy puppet to act in the ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the fire an' het me up some coffee," he said, still in that impersonal way which was so disturbing only because it was not his way. "I've harnessed up. I'm goin' to the street. You remember where that Brahma stole her nest? I've got to have two eggs for ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... and hesitated. In the thraldom of his selfish passion for Mrs. Dall he dared not contemplate a collision with her countrymen. He would have again sought refuge in his passive, non-committal attitude, but he knew the impersonal character of Indian retribution and compensation—a sacrifice of equal value, without reference to the culpability of the victim—and he dreaded some spontaneous outbreak. To prevent the enforced expiation of the crime by some innocent ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... enhanced life; a life which, immersed in the stream of history, is yet poised on the eternal world. This life involves a complete re-direction of our desires and impulses, a transfiguration of character; and often, too, a sense of subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of impersonal strength, so overwhelming as to give many of its activities an inspirational or automatic character. We found that this life was marked by a rhythmic alternation between receptivity and activity, more complete and purposeful than the rhythm of work and rest which conditions, ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... The sun was shining, the road white and dusty, the mountains of Elvira purple to the tops and there splashed with silver. When he spoke, his voice was changed. Neither now nor hereafter did he discourse of money-gold and nobility flowing from earthly kings with that impersonal exaltation with which he talked of his errand from God to link together east and west. But he drew them somehow in train from the last, hiding here I thought, an earthly weakness from himself, and the weakness so intertwined with strength ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... affairs. The soldiers loved him and they idealized him. He was to them the personification of the union cause. The day for the discussion of abstract principles had long gone by. Their ideal had ceased to be an impersonal one. All the hope, the faith, the patriotism of the soldiers centered around the personality of the president. In their eyes and thoughts, he stood for the idea of nationality, as Luther stood for religious liberty, Cromwell for parliamentary privilege, or Washington for colonial independence. ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... paid scant heed to my appearance, I had been content (in a certain impersonal sort of way), had dressed in the fashion, and taken advantage of such adornments as were in favor, as much from habit as from any set design; but now, lying beside the brook with my chin propped in my hands, I began to study myself critically, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... photography capture that light? There had been a new look in her face—something different; yes, Selden agreed there had been something different. The coffee was so exquisite that he asked for a second cup: such a contrast to the watery stuff at the club! Ah, your poor bachelor with his impersonal club fare, alternating with the equally impersonal CUISINE of the dinner-party! A man who lived in lodgings missed the best part of life—he pictured the flavourless solitude of Trenor's repast, and felt a moment's compassion for the man ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... surveying life from afar, are apt to interpret historical events as the outcome of impersonal forces which shape the course of nations unknown to themselves. This is an impressive theory, but it will not bear close scrutiny. Human nature everywhere responds to the influence of personality. In Greece this response is more marked than anywhere else. No people ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... then danced, at first a little stiffly. But her mind gradually concentrated on her movements; she began to catch the impersonal working ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... space he seemed incapable of movement. At length, conscious of a warm, moist trickle on his chin, he raised one hand mechanically to his face and brought it away, dabbled with bright crimson. For a moment or two he regarded the stiff, crooked fingers and bruised knuckles in a dazed, impersonal fashion as if the hand belonged to some one else. Then he became ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... appeared, in the wake of the impersonal and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... rainbow on the summer hills, Hidden in sea-mist down the hot coast-line, Couched on the clouds that fiery sunset fills, Blessed, remote, impersonal, divine; ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... may at one time have been the totem of savage tribes.[2] In mythology as well as in art the lion remained the riding or driving animal of the Great Mother. Their conception of the divinity was indistinct and impersonal. A goddess of the earth, called Ma or Cybele, was revered as the fecund mother of all things, the "mistress of the wild beasts"[3] that inhabit the woods. A god Attis, or Papas, was regarded as her husband, but the first place in this divine household ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... nothing could happen between her and him. He liked to have Gudrun about, as a fellow-mind—but that was all. And she had no real feeling for him. He was a scientist, he had to have a woman to back him. But he was really impersonal, he had the fineness of an elegant piece of machinery. He was too cold, too destructive to care really for women, too great an egoist. He was polarised by the men. Individually he detested and despised them. In the mass they fascinated him, as ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... developed into as perfect a means for the expression of human thought as any of the European types of speech; they are astonishingly rich in verbs which make it easy to express motion and action clearly and vividly; the impersonal, or abstract article "it" is used exactly as in European languages, and the particular prefix provided in some of the Bantu types for the class of nouns which represent abstract conceptions makes it possible to increase the vocabularies in that direction ad infinitum. The Bantu ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... and pain into love and hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour. It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... particular men and groups of men, partly true but passing by exaggeration into the mythical, came the wholly mythical, or fiction; which then and always preserved the biographico-historical character. Add to which that out of the criticisms and reflections scattered through this personal literature an impersonal literature slowly emerged; the whole group of these products having as their deepest root the eulogies of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... immortality. They never quite got rid of a haunting dread that perhaps, after all, they might be nothing better than insignificant and unheeded atoms, swept hither and thither in the mighty eddies of an unseen, impersonal, mysterious agency, and destined hereafter "to be sealed ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... far-off part of Coffin, you showed enough to put me at ease by getting me to lecture you with safe impersonal figures. But he didn't mind. The fact was that now he could free-sit, face to face, alone, and talk to her like ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson
... experience for the lady of the lacy filaments and regal poise; yet it was far from unpleasant to meet such calm masculinity. She switched on the light once more, to feel a surprising satisfaction in the impersonal, unabashed honesty of those ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... to lie the decisive difference between those peoples whose patriotic affections center about the fortunes of an impersonal commonwealth and those in whom is superadded a fervent aspiration for dynastic ascendency. The latter may be counted on to break the peace when a ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... last in a pause by the roulette table at the rear of the room. Curious to watch the game in being, he lingered there, head cocked shrewdly on one shoulder, a speculative pensiveness informing his eyes, his interest plainly aloof and impersonal. This despite the fact that his emotions of intestinal felicity were momentarily becoming more intense: the torchlight procession was in full swing, leaving an ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... or burnt in a passion, or tortured by strivings for style, or left as it is? Intellect is a problem to itself. Something of the problem seems (it would be wrong to be more certain) to have made this play not quite impersonal, as ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... hands slowly together, and when he spoke his voice was sharp and quick and wholly impersonal. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... of his words, they stood stock-still, in a huddled group, staring out over the plain. Their nerves were numbed by the sudden shock, and to all of them it was like a scene in a dream, vague, impersonal, and un-real. The men upon the camels had streamed out from a gorge which lay a mile or so distant on the side of the path along which they had travelled. Their retreat, therefore, was entirely cut off. ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... concern the highest problem of the poem and of human life. It is a wrong theology, at least a wrong Homeric theology, to hold that the Gods are the cause of human ills; these are the consequences of man's own actions. Furthermore, the cause is not a blind impersonal power outside of the individual, it is not Fate but man himself. What a lofty utterance! We hear from the supreme tribunal the final decision in regard to individual free-will and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... responsible for drafting the regulations that governed the changes in the wartime Navy. Rather, the Navy began integrating its general service because segregation proved painfully inefficient. The decision was largely the result of the impersonal operation of the 1940 draft law. Although imperfectly applied during the war, the anti-discrimination provision of that law produced a massive infusion of black inductees. The Army, with its larger (p. 615) manpower base and expandable black units, ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... of Landover, however, was impersonal. The banker merely represented a class. On the other hand, he hated Percival as an individual; he hated him with every drop of blood in his black, venomous heart. He had a certain grudging regard,—it might even be called respect,—for the class to which Landover belonged; ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... his name was), understood that, for a fable, all the persons must be impersonal. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must move crooked. The sheep in a fable must march ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line. Even if it have the third vowel as its centre, it does not soon betray it. The highest thought, that is, is the most seemingly impersonal; it does not ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... he did not quite know why. Before the thought of traveling a month in her society his mind fell back reeling, baffled by the sudden entrance of such a dazzling intruder. A month beside this glowing figure, a month under the impersonal interrogation of those cool, demanding eyes! It was as if the President or General Zachary Taylor ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... specially interested in this woman beside him. He had seen her fairly, with his first appreciative glance, when he had climbed into the stage on the preceding day. He had realized there fully the charm of her face, the dark roguish eyes, the clear skin, the wealth of dark hair. Yet all this was impersonal; however pretty she might be, the fact was nothing to him and never could be. Knowing who she was, he comprehended instantly the social gulf stretching unbridged between them. An educated man himself, with family connections ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... she sent for me and I was confronted with a human situation which I must in this narrative of Secret Service operations treat as impersonal though it is full of pathetic implications. I found ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... to prepare the young soul for the great battle of life, to put upon it the armor of a knight which shall be borne untarnished, the first instruction concerning the facts of the reproductive life may well be impersonal, poetical, beautiful, filling the mind with sentiment,—not sentimentality,—so that the mental vision of this side of life shall be one worthy of the glorious mind of man. To keep the mind of the child wisely impressed ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... must be used with caution. "It is raining" is correct, although it has no antecedent. We desire that the antecedent shall be vague, impersonal. But unnecessary use of the indefinite it, you, ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... out to Colorado, where he found Hernshaw a stout, silent, impersonal man, whose notion of the paternal office seemed to be a ready acquiescence in a daughter's choice of a husband; he appeared to think this could be best expressed to Hewson in a good cigar He perceptibly enjoyed the business details of the affair, but he ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... undifferentiated into individuality. As pure intelligence it is infinite responsiveness and susceptibility. As devoid of relation to time and space it is devoid of individual personality. It is, therefore, in this aspect a purely impersonal element upon which, by reason of its inherent intelligence and susceptibility, we can impress any recognition of personality that we will. These are the great facts that the mental scientist works with, and the student will do well to ponder deeply ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... are humiliations that we should mind them so? They come to everybody in turn, and they are as relentless and impersonal as the sun marching around the sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers, and the streetcar conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the Kaiser with his victorious army had his, with more to come. Even Peter Cheever had his in plenty, ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... before the critic was satisfied. It would never do to spoil an effect which had been achieved with so much trouble; so the unselfish creature gulped down her tears, and tried to talk cheerfully on impersonal topics, keeping her eyes fixed on the landscape the while, lest the sight of her child might prove too ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
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