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More "Superfluity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (canalis), and the presence of buckets (Kuebeln), bags (Bulgen), pockets (Taschen), or cans (Kannen) as components of three of Agricola's four categories of hauling machines are reasons enough for the apparent superfluity of German names, if not for his decision to avoid the use of German names. But it should also be noted that the names sometimes refer to a pump and its prime mover considered as a single machine. Such is the case with the Kehrrad, a bucket windlass driven by a reversible waterwheel ...
— Mine Pumping in Agricola's Time and Later • Robert P. Multhauf
... divined them, from the way the girl moved, from the look in her gray-blue eyes, from the carriage of her head. She was certainly pretty, with that proud virginal beauty which often bears itself on the defensive, in our modern world where a certain superfluity of women has not tended to chivalry. But how little prettiness matters, beside the other thing!—the indefinable, irresistible something—which gives the sceptre and the crown! All the time she was listening to Mrs. Penfold's chatter, and the daughter's occasional words, Victoria Tatham ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... African reaches a plantation for the first time, he fancies himself in paradise. He is amazed by the generosity with which he is fed with fruit and fresh provisions. His new clothes, red cap, and roasting blanket (a civilized superfluity he never dreamed of), strike him dumb with delight, and, in his savage joy, he not only forgets country, relations, and friends, but skips about like a monkey, while he dons his garments wrongside ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... of Europe the Italians had never understood or practised chivalry, save in such select and exotic schools as the Casa Gioiosa under Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua. The oath of Arthur's knights would have seemed to them mere superfluity of silliness. Onore connoted credit, reputation, and prowess. Virtu, which may be roughly translated as mental ability combined with personal daring, set the standard and ruled opinion. 'Honour in the North was subjective: ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... this town are kept as clean as a floor, by sweepers watching the streets all day long, collecting and carrying away all the refuse matter. One day, I felt ill at ease about a small piece of paper that had become a superfluity in my pocket, but which I was afraid to throw upon the street, as it would there seem as much out of place as if I should drop it upon the carpet in a parlor. I passed along the pavement with it, until I met a street-sweeper, and there threw ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... matter of discernment; for every superfluous word prevents its purpose being carried out. Voltaire means this when he says: l'adjectif est l'ennemi du substantif. (But, truly, many authors try to hide their poverty of thought under a superfluity of words.) ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... twenty-four centuries by its connection with Pythagoras. I looked with astonishment upon a country renowned for its fertility, and in which, in spite of nature's prodigality, my eyes met everywhere the aspect of terrible misery, the complete absence of that pleasant superfluity which helps man to enjoy life, and the degradation of the inhabitants sparsely scattered on a soil where they ought to be so numerous; I felt ashamed to acknowledge them as originating from the same stock as myself. Such is, however the Terra di Lavoro where labour seems to be execrated, where everything ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... imparted a certain wild look that contrasted with his speech. Christina forgot that the man was a labourer like any other, but noted that he did not manifest the least embarrassment in their presence, or any consciousness of a superfluity of favour in their approach: she did not know that neither would his hired servant, or the poorest member of his clan. It was said of a certain Sutherland clan that they were all gentlemen, and of a certain Argyll clan that they were all ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... and no bounds to my task. No display of a scene like this could be chargeable with redundancy or superfluity. Even the colour of a shoe, the knot of a ribband, or your attitude in plucking a rose, were of moment to be recorded. Even the arrangements of your breakfast-table and your toilet ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... Close-curled, now on his bared and brawny chest, Now on his flexile, vine-like veined limbs, With iron network of strong muscle thewed, And godlike brows and proud mouth unrelaxed. Firm was his step; no superfluity Of indolent flesh impeded this man's strength. Slender and supple every perfect limb, Beautiful with the glory of a man. No weapons bare he, neither shield: his hands Folded upon his breast, his movements free Of all incumbrance. When his mighty strides Had brought him ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... these reflections by the memory of Aubrey Beardsley, and the reception which his work received, not from the British public, but from the inner circle of advanced intellectuals. Too much occupied with the obstetrics of art, his superfluity of naughtiness has tarnished his niche in the temple of fame. 'A wish to epater le bourgeois,' says Mr. Arthur Symons, 'is a natural one.' I do not think so; at least, in an artist. Now much of Beardsley's work shows the eblouissement of the burgess on arriving at Montmartre for the first ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... passion, and tried to speak calmly and logically that I might correct this impression. I told them that I had not meant to accuse them, as if they, or the rich in general, were responsible for the misery of the world. True indeed it was, that the superfluity which they wasted would, otherwise bestowed, relieve much bitter suffering. These costly viands, these rich wines, these gorgeous fabrics and glistening jewels represented the ransom of many lives. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... was now talking decently!—about matters he understood; Burne-Jones, Rossetti—some French pictures in Bond Street—and so forth. The ruffled host was half appeased, half wroth. For if he could make this agreeable impression, why such a superfluity of naughtiness downstairs? And the fellow had really some general cultivation; nothing like Welby, of course—where would you find another Arthur Welby?—but enough to lift him above the mere journeyman. After all, one must be indulgent to these novices—with no traditions behind ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... result of this plan perhaps, but more as a result of great natural facility in writing, his manuscripts were often without a single erasure for many pages; and a typewriter was really a superfluity. ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... me of the cow that the man wanted to train so as to consider eating a superfluity—she was coming on admirably, but unfortunately for the full success of the experiment, she perversely died, the very day her owner had reduced her to ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins
... persons, while its whole wealth had centred upon a very few. To the end, therefore, that he might expel from the state arrogance and envy, luxury and crime, and those yet more inveterate diseases of want and superfluity, he obtained of them to renounce their properties, and to consent to a new division of the land, and that they should live all together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence, and the disgrace of evil, and credit ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... "feast of fat things" from my friends, and just as I was in the act of tasting, in came this talker and substituted his fiddle-faddle of saws and stories, which he had repeated, perhaps, a hundred times. We were jaded with his superfluity of loquaciousness, and were not sorry when the time of departure arrived. He was last of the company to retire, and he did so with much self-complacency, doubtless thinking to himself, as he walked ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... not belong to this particular class of correspondents, but she could not resist the law of her sex, whose thoughts naturally surround themselves with superabundant drapery of language, as their persons float in a wide superfluity of woven tissues. Was she indeed writing to this unknown gentleman? Euthymia ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... soft stones to leeward And make up our bed. Eat our bread and bacon, Smoke the pipe of peace, And, ere we be drowsy, Give our boots a grease. Homer's heroes did so, Why not such as we? What are sheets and servants? Superfluity! Pray for wives and children Safe in slumber curled, Then to chat till midnight O'er this babbling world— Of the workmen's college, Of the price of grain, Of the tree of knowledge, Of the chance of rain; If Sir A. goes Romeward, If Miss B. sings true, If the fleet comes ...
— Andromeda and Other Poems • Charles Kingsley
... delicate subject of dress. He was more tolerant in answering them than when he denounced "the stinking pride of women" at Mary Stuart's Court; admitting that "in clothes, silks, velvets, gold, and other such, there is no uncleanness," yet "I cannot praise the common superfluity which women now use in their apparel." He was quite opposed, however, to what he pleasingly calls "correcting natural beauty" (as by dyeing the hair), and held that "farthingales cannot ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... state of society in which it prevails, its signification will, of course, be different. The effect of civilization is to increase the number of our wants. The same degree of education which, during the last century, was considered, even by the upper classes, a superfluity, is now a necessary for the middling class, and will soon become a necessary for the lowest, or all but the lowest, members of society. Most of our readers are acquainted with the story of the Highland chief who rebuked his son indignantly for making a pillow of a snowball. Sumptuary laws ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... remarkable general capacity, made her a most taking, provoking creature. Mrs. Thornburgh—much recovered in mind since Dr. Baker had praised the pancakes by which Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the superfluity of naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign cooks—watched the young man and maiden with a face which grew more and more radiant. The conversation in the garden had not pleased her. Why should ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... your fine style have deemed that a superfluity; but you might find use for one now. A very advantageous character that, I assure you—saves much time and trouble—diminishes the chances of failure too. It's not too late. I advise you to try one. If that fails, you have still another string ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... exochas aristinden ekkatherantes. aristinden ekkatherantes appears to be a condensed phrase for aristinden eklexantes kai ekkatherantes. "Having chosen the most striking circumstances par excellence, and having relieved them of all superfluity," would perhaps give the literal meaning. Longinus seems conscious of some strangeness in his language, making a quasi-apology in hos an ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... state of the law parents may still christen a child Rollo—was a youth to whom Nature had given a cheerful disposition not marred by any superfluity of brain. Everyone liked Rollo—the great majority on sight, the rest as soon as they heard that he would be a millionaire on the death of his Uncle Andrew. There is a subtle something, a sort of nebulous charm, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... unearthed a time-honoured tea-pot—we had of course taken the precaution of carrying tea with us—one by one milk and sugar were forthcoming in what may be called wholesale fashion, milk-jugs and sugar-basins being apparently articles of superfluity, and in company of a charming old dog and irresistible kitten, also of some quiet wayfarers, we ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... held in these log huts were as rude as might be expected; yet there is evidence that although there was no superfluity of law or of learning, justice was substantially administered. The lawyers came mostly from Kentucky, though an occasional New Englander confronted and lived down the general prejudice against his region and obtained preferment. The ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... ought never to be called a street, this most magnificent of terraces, and the world has cause to bless that interdict of the Court of Sessions in 1774, which prevented the Gradgrinds of the day from erecting buildings along its south side,—a sordid scheme that would have been the very superfluity of naughtiness. ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... toward the last. Nevertheless, they reveal, if not a great aesthetic feeling, at least that yearning for elegance which entered so profoundly into the manners of the ancients. With us, in fine, art is never anything but a superfluity—something unfamiliar and foreign that comes in to us from the outside when we are wealthy. Our paintings and our sculptures do not make part and parcel of our houses. If we have a Venus of Milo on our mantel-clock, it is not ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... soul, or vice versa, and compared matter and spirit to two clocks so accurately regulated to keep time with one another, that the one struck when ever the other pointed to the hour; or, with Berkeley, they abolished the "substance" of matter altogether, as a superfluity, though they failed to see that the same arguments equally justified the abolition of soul as another superfluity, and the reduction of the universe to a series of events or phenomena; or, finally, with Spinoza, to whom Berkeley makes a perilously close approach, they asserted ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... suggest, where she spoke out broad words, frank and free; the motif is one and the same. If we judge Mrs. Behn's dramatic output in the only fair way by comparing it legitimately with the theatre of her age, we simply shall not find that superfluity of naughtiness the critics lead us to expect and deplore. There are not infrequent scenes of Dryden, of Wycherley, of Vanbrugh, Southerne, Otway, Ravenscroft, Shadwell, D'Urfey, Crowne, full as daring as anything Aphra wrote; ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... of vanished Byzantium, will find a common topic with the spiritual advisers of the kingdoms of the East in this difficult theme,—the theme of the concessions permissible and expedient to earnest believers encumbered with leisure and a superfluity of power.... It is not necessary to discuss religious development, therefore, before deciding this issue. We are dealing now with things deeper and forces infinitely more powerful than the mere convictions ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... a pair of Mexican tapaderas—deep hooded stirrups with a great superfluity of leather extending below as if they were wings for ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... of them, tho' they have the Name, yet Nature has not refus'd them the Advantage to make use of their Genital Parts, and to Engender as others. The Male Hermaphrodite may get Children, and the Female conceive; so that neither the one nor the other differ from Men or Women, but only by a superfluity or a deficiency of Parts, and such as does not disturb ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... Nature that his form, so literally corpulent, should be so inadequate. However, there it was. And Nature, seeming to realize the anachronism, had done her best to repair her blunder. If he were laboring under a superfluity of adipose, she had equipped him with muscles of steel and lungs of tremendous expansion, a fierce courage, and nerves of a tempering ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... eighteen inches of the spike have already blossomed, none of the ovaries have been fertilized; they are dropping off, but I am rather sanguine regarding those about the middle of the spike. So great is the superfluity of nectar contained in the flowers, that on the afternoon of the second day it often drops from the cups, and the least shake to the scape brings it down in a shower. The main beauty of the inflorescence consists in the dense bottle-brush-like mass of bright yellow anthers. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... to the lowest possible point of sustenance. Population, within certain limits, may doubtless constitute the strength of a nation; but who will contend, that a nation of beggars, a nation overflowing with a starved miserable superfluity, is in a condition ...
— Travels through the South of France and the Interior of Provinces of Provence and Languedoc in the Years 1807 and 1808 • Lt-Col. Pinkney
... savage tribes, tugging and tearing, and kicking and biting, and gnashing, foaming, grinning, and gouging, in all the poetry of martial nature, unencumbered with gross, prosaic, artificial arms; an equal superfluity to the natural warrior and his natural poet? Is there anything unpoetical in Ulysses striking the horses of Rhesus with his bow (having forgotten his thong), or would Mr. Bowles have had him kick them with his foot, or smack them with his hand, as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... heart that I bade farewell to my Vienna friends, my musical comrades, the Legation hospitalities, and my faithful little Israelite. But the colt frisks over the pasture from sheer superfluity of energy; and between one's second and third decades instinctive restlessness - spontaneous movement - is the law of one's being. 'Tis then that 'Hope builds as fast as knowledge can destroy.' The ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... received these remarks with very boisterous mirth, whilst Mr. O'Connor simply shook his head and looked sadly upon his limbs, now shrouded in a superfluity of garments, somewhat resembling a slender thread of water in a shallow summer stream nearly wasted away and surrounded by an ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... of a maid, but no one seemed to realise what this entailed on the small boy immediately concerned. The house had evidently been built by some malevolent architect with the sole object of terrifying little boys. Never, surely, had such a prodigious length of twisting, winding passages and such a superfluity of staircases been crammed into one building, and as in the early "sixties" electric light had not been thought of, and there was no gas in the house, these endless passages were only sparingly lit with dim colza-oil lamps. From his nursery the little boy had to make his way ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... are the principles of Neo-conservatism, our case is made out with a superfluity of proof. Of course there is a pretence of acting on these principles already. When a measure is before Parliament it is assumed that the sole issue in dispute is its utility. The Conservative debater recognizes the decisiveness of this test just ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... incline my heart, O bitter fate; but thou didst turn it against the noblest heroes of our land, and towards a stranger, towards our enemy. O most holy mother of God! for what sin dost thou so pitilessly, mercilessly, persecute me? In abundance and superfluity of luxury my days were passed, the richest dishes and the sweetest wine were my food. And to what end was it all? What was it all for? In order that I might at last die a death more cruel than that of the meanest beggar in the kingdom? ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... been exercised in its adornment. There are many good paintings, including portraits of the various presidents of the club, which adorn the entrance hall. After books, perhaps the most distinctive feature of the club is our collection of pipes. In a large rack in the smoking-room—really a superfluity, since smoking is permitted all over the house—is as complete an assortment of pipes as perhaps exists in the civilized world. Indeed, it is an unwritten rule of the club that no one is eligible for membership who cannot produce a new variety of pipe, which is ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... the following form—'be so and so my heir after five years from my decease,' or 'after the calends of such a month,' or 'up to and until such calends'; for a time limitation in a will is considered a superfluity, and an heir instituted subject to such a time limitation is ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... fellow-citizens the faithful Vindex, who had revealed the conspiracy of the Tarquins. The public festival was continued during several days in all the principal cities in Rome, from custom; in Constantinople, from imitation in Carthage, Antioch, and Alexandria, from the love of pleasure, and the superfluity of wealth. In the two capitals of the empire the annual games of the theatre, the circus, and the amphitheatre, cost four thousand pounds of gold, (about) one hundred and sixty thousand pounds sterling: and if so heavy ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... groups, Antonio, Shylock, and Portia are respectively the centres; while the part of Lorenzo and Jessica, though strictly an episode, seems nevertheless to grow forth as an element of the original germ; a sort of inherent superfluity, and as such essential to the well-being of the piece. But perhaps it may be better described as a fine romantic undertone accompaniment to the other parts; itself in perfect harmony with them, and therefore perfecting ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... NATUR'!' Now that clock is sold for forty dollars—it cost me just six dollars and fifty cents. Mrs. Flint will never let Mrs. Steel have the refusal—nor will the deacon learn until I call for the clock, that having once indulged in the use of a superfluity, how difficult it is to give it up. We can do without any article of luxury we have never had, but when once obtained, it is not in 'HUMAN NATUR'' to surrender it voluntarily. Of fifteen thousand sold by myself and partners ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... thing respectable about them is their venerable antiquity. A startling contrast is produced by the copies of them made by the students. If the colours in the old pictures are faded, in the modern ones they blaze with a superfluity of vividness; red, yellow, green, etc., are there in all their force; such a thing as mixing, softening, or blending them, has evidently never been thought of. Even at the present moment, I really am at a loss to determine ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... and out by the gate in the old wall, up Myasnitzkaya Street, and round to the right to a building that used to be the Grand Hotel of Siberia, a loathsome place where I once stayed. Here in the old days provincial merchants put up, who did not mind high prices and a superfluity of bugs. It has now been turned into a hive of office work, and is the headquarters of the Supreme Council of Public Economy, which, controlling production and distribution alike, is the centre of the constructive work going ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... he were a painter, that he might perpetuate her graces through a few favored generations who might behold and adore her dimly as he beheld and adored her clearly, in her riding-dress of Lincoln green, whose voluminous superfluity she held gathered to her girdle as she moved. No painter could have scanned her more closely, noted more minutely the buckle of brilliants that captured the plume in her hat, the lace about her throat, the curious work ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... surfaces, like the inside of our own lungs, can act only when they are relaxed and moist. That is the reason why a frog's skin is always moist, and why a frog requires moist air. It does not need this constantly, because, when moisture is abundant, there is a bag in which it stores up superfluity of water, to be used in any day of need. It is this water—pure and clear—which frogs or toads expel when they are alarmed by being handled. Is not enough said here, to rescue frogs from our contempt? We may add, that they are capable of understanding kindness—can ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... the winning post for quality. I like to think of Stanford being that university. Geniuses are sensitive plants, in some respects like prima donnas. They have to be treated tenderly. They don't need to live in superfluity; but they need freedom from harassing care; they need books and instruments; they are always overworking, so they need generous vacations; and above all things they need occasionally to travel far and wide in the interests of their souls' development. Where quality is ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... shall have money enough for two. What I want is that you should kindly relieve me of my superfluity and make it over to Isabel. Divide my inheritance into two equal halves and give her ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... and higher destinies,—how will it be possible (without raising new ghosts, in a sense) to give readers any intelligible notion?—Here, flickering on the edge of conflagration after duty done, is a poor Note which perhaps the reader had better, at the risk of superfluity, still in ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... thrilling pleasures there are in store for us in literature when once we have cut ourselves adrift from all this superfluity of cultured opinion, and have given ourselves complete leave to love what we like and hate what we like and be indifferent to what we like, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... good young friend, love is natural; but you must love within bounds. Divide your time: devote a portion to business, and give the hours of recreation to your mistress. Calculate your fortune; and out of the superfluity you may make her a present, only not too often,—on her birthday, and such occasions." Pursuing this advice, he may become a useful member of society, and I should advise every prince to give him an appointment; but it is all up with his love, and with his genius if he ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... farmers who tilled their own grounds and were equal strangers to [v]opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of [v]superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the [v]primeval simplicity of manners; and, frugal by habit, they scarce knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with cheerfulness on days of labor, but observed festivals as intervals ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... just wants what Christianity brings; and Christianity just brings what my soul requires. It answers to my soul, as light and beauty answer to the eye, and as sound and music answer to the ear, and the whole of nature to the whole of man. There is neither want, nor superfluity, nor disagreement. Christianity and my soul, like nature and my physical being, are a glorious match. They are one: as I and my life are one. Christ is my life. Christ is my all. And He is all that my soul requires ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... hundred thousand more before morning, we should probably petition Government to receive the importing vessels with chain-shot. Not even Milton or Shakespeare could make head against such a Lopez de Vega principle of ruinous superfluity. Allowing for this one case of preternatural excess, assuming only that degree of limitation which any absolute past must almost always create up to that point, we say that there is no conceivable composition, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... disposed, with sufficient coherence, so as that they cannot change their places without injury to the general design. His images are displayed with such luxuriance of expression that they are hidden, like Butler's Moon, by a "Veil of Light;" they are forms fantastically lost under superfluity of dress. Pars minima est ipsa puella sui. The words are multiplied till the sense is hardly perceived; attention deserts the mind, and settles in the ear. The reader wanders through the gay diffusion, sometimes amazed, and sometimes delighted; but, after many turnings in the flowery labyrinth, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... books, instead of living healthfully in the open air, and among his fellow-beings. Still he felt the pleasure of being warmed through by this natural heat, and, though blinking a little from its superfluity, could not but confess an enjoyment and cheerfulness in this flood of morning light that came aslant the hill-side. While he thus stood, he felt a friendly hand laid upon his shoulder, and, looking up, there was ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... made up of song, and dance, and merriment, with our so many cheerful neighbours; with the most accomplished of whom we got up enthusiasms for music and literature. We considered ourselves to be virtuous, because we loved those who loved us, and because we gave of our superfluity to those who needed it. Friendship was our passion. We were ready to die for friendship, but towards love we had hearts of stone. How we jested over our lovers, and thought what fun it would be to act ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... Money could never compensate for the loss of your love. You are my life, and from you alone can I receive happiness or unhappiness. At your side I am rich and joyous, though we may outwardly need; without you I should be poor with superfluity. I am proud that we in spirit have freed ourselves from those fictitious externals with which the foolish burden themselves. Oh, my beloved Philip, my whole soul is exultant that we are never more to part—no, not even ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... Engineers directs his men. He can tie up any railroad with a snap of his finger if his men are not treated squarely. In such a literary dreamland an author might do one-third of his present work and get far more pay than now. Publishers and editors would not then have a superfluity of matter. They would then have to bow to the authors' trust before the desired material ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... how the latter tapers to the waist, which the young dandies compress within the smallest compass. In addition to the cloth, there is always round the waist a girdle of cords made of tasar-silk or of cane. This is now a superfluity, but it is no doubt the remnant of a more primitive costume, perhaps the support ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... it is permitted to behold them, and surely they are deserving of a fair destiny. We see laws which never fail, of whose failure we never conceived; and their lamps burn all the night, too, as well as all day,— so rich and lavish is that nature which can afford this superfluity of light. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... 'Life's Superfluities' (Des Lebens Uberfluss), wherein he shows that with health, a cheerful disposition, and sympathetic companionship, we may do without anything in the way of an extra at all. Shelter, covering, bed—beyond these all is mere superfluity. ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... will conscionably, quietly and patiently, trauell in your Orchard, God shall crowne the labours of his hands with ioyfulnesse, and make the clouds drop fatnesse vpon your trees, he will prouoke your loue, and earne his wages, and fees belonging to his place: The house being serued, fallen fruite, superfluity of herbes, and flowers, seedes, grasses, sets, and besides all other of that fruit which your bountifull hand shall reward him withall, will much augment his wages, and the profit of your bees will pay ...
— A New Orchard And Garden • William Lawson
... in the wind of a civil d—-, started back also, sobbing more than ever. It was a little too much that the first result of his discovery of the mistake should be absolute repulse. She leant against the mantelpiece, when Julian, much bewildered at her superfluity of emotion, assisted her to a seat in sheer humanity. But Christopher was by no means pleased when he again thought round the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... materials found in the earth, on the one hand, and the quantity which is supposed necessary for hardening and consolidating strata, on the other. If this earth has been consolidated by the burning of combustible materials, there must have been a superfluity, so far as there is a certain quantity of these actually found unconsumed in the strata of the earth. Our author's conclusion is the very opposite; let us then see how he is to form his argument, by which he proves that the supposition ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... between them, some being very wide. Two more horses died during the day from the effects of the poison, and the Leader owns that he was beginning to be at his wits end as to how they were to get along. Every superfluity and been abandoned, and, with the exception of a few light things, such as clothes and blankets, of too trifling weight to make it worth while to leave, and only what was absolutely necessary, retained; yet there were barely sufficient horses ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... built to shelter a family of boys, and steps being a superfluity scorned by their agile legs, there was a sheer drop of three feet to the ground upon that side. Evadna made it in a jump, just as the boys did, and landed ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... later, Alice, having completed dressing, leaned out of her bedroom window to drink in the soft air of evening. She had not brought a maid, and had refused her hostess's offer to lend her her own on the ground that maids were a superfluity. It was her desire to be a very practical young person, a scorner of modes and trivialities, and yet she had taken unusual care with her toilet this evening, and had spent many minutes before the glass. Looking at herself carefully, a growing conviction ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... before them, and they take the hint. You feel so grateful, too, for the hospitality of the log-cabin; such gratitude as the hospitality of the rich, however generous, cannot inspire; for these wait on you with their domestics and money, and give of their superfluity only; but here the Master gives you his bed, his horse, his lamp, his grain from the field, his all, in short; and you see that he enjoys doing so thoroughly, and takes no thought for the morrow; so that you seem in fields full of lilies perfumed with pure kindness; ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... unnecessary thing he would be likely to repeat." He cast the subject aside as if it were a worthless superfluity and went on: "When you say there is no one suitable, you surely forget ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... deplores the fashions of his day, alluding to the "sinful costly array of clothing, namely, in too much superfluity or else indisordinate scantiness!" Changing fashions have always been the despair of writers who have tried to lay down rules for aesthetic effect in dress. "An Englishman," says Harrison, "endeavouring some ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... little out of winter until we can bear the blazing heat of summer, and out of heat back again into the depths of winter. So should we follow God, and take one step after another until we reach our goal. [30] What you might spend on heavy rugs and coverlets spend rather on food: any superfluity there will not be wasted: and you will not sleep less soundly for lack of bedclothes; if you do, I give you leave to blame me. But with clothing the case is different: a man can hardly have too much of that in sickness or in health. [31] And for ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... criticisms are excellent; none more so than the following:—"Bouffe's gaiety is frank and communicative, his pathos simple, yet inexpressibly touching; the foundation of his character is sensibility; he feels all he says. He never employs any superfluity of action for the purpose of producing effect, nor does he seek, by first raising his voice almost to a shriek, and then lowering it to a whisper, to startle his audience into a fit of enthusiasm; on the contrary, a studied sobriety, both of speech ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... agricultural development; and he was bound in return to perform arduous and complicated duties. How far he performed them well is another question. At least, he did whatever was done in the way of governing, and therefore did not sink into a mere excrescence or superfluity. I must try to point out certain results which had a material effect upon English opinion in general and, ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... luxury of the Pompadour. Hence the machine-made frivolities of the most respectable homes, the hair-brushes with backs of stamped silver, the scent-bottles of imitation cut-glass, the draperies with printed rose-buds on them, the general artificial-floweriness and flimsiness and superfluity of naughtiness of our domestic art. It expresses a feminine romance to which the male indulgently consents, as if he were really the voluptuous monarch whose mistress the female, aesthetically, pretends ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... Ursula Drew for some time, was quite aware that superfluity of meekness did not rank among that ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... public, if the charity of well-disposed persons were not intercepted by those common strollers, who are most importunate, and who least deserve it. These, indeed, are properly and justly called the poor, whom it should be our study to find out and distinguish, by making them partake, of our superfluity and abundance. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... precisely, the Dorian manner everywhere, in possession of the whole of life. Compare it, for further vividness of effect, to Gothic building, to the Cistercian Gothic, if you will, when Saint Bernard had purged it of a still barbaric superfluity of ornament. It seems a long way from the Parthenon to Saint Ouen "of the aisles and arches," or Notre-Dame de Bourges; yet they illustrate almost equally the direction of the Platonic aesthetics. Those churches of the Middle ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... around its jaws—"how can you, Mr. Lackobreath, be so infernally cruel as to pinch me in that manner by the nose? Did you not see how they had fastened up my mouth—and you must know—if you know any thing—how vast a superfluity of breath I have to dispose of! If you do not know, however, sit down and you shall see. In my situation it is really a great relief to be able to open ones mouth—to be able to expatiate—to be able to communicate with a person like yourself, who do not think yourself called upon at every ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... through the law we obtain salvation, but through the gospel. "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek." Rom. 1:16. "Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls." Jas. 1:21. "Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which liveth and abideth forever." ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... consisting of farmers, who tilled their own grounds, and were equal strangers to opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the primeval simplicity of manners; and frugal by habit, they scarcely knew that temperance ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... his hands, however, are well defended by a pair of gauntlets that reach his elbows; and on his head he wears a cap richly ornamented with bear's and eagle's claws. His long thick hair, however, renders the head-gear an article of superfluity,—but it is the fashion. The dress of the women consists of a square piece of dressed deer-skin, girt round them by a cloth or worsted belt, and fastened over their shoulders by leather straps; a jacket of leather, and cloth leggings. I have also observed ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... to-day had become a vision almost as fantastic as the cupolas and chimneys that rose before me. I thought, while I lingered there, of all the fine things it takes to make up such a monarchy; and how one of them is a superfluity of mouldering, empty palaces. Chambord is touching—that is the best word for it; and if the hopes of another restoration are in the follies of the Republic, a little reflection on that eloquence of ruin ought to put the Republic on its guard. A sentimental ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... travelling from the Capital towards Kien-fi. A day's journey from that place he will encounter obstacles and fall into the hands of those who will take away his robes and papers. About the same place you will meet one with a bowl on the roadside who will hail you, saying, 'Charity, out of your superfluity, noble mandarin coming from the north!' To him you will reply, 'Do mandarins garb thus and thus and go afoot? It is I who need a change of raiment and a chair; aye, by the token of the Locust's Head!' He will then lead ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... acts of previous self-denial, and I wish you to be persuaded, that unless these are practised habitually and incessantly you can never be truly generous. A readiness to give that which costs you nothing, that which is so truly a superfluity that it involves no sacrifice, is a mere animal instinct, as selfish perhaps, though more refinedly so than any other species of self-indulgence. Generosity is a nobler quality, and one that can have no real existence without economy ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... and tramped on in silence. Pelle stepped forward carelessly, drinking in the fresh air. He was conscious of a superfluity of strength and well-being; otherwise he thought of nothing, but merely rejoiced unconsciously over his visit to his home. At every moment he had to moderate his steps, so that Sort should ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... marriage was a silly love match and a failure, I have always admitted to myself that I should marry again. A bachelor is a man who shirks responsibilities and duties; I seek them, and consider it my duty, with my monstrous superfluity of means, not to let the individualists outbreed me. Still, I was in no hurry, having other things to occupy me, and being fond of my bachelor freedom, and doubtful sometimes whether I had any right ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... frivolous ignoramuses who have no soul for anything but debauchery; the sophistical theologian, to whom Helicon, the Castalian fountain, and the grove of Apollo were foolishness; the greedy lawyers, to whom poetry was a superfluity, since no money was to be made by it; finally the mendicant friars, described periphrastically, but clearly enough, who made free with their charges of paganism and immorality. Then follows the defence of poetry, the praise of it, and especially of the ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... girls tripped gayly along the streets, merry and uncomplaining; and, surrounded by velvet, silver, and marble, by every superfluity of luxury, Cornelia Graham, with a bitter heart and hopeless soul, shivered in her easy-chair before a glowing fire. The Christmas sunlight crept in through the heavy crimson curtains and made gorgeous fret-work on the walls, but its cheering ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... healthy school-girl, for the morning pistolets or rolls, which were new-baked and very good, and of which a certain allowance was served to each. This allowance being more than I needed, I gave half to Ginevra; never varying in my preference, though many others used to covet the superfluity; and she in return would sometimes give me a portion of her coffee. This morning I was glad of the draught; hunger I had none, and with thirst I was parched. I don't know why I chose to give my bread rather to Ginevra than to another; nor why, if two had to share the convenience ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... withal a good leader in a frolic. 'You follow me and do as I tell you, and I don't believe old "Tushy" will follow us far.' By general consent he led them to the dry, sandy shore, and such as had them filled their handkerchiefs, and such as could not boast of that superfluity filled their caps, with sand. 'Now,' says Phil, 'when he comes back, and it won't be long, we'll form a line and wait till he gets his skates on, when he'll put chase for some of us. If he gets near any of us, some one sing out "Bully," ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... a little aid in our dire need, have poured in millions of bushels of wheat to your poor,—one brave, decided act of sympathy on your part for us would ere this have trampled down secession, and sent cotton to your marts, even to superfluity. Or, were you so minded, and could 'worry through' a single year, you might raise in your own colonies cotton enough, and be forever free ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... youth whom she loves, enjoying all the comforts of life with a moderate fortune, which it will always be in your own power to improve, or tied for life to a monied man whom she detests, cursing her hard fate, and despising that superfluity of wealth, in spite of which she finds ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... Prophet, recognising in the youth a literary sense that instinctively rejected superfluity. "He does call. May ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... I will take the freedom to repeat to Colonel Everard," said Bletson; "but which would be as bad as Greek to thee, Desborough. Old Geoffrey lays the whole blame of our nocturnal disturbance on superfluity of humours, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... it be that the multitude, feeling the pangs of poverty, sympathise with the daring and ingenious depredators who take away the rich man's superfluity, or whether it be the interest that mankind in general feel for the records of perilous adventures, it is certain that the populace of all countries look with admiration upon great and successful thieves. Perhaps both these causes combine to invest their career ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... mater at whose plentiful breast all mankind are nourished. It is true, like other parents, she is not always equally indulgent to all her children, but, though she gives to her favorites a vast proportion of redundancy and superfluity, there are very few whom she refuses to supply with the conveniences, and none with ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... As we had no superfluity of servants, our children were early obliged to acquire habits of independence; and my little girl, then just nine years of age, was frequently consigned with no other care than that of her own good sense, to the companionship of a little band of playmates, pretty similarly circumstanced, ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... necessary to work to find the means of indulging in them. Remunerative labor is eagerly sought after. The magnificent road now building through the island and traversing the parish of Metcalfe, has a superfluity of workmen, notwithstanding the shameful unfairness with which they have often been treated by the superintendents. I have known the people go in numbers to an estate ten miles distant, and remain there ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... bitterness, which he was infallible in distinguishing from pretended anger, seemed to sink into his heart and poison all his enjoyments till he became sensible that he was entirely forgiven. Of the malice which generally accompanies a superfluity of sensitiveness Ilbrahim was altogether destitute. When trodden upon, he would not turn; when wounded, he could but die. His mind was wanting in the stamina of self-support. It was a plant that would twine beautifully round ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in order better to make him known).... On shaving days he used the same vessel to lather his chin in. This, according to him, was a simplicity of manner worthy of the ancient Romans, and which condemned the splendour and superfluity of the others. When all was over, he dressed; then played high at piquet or hombre; or rode out, if it was absolutely necessary. All was now over for the day. He supped copiously with his familiars: was a great eater, of wonderful gluttony; a connoisseur in no dish, liked fish much, but the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... conquest there has been no such process of selection in operation amongst the Indians. The most indolent can obtain enough food, whilst the climate makes clothing almost a superfluity. The idle and improvident live their natural terms of years, and increase their kind even faster than the provident and industrious. The tribal feeling is destroyed; the selfish and sensual instincts are developed, and year by year the ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... fortunately, at that moment the order to pipe to dinner was given. The boatswain's call came into requisition, and all hands, except the watch on deck, were soon busily employed in discussing the contents of a cask of beef, boasting of but a small proportion of fat or lean and a considerable superfluity ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... a sough o' cholera Or typhus, wha sae gleg as she! She buys up baths, an' drugs, an' a', In siccan superfluity! She doesna need—she's fever proof— The pest walked o'er her very roof; She tauld me sae, and then her loof Held out for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... Safety refused to listen to Ferney's explanations. The Scarlet Pimpernel was only an ordinary mortal—an exceedingly cunning and meddlesome personage it is true, and endowed with a superfluity of wealth which enabled him to break the thin crust of patriotism that overlay the natural cupidity of many Captains of the Town Guard—but still an ordinary man for all that! and no true lover of the Republic should allow either superstitious terror or ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... were worth looking at. He was clad in tightfitting sage-green felt, so it appeared, with a superfluity of straps, buttons, lacings, and harness of all sorts. A conical Tyrol hat garnished with a cock's plume and faded violets was crushed between his back and that of the chair. As his large nervous feet reached for the chairlegs below, one could see an expanse ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... no superfluity of servants. The old fellow said that food was ready, and without more ado we went into the dining-room—another vast chamber with rough stone walls above the panelling—and found some cold meats on the table beside a big fire. ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... cotton bale. We are indeed about to demand corn, but the answer of the foreigner will be this,—"You want grain, for your population is increasing, your land has gone out of cultivation, and you cannot support yourselves. Well, we have a superfluity of grain which we can give you—in fact we have grown it for you—but then it is for us to select the equivalent. We shall not take those goods which you offer in exchange. Twelve years ago we set up cotton manufactories. We had ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... we place ourselves as strangers over against nature, in order to comprehend it objectively, we find that from the grade of organized life upwards it has only one intention—that of the maintenance of the species. To this end it works, through the immense superfluity of germs, through the urgent vehemence of the sexual instinct, through its willingness to adapt itself to all circumstances and opportunities, even to the production of bastards, and through the instinctive maternal affection, the strength ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... to cherish only those which conduce to the welfare of society; and in which every man's native intellect shall be sufficiently strong, and his culture sufficiently extensive, to enable him to know what he ought to do and to seek after. And, in that blessed State, police will be as much a superfluity as every ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... till our journey, properly so called, had terminated. For our course lay down a very steep street, and across the bridge into the Alt Stadt, where at a hotel, rich in all the essentials of food, and wine, and couches, though somewhat deficient in the superfluity of cleanliness, we established our head-quarters ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... by compassion for his fellow-creatures. His sympathy was excited by the misery with which the world is burning. He witnessed the sufferings of the poor, and was aware of the evils of ignorance. He desired to induce every rich man to despoil himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and service, and was ready to be the first to lay down the advantages of his birth. He was of too uncompromising a disposition to join any party. He did not in his youth look forward to gradual improvement: ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... incarnation of this picture, usually wore footed trousers, shoes with thick soles to them, an overcoat of coarse cloth, a black cravat, a waistcoat of some gray-and-white material buttoned to the chin, and a cheap hat. Contempt for superfluity in dress was visible in his whole person. Lucien also discovered that the mysterious stranger with that unmistakable stamp which genius sets upon the forehead of its slaves was one of Flicoteaux's most regular customers; he ate to live, careless of the fare which appeared ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... for a day, a week, or a month, or a year; but from antiquity to posterity, for many ages; there I found entertainment beyond my expectation or merit, and there is fish, flesh, bread and fruit, in such variety, that I think I may offenceless call it superfluity, or satiety. The worst was, that wine and ale was so scarce, and the people there such misers of it, that every night before I went to bed, if any man had asked me a civil question, all the wit in my head could not have made him a ...
— The Pennyles Pilgrimage - Or The Money-lesse Perambulation of John Taylor • John Taylor
... books and treatises of many a noble history, as well in metre as in rhyme and prose; and them so craftily made that he comprehended his matters in short, quick, and high sentences, eschewing prolixity, casting away the chaff of superfluity, and shewing the picked grain of sentence uttered by crafty and sugared eloquence; of whom among all others of his books I purpose to print, by the grace of God, the book of the tales of Canterbury, in which I find many ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... belle of the season. Even the most ardent of worshippers at such a shrine must, one would think, desire in their deity a little more sweetness and light. But the beauty of eighteen summers is trained to look on worship as simply her due, and to regard amiability as a mere superfluity. She knows she can summon an adorer by one beckon of her fan, and dismiss him by another. A bow will repay the most finished of pretty speeches, and conversation can be conducted at the least possible expense by the slight trouble of recollecting who was at Lady ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... a shining name in political life, his object now was to find a sufficient sphere for the exercise of all his powers in the Church. It was no fault of his that he was unwilling to settle as curate and have no aim beyond his parish except to go to heaven at last. With his superfluity of human nature, for him to become a saint was out of the question. What then? Should he enter the realm of dogmatics, and become a learned and redoubted champion of the faith, passing his life amid exegesis? Should he renounce thorough thinking, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... astronomer doubts the solar motion, though both doubt the sufficiency of present means to determine its amount and direction. This is implied in the omitted words, which Mr. Reddie—whose omission would have been dishonest if he had seen their meaning—no doubt took for pleonasm, superfluity, overmuchness. The rashness which pushed him headlong {350} into the quillet that his thunderbolt had stopped the chariot of the Sun and knocked the Greenwich Phaeton off the box, is the same which betrayed him into yet grander error—which deserves the full word, quidlibet—about ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... desire will have been enough to make my talents useless, and to neutralize my powers. Unproductive nature that I am, tortured by the belief that production was required of me, may not my very remorse be a mistake and a superfluity? ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... shall so will, you may obtain from her liberality a shirt for this worthless tabernacle, and also a pair of hose; for I am unsavory to myself and to others, and of such luxuries none here has superfluity; for all live in holy poverty, except the fleas, who have that consolation in this world for which this unhappy nation, and those who labor among them, must wait till the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... and freedom—now that he was deprived of all this, seemed to Pierre to constitute perfect happiness; and the choice of occupation, that is, of his way of life—now that that was so restricted—seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a superfluity of the comforts of life destroys all joy in satisfying one's needs, while great freedom in the choice of occupation—such freedom as his wealth, his education, and his social position had given him in ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... were young and healthy; half a dozen times they had each declared the other more than common good-looking; they both had, and never knew what it was not to have, money enough for comfort and, in addition that divine little superfluity wherefrom joys are born. The house was good to look at and good to live in; there were horses to ride, the river to go a-rowing on, and a big box from Mudie's every week. No one worried them; Miss Bussey was generally visiting the poor; or, as was the case at this moment, asleep ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... him here," said Hedwig, shyly, "and he would not even glance at me until I positively insisted upon it." Nino laughed, as he would have laughed at most things in that moment, for sheer superfluity of happiness. ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... he himself, having made a discovery of a public-house in the neighbourhood, went thither every evening and enjoyed his pipe and can; being very well satisfied with the behaviour of the landlord, whose communicative temper was a great comfort to his own taciturnity; for he shunned all superfluity of speech, as much as he avoided any ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... houses comes, even when they have not fallen into decay, from their look of having outlived their original use. Their extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present fate. They weren't built with such a thickness of wall and depth of embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American families. I don't know whether it was the appearance of these stony old villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... tiptoe. The entertainment over, Heliodora was carried home in her litter, no friend accompanying her. Few nowadays were the persons in Rome who bade guests to their table; even the richest had no great superfluity of viands. After sunset, the city became a dark and silent desert, save when watch-fires glared and soldiers guarded ...
— Veranilda • George Gissing
... of gift is it that thou desirest?" said Eocho. "Nothing less than a gift of milking-kine," said Ailill. "There is no superfluity of these in my land," said Eocho; "I have forty fosterlings, sons of the kings of Munster, to bring them up (to manhood); they are here in my company, there are forty cows to supply the needs of these, to supply my own needs are seven times twenty milch-cows [there are fifty men ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... clerk quickly learns all the essential portion of the code-book by heart. The book then lies in the drawer a superfluity. It is claimed for Chiang, the second Chinese clerk in Yunnan, that he knows all the 10,000 numbers and their ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... Wilson, there are six Missionaries in Tahaiti alone, and only four among all the other Society Islands. Each Missionary possesses a piece of land, cultivated by the natives, which produces him in superfluity all that he requires, and he also receives an annual allowance of fifty pounds from the London Missionary Society. This Society has also sent Missionaries to Tongatabu, one of the Friendly Islands, and to Nukashiva, lately made known to us ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... your dress, upon a more grave and composed fashion; wear your cloak on both shoulders, and your falling band unrumpled and well starched. You must enlarge the brim of your beaver, and diminish the superfluity of your trunk-hose; go to church, or, which will be better, to meeting, at least once a month; protest only upon your faith and conscience; lay aside your swashing look, and never touch the hilt of your sword but when you would draw the carnal ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... And then the amount of petticoats she wore! Even as Hermione she was always bunched out by layer upon layer of petticoats, in defiance of the fact that classical parts should not be dressed in a superfluity of raiment. But if the petticoats were full of starch, the voice was full of pathos—and the dignity, simplicity, and womanliness of Mrs. Charles Kean's Hermione could not have been marred by ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... have not fallen into decay, from their look of having outlived their original use. Their extraordinary largeness and massiveness are a satire on their present fate. They weren't built with such a thickness of wall and depth of embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and superfluity of stone, simply to afford an economical winter residence to English and American families. I don't know whether it was the appearance of these stony old villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change of manners, that threw a tinge of melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is that, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... of course. He was not wordless, for the letter contained almost a superfluity of words; but people often said things they did not ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... water for the hands of the guests—an office which suggests an obvious rhyme for poets writing of water-jugs. Another epitaph is a shining example of the proper manner of attributing to the dead an almost crushing superfluity of virtues. Sara Holney, first in Latin, and then in English, thus is lamented ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... other, "what is to become of that large body of teachers who have not been endowed with a true gift for culture, and who set up as teachers merely to gain a livelihood from the profession, because there is a demand for them, because a superfluity of schools brings with it a superfluity of teachers? Where shall they go when antiquity peremptorily orders them to withdraw? Must they not be sacrificed to those powers of the present who, day ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and Wilson, there are six Missionaries in Tahaiti alone, and only four among all the other Society Islands. Each Missionary possesses a piece of land, cultivated by the natives, which produces him in superfluity all that he requires, and he also receives an annual allowance of fifty pounds from the London Missionary Society. This Society has also sent Missionaries to Tongatabu, one of the Friendly Islands, and to Nukashiva, lately made known ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... a great advantage over other plants in their cross-fertilisation being assured. But this advantage is gained in the case of anemophilous species at the expense of the production of an enormous superfluity of pollen, with some risk to them and to entomophilous species of their fertilisation occasionally failing. Half the individuals, moreover, namely, the males, produce no seed, and this might possibly be a disadvantage. ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... superfluity of servants. The old fellow said that food was ready, and without more ado we went into the dining-room—another vast chamber with rough stone walls above the panelling—and found some cold meats on the table beside a big fire. The servant presently ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... here," said Hedwig, shyly, "and he would not even glance at me until I positively insisted upon it." Nino laughed, as he would have laughed at most things in that moment, for sheer superfluity of happiness. ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... not contain (a) a love interest, (b) a wrongly suspected hero, (c) a baffled inspector, (d) an amateur, but inspired, detective. It would be a grateful task to add that the result proves the superfluity of these time-worn accessories. But the cold fact is that, to me at least, the proof went the other way. From the first I was painfully aware of a lack of snap about the whole business, and I am more than suspicious that the author ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... army, don't kick up a row!"— GRANDOLPHO mine, it were sheer superfluity For you to bid your forces scatter now. The troopers two, of curious incongruity, With the long drummer, and the fifer short, That formed the old stage-army were more numerous Than is your following. You have given us sport In many scenes, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... can tie up any railroad with a snap of his finger if his men are not treated squarely. In such a literary dreamland an author might do one-third of his present work and get far more pay than now. Publishers and editors would not then have a superfluity of matter. They would then have to bow to the authors' trust before the desired ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... for her reception for some time, he was constrained to submit to Kate's desire to enter at once upon her probationary visit. Their arrangements were soon made, and the young lady was not the last who was ready for the start; her mind was not troubled with a superfluity of apparel, or an infinity of boxes. We cannot say if she was peculiar to her sex in this respect, but certain it is she did not hesitate to make the journey without the legion of packages which ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... mischief that results from domestic peculation, that too is immense from a political point of view. Life being made to cost double, any superfluity becomes impossible in most households. Now superfluity means half the trade of the world, as it is half the elegance of life. Books and flowers are to many persons as necessary ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... which I will take the freedom to repeat to Colonel Everard," said Bletson; "but which would be as bad as Greek to thee, Desborough. Old Geoffrey lays the whole blame of our nocturnal disturbance on superfluity of humours, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... have been both amazed and indignant. And it would have been unsafe to hint at such a thing to Casey Dunne. Indeed, the desirability of a chaperon never occurred to either of them; which was, after all, the best guarantee of the superfluity of that mark of an ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... operations in response to an increase of his field hands and could usually provide employment at home for any artizan he might produce, a lawyer, a banker or a merchant had little choice but to hire out or sell any slave who proved a superfluity or a misfit in his domestic establishment. On the other hand a building contractor with an expanding business could not await the raising of children but must buy or hire masons and carpenters where ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... her little silver shrines. It cannot bee denied, but many such there were, who helped to pull downe the Abbyes; not out of any hatred to those uncleane cages, but to reare their owne houses out of the ruines, and spoyled copes to make cushions. Judas complained of superfluity, but greeved it fell besides his bag: many hold temporalities tithes and glebes, unlawfull, because they are loth to forgo them: If Jezebel proclaime a Fast, let Naboth looke to his vine-yard; If the Usurer & Trades-man frequent Sermons, let the buyer ...
— A Coal From The Altar, To Kindle The Holy Fire of Zeale - In a Sermon Preached at a Generall Visitation at Ipswich • Samuel Ward
... even for democracy. The literature of syndicalism teems with attacks on democracy. "Syndicalism and Democracy," says Emile Pouget, "are the two opposite poles, which exclude and neutralize each other.... Democracy is a social superfluity, a parasitic and external excrescence, while syndicalism is the logical manifestation of a growth of life, it is a rational cohesion of human beings, and that is why, instead of restraining their individuality, it prolongs and develops it."[37] Democracy is, in the view of Sorel, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... sufficiently well-grassed, with the everlasting black soil, tea-tree flats, and gullies running between them, some being very wide. Two more horses died during the day from the effects of the poison, and the Leader owns that he was beginning to be at his wits end as to how they were to get along. Every superfluity and been abandoned, and, with the exception of a few light things, such as clothes and blankets, of too trifling weight to make it worth while to leave, and only what was absolutely necessary, retained; yet there were barely sufficient horses ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... crippled that rival station. From the cleaning and packing shed we went to another, where the diving apparatus is kept. This was sent out from England, and is exactly the same as that in use everywhere, being made to fit tightly round the ankles, wrists, and neck, with an immense superfluity of space in the middle to hold a storage of air. Besides this heavy dress, divers wear a belt with a large knife stuck into it, to cut themselves free from any obstacle their ropes may get foul of, and they ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... circumstances when these harbour mouths of inland basins vomit floods, deflecting, burying, and dismasting ships. For, conceive a lagoon perfectly sealed but in the one point, and that of merely navigable width; conceive the tide and wind to have heaped for hours together in that coral fold a superfluity of waters, and the tide to change and the wind fall—the open sluice of some great reservoirs at home will give an image ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as an actor can be." Many of Mr. Hervey's criticisms are excellent; none more so than the following:—"Bouffe's gaiety is frank and communicative, his pathos simple, yet inexpressibly touching; the foundation of his character is sensibility; he feels all he says. He never employs any superfluity of action for the purpose of producing effect, nor does he seek, by first raising his voice almost to a shriek, and then lowering it to a whisper, to startle his audience into a fit of enthusiasm; on the contrary, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... great reptile, twelve or more feet long. This great beast had died and got buried in the sand; the sand had gradually hardened over the bones, but remained porous. Water had trickled through it, and that water being probably charged with a superfluity of carbonic acid, had dissolved all the phosphate and carbonate of lime, and the bones themselves had thus decayed and entirely disappeared; but as the sandstone happened to have consolidated by that time, the precise shape of the bones was retained. If that sandstone had remained soft ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... of my fur-lined overcoat, which I commanded a hobbardyhoy of the sweeper class to hold, I again mounted upon the saddle, while the proprietor of the machine sustained it in a position of rectitude, and then, supporting me by the superfluity of my pantaloons, he propelled me from the rear, counselling me to press my feet vigorously upon the paddles. But it all proved as the labour of Sisyphus, for the seat was of sadly insufficient dimensions and adamantine hardihood, and whenever ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... rivers are deepened for navigation, and not a mile of railway opened. The enormous sums of money expended on such unnecessary works as the Benguet road and the creation of multifarious bureaux, with a superfluity of public servants, might have been better employed in the development of agriculture and cognate wealth-producing public works. The excessive salaries paid to high officials seem to be out of all proportion to those ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... meanwhile enjoyed pensions in great prosperity and peace, and with perhaps a superfluity of ale and wine, in Tunstall hamlet. One had been all his life a shipman, and continued to the last to lament his man Tom. The other, who had been a bit of everything, turned in the end towards piety, and made a most religious death under the name of Brother Honestus in the neighbouring abbey. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pamphlets of a popular writer, so invaluable to the philosophical antiquary. Tom Nash, a town-wit of the reign of Elizabeth, long before Camden wrote her history, in his "Pierce Pennilesse," had detected the same origin.—"Superfluity in drink," says this spirited writer, "is a sin that ever since we have mixed ourselves with the Low Countries is counted honourable; but before we knew their lingering wars, was held in that highest degree of hatred ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... figure often having its force and propriety, as justified by the law of passion, which, inducing in the mind an unusual activity, seeks for means to waste its superfluity,—when in the highest degree—in lyric repetitions and sublime tautology—'(at her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead)',—and, ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... We call a tub a 'tosh.' When Dirty Dick came here he was unclean. He told his form—oh! the cheek of it!—that in his filthy mind one bath a week was plenty," unconsciously the boy mimicked the thick, rasping tones—"two, luxury, and three—superfluity! After that he was called Dirty Dick. There's another story. They say that years ago he went to a Turkish bath, and after a rare good scraping the man who was scraping him—nasty job that!—found something which Dirty ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... falling across his path, brought him sharply back to the present reality. He looked up and saw that a table had been pulled out on to the verandah, and that four officers sat round it, playing cards by the light of a lamp. At Marut there was always a heavy superfluity of men, and these four, doubtless weary of standing uselessly about, had made good their escape to enjoy themselves in their own way. Nehal Singh hesitated. He felt a strong desire to go up and join them, to learn to know them outside the enervating, leveling atmosphere ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... worked have ten pairs of shoes, they could have a thousand; and clothes too, in the greatest superfluity. He had not been to church, he said, but he knew that there they held forth as though it were the most natural thing in the world that those who had shoes should give them to those who had none. You would ...
— Captain Mansana and Mother's Hands • Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson
... see Italy and its civilisation, and Master Michael Angelo, whom I see here. It is quite true that we have not such buildings and pictures as you have, but they are already being made, and little by little they are losing that barbarian superfluity that the Goths and Moors sowed throughout Spain. I also hope that, on arriving in Portugal after leaving here, I may assist either in the elegance of building or in the nobility of painting, so that we may be able to compete with you. Our science is almost ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... course, I get all I want in double-quick time, as I try to save my man trouble; and the carpenter leaves my scuttle open when no one else gets it, quite willing to get up in his time of sleep to close it, if it comes on to blow. A maid is really a superfluity on board ship, as the men rather like being 'aux petits soins'. The boatswain came the other day to say that he had a nice carpet and a good pillow; did I want anything of the sort? He would be proud that I should use ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... birth among the plants and flowers. The Provencal and the romantic poets loved the same descriptions. Spenser, for instance, has charming stanzas about beautiful wilds with their streams and flowers; Cowley's six books on plants, vegetables, and trees are written with extraordinary affection and a superfluity of imagination; and of our old Brockes, Gessner says: 'He observed Nature's many beauties down to their finest minutiae, the smallest things move his tender feelings; a dewdrop on a blade of grass in the sunshine inspires him. His scenes are often too laboured, ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... in her of girlish pertness and ignorance with the promise of a remarkable general capacity, made her a most taking, provoking creature. Mrs. Thornburgh—much recovered in mind since Dr. Baker had praised the pancakes by which Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the superfluity of naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign cooks—watched the young man and maiden with a face which grew more and more radiant. The conversation in the garden had not pleased her. Why should people ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... great sweat, toil, and yet remained dissatisfied too, which every one according to his strength and ability, and that was very inconsiderable (for they provided no other Food than what was absolutely necessary to support Nature without superfluity, freely bestow'd on them, and one individual Spaniard consumed more Victuals in one day, than would serve to maintain Three Families a Month, every one consisting of Ten Persons. Now being oppressed by such evil ...
— A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies • Bartolome de las Casas
... against the walls in the yellow sun, where they were drying to be used as fuel. Yet it was not the great make of the year as yet; before the standard crop came in there accumulated, in abundant times like this, a large superfluity of early apples, and windfalls from the trees of later harvest, which would not keep long. Thus, in the baskets, and quivering in the hopper of the mill, she saw specimens of mixed dates, including the mellow countenances ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... establishment, and in the government of the realm. France had had during the last years poor harvests. The people were suffering from a want of the bare necessities of life. The taxes could not be collected. A reform must be introduced, and those who before had rejoiced in a superfluity of royal gifts had to be contented with a diminution ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... of the Jury—You sit in that box as the great reservoir of Roman liberty, Spartan fame, and Grecian polytheism. You are to swing the great flail of justice and electricity over this immense community, in hydraulic majesty, and conjugal superfluity. You are the great triumphal arch on which evaporates the even scales of justice and numerical computation. You are to ascend the deep arcana of nature, and dispose of my client with equiponderating concatenation, in reference to his future velocity and reverberating ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Falesa? If I mistake not, our interest centres neither in Case's dirty trick of the marriage, nor in his more stiff-jointed trick of the devil-contraptions. The first but helps to construct the problem, the second seems a superfluity. The problem is (and the author puts it before us fair and square), How is Wiltshire a fairly loose moralist with some generosity of heart, going to treat the girl he has wronged? And I am bound to say that ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... home with his cousin he found they lacked just five shillings of the required amount to pay their fare. They boarded the train and paid as far as they could. The train stopped at Crewe fifteen minutes for lunch. Lunch is a superfluity if you haven't the money to pay for it—but stealing a ride in Scotland is out of the question. Robert Louis hastily took a pair of new trousers from his valise and ran up the main street of the town anxiously looking for a pawnshop. There at the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... adornment. There are many good paintings, including portraits of the various presidents of the club, which adorn the entrance hall. After books, perhaps the most distinctive feature of the club is our collection of pipes. In a large rack in the smoking-room—really a superfluity, since smoking is permitted all over the house—is as complete an assortment of pipes as perhaps exists in the civilized world. Indeed, it is an unwritten rule of the club that no one is eligible for membership who cannot produce a new variety of pipe, which ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... in the least embarrassed by his superfluity of parents. He adjusted himself to the circumstances with tact and a sympathetic consideration which would scarcely have been expected of him. He managed the two fathers with consummate skill, divided his attentions honorably between ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... was to find a sufficient sphere for the exercise of all his powers in the Church. It was no fault of his that he was unwilling to settle as curate and have no aim beyond his parish except to go to heaven at last. With his superfluity of human nature, for him to become a saint was out of the question. What then? Should he enter the realm of dogmatics, and become a learned and redoubted champion of the faith, passing his life amid exegesis? Should he renounce thorough ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... insolently stride Down the red noonday on such noiseless feet? Piled in his barrow, tawnier than wheat, Lie heaps of smoldering daisies, somber-eyed, Their copper petals shriveled up with pride, Hot with a superfluity of heat, Like a great brazier borne along the street By captive leopards, black and ...
— Nets to Catch the Wind • Elinor Wylie
... anything he had learnt but to take his broth twice." Nay, in our own remembrance, the use of a carving knife was considered as a novelty; and a gentleman of ancient family and good literature used to rate his son, a friend of mine, for introducing such a foppish superfluity.'—London Mag. 1778, p.199. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... an odd superfluity of illustration, that bank-notes enable a man to be bribed much more easily than of old. There is no danger, he says, that a patriot will be exposed by a guinea dropping out of his pocket at the end of an interview with the minister; and he shows how awkward it would be if ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... embarrassing, and irksome; and though moments occurred when I longed to say something that might ingratiate me, and endeavoured to effect an advance in that direction, the words always failed me at the necessary juncture, and I found myself lying crushed as before under a burdensome sense of the superfluity ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... had originally been intended that there should be three French armies, but during the conferences with Archduke Albert in the spring, that plan was abandoned in favour of one sole army under the command of Napoleon III. The idea underlying the change was to avoid a superfluity of staff-officers, and to augment the number of actual combatants. Both Le Boeuf and Lebrun approved of the alteration, and this would seem to indicate that there were already misgivings on the French side in regard to the inferior strength of their effectives. The army was divided into eight sections, ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... said suddenly, after a ten minutes' silence, "I'm going to be married at once. It will be 'a marriage in the bush,' as the Suabians call an impecunious match, since neither of us has any money; and I, at least, haven't so great a superfluity of brains that in this intelligent age of the world I am ever likely to make much by selling myself; and that is the only way any ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... secondly, in thus tenaciously holding on to his place did he (I am satisfied) govern himself by any mercenary thought or wish, but simply by an austere sense of duty. He discharged his public functions with constant fidelity, and with superfluity of learning; and felt, perhaps not unreasonably, that possibly the same learning united with the same zeal might not revolve as a matter of course in the event of his resigning the place. I hide from myself no part of the honorable motives which might (and probably ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a friend: "Two parents are the rule; no parents the exception; a mother but no father is not uncommon; but I had a father and never had a mother. I was nursed by a man, and educated by monks, all of which shows that women are more or less of a superfluity in creation. God Himself is a man. He had one son, but no daughters. The cherubim are boys. All of the angels are masculine, and so far as Holy Writ informs us, there ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... the "Head of Brutus," the "Bound Captives," and the "Pieta" in the Duomo of Florence, are instances of masterpieces in the rough. He loved to fancy that the form dwelt within the stone, and that the chisel disencumbered it of superfluity. Therefore, to his eye, foreseeing what the shape would be when the rude envelope was chipped away, the marble mask may have taken the appearance of a veil or mantle. He may have found some fascination in the incompleteness that ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... to our wristbands, and by his lace boot-tops; his poverty, by his wearing three bands, four neckcloths, and seven pair of cuffs (probably one a day for the week) to one shirt. His having, in respect to the last garment, was probably like Poins'] and if the reader [Footnote: "one for superfluity and one other for use." The cap was probably that which he wore when he laid aside his wig. His hose, of colored silk, probably made only "semi-occasional" visits to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... which have the appearance of being free, they make so many phrases in the sense which they are ordered. It must be confessed that our French writers are the only ones who can in this manner every morning embellish the same sophism, and who hug themselves in the very superfluity of servitude. While the instruction of this famous affair was in progress, the journals informed Europe that Pichegru had strangled himself in the Temple; all the gazettes were filled with a surgical report, which appeared very improbable, notwithstanding the care with which it was drawn up. ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... reticence; we hint, point, and suggest, where she spoke out broad words, frank and free; the motif is one and the same. If we judge Mrs. Behn's dramatic output in the only fair way by comparing it legitimately with the theatre of her age, we simply shall not find that superfluity of naughtiness the critics lead us to expect and deplore. There are not infrequent scenes of Dryden, of Wycherley, of Vanbrugh, Southerne, Otway, Ravenscroft, Shadwell, D'Urfey, Crowne, full as daring as anything Aphra wrote; indeed, in some instances, far more wanton. Particularizing, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... combustible materials found in the earth, on the one hand, and the quantity which is supposed necessary for hardening and consolidating strata, on the other. If this earth has been consolidated by the burning of combustible materials, there must have been a superfluity, so far as there is a certain quantity of these actually found unconsumed in the strata of the earth. Our author's conclusion is the very opposite; let us then see how he is to form his argument, by which he proves that the supposition of subterraneous heat for hardening bodies is gratuitous and ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... any attraction to me. Money could never compensate for the loss of your love. You are my life, and from you alone can I receive happiness or unhappiness. At your side I am rich and joyous, though we may outwardly need; without you I should be poor with superfluity. I am proud that we in spirit have freed ourselves from those fictitious externals with which the foolish burden themselves. Oh, my beloved Philip, my whole soul is exultant that we are never more to part—no, not even in eternity, for I believe that love is an undying sentiment, ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... on his fancy. Often the folds of a piece of drapery so delighted him that they are continued for their own sake and float out where there is no wind to support them, or he would develop their intricacies beyond every possibility of conceivable train or other superfluity of real garments; and it is this necessity to be richer and more magnificent than probability permits which brings us to the creator in Duerer; not only had he a profound realistic perception of what the world was like, but he had an imagination that ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... bulwark was razed to the level of the deck, and the boat swung thwart-ship, made fast with a slack line to either stump, and successfully run out. For a voyage of forty miles to hospitable quarters, not much food or water was required; but they took both in superfluity. Amalu and Mac, both ingrained sailor-men, had chests which were the headquarters of their lives; two more chests with handbags, oilskins, and blankets supplied the others; Hadden, amid general applause, added ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... desirable. Without the one, man, being a gregarious animal, cannot subsist: while without the other he would simply be in clover. The "statesman'' whom office does not render positively nefarious is at best an expensive superfluity. ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... and New England, I presented to thirty of the chief companies in London at their Halls, desiring either generally or particularly (them that would) to imbrace it and by the use of a stock of five thousand pounds to ease them of the superfluity of most of their companies that had but strength and health to labor; near a year I spent to understand their resolutions, which was to me a greater toil and torment, than to have been in New England about my business but ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... afford better nourishment than the laborious poor can generally obtain; especially as they are rarely tolerable cooks, and have not fuel to do justice to what they buy. In almost every family there is some superfluity; and if it be prepared with cleanliness and care, the benefit will be very great to the receiver, and the satisfaction no less to the giver. The cook or servant should never be allowed to wash away as useless, the peas or grits of which soup or gruel ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... flowers on some eighteen inches of the spike have already blossomed, none of the ovaries have been fertilized; they are dropping off, but I am rather sanguine regarding those about the middle of the spike. So great is the superfluity of nectar contained in the flowers, that on the afternoon of the second day it often drops from the cups, and the least shake to the scape brings it down in a shower. The main beauty of the inflorescence consists in the dense bottle-brush-like mass of bright yellow anthers. This ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... an expensive charge on the Board of Works, and then, after the custom of the Trade, primed, emboldened, and made drunk to do it, drunk to a point which had brought him to destruction—yes, he was like that man; his temptations, his perils, his essential superfluity were all the same. As he went up the stair he tried to imagine he was the man himself, going up and up, a solitary and uplifted figure, fixing his thoughts on things above in order that he might forget the gulf which yawned below. He took his hand from the balustrade, and ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... least bestowed one penny well. "Right," cries his lordship, "for a rogue in need To have a taste is insolence indeed: In me 'tis noble, suits my birth and state, My wealth unwieldy, and my heap too great." Then, like the sun, let bounty spread her ray, And shine that superfluity away. Oh, impudence of wealth! with all thy store, How dar'st thou let one worthy man be poor? Shall half the new-built churches round thee fall? Make quays, build bridges, or repair Whitehall: Or to thy country let that heap be lent, As M**o's was, but not at ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... period at his will, and, when no longer required, giving place to others. The idea once recorded seems never to appear again. Nature is never so prodigal as with the man of genius. Of all her children he is the favorite; these pictures are given him in superfluity, out of all proportion to his ability to use them. The harder he works in the effort to catch up with his material, ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... self-denial, and I wish you to be persuaded, that unless these are practised habitually and incessantly you can never be truly generous. A readiness to give that which costs you nothing, that which is so truly a superfluity that it involves no sacrifice, is a mere animal instinct, as selfish perhaps, though more refinedly so than any other species of self-indulgence. Generosity is a nobler quality, and one that can have no real ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... things are very enjoyable, and in these times there is no lack of them. The tendency, I should say, is towards superfluity. But new places——! There are surely not many left except the North Pole and the South. Everybody goes everywhere nowadays, and you tumble over friends in Damascus and find your tailor picnicking on the slopes ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... the best of everything. Mrs. Lenox knew how to spend money, she had a house in New York and a villa in Belfield; she had running accounts with tradesmen; and not only gave dinner-parties, balls and receptions, but out-dressed her circle with a sort of gorgeous superfluity which made her intimates experience the ignominy of their inferiority. Mr. Lenox resigned himself to the irresistible current of his wife's will, and if he felt inward doubts silenced them as suggestions of morbid ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... centuries, and the long-striking balance of Time, yet remains to be settled. The French Revolution was absolutely a strike, and a very terrible and relentless one, against ages of bad pay, unjust division of wealth-products, and the hoggish monopoly of a few, rolling in superfluity, against the vast bulk of the work-people, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... destinies,—how will it be possible (without raising new ghosts, in a sense) to give readers any intelligible notion?—Here, flickering on the edge of conflagration after duty done, is a poor Note which perhaps the reader had better, at the risk of superfluity, still in part take along ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... I exclaimed, stupidly surprised that the poor deformed creature should have found a mate—as though there were not a superfluity of mates in the world—"I didn't ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... never so popular, never so determined, never so thoroughly ingrained, entwined, inter-twisted with the whole life-core and being of our people. 'We suffer—but on with the war! Hurrah for battle—only give us victory! Do you ask for money, arms, ships?—take all and everything to superfluity—but oh, give us victory and power!' Out of such will as this there come the greatest of men—giants of a fearfully glorious future. When we look around and see this red-hot iron determination to see all through to the victorious end, we may well feel assured that the day of great ideas and of great ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and keeps it pining around and watching the barometer all the time, and liable to get sick through confinement and lack of exercise, and all that sort of thing, why—why, the inhumanity of it is enough, let alone the wanton superfluity and uselessness of any such a loafing consumptive hospital-bird of a Had taking up room and cumbering the place for nothing. These finical refinements revolt me; it is not right, it is not honorable; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... multitude of indigent and necessitous persons, while its whole wealth had centred upon a very few. To the end, therefore, that he might expel from the state arrogance and envy, luxury and crime, and those yet more inveterate diseases of want and superfluity, he obtained of them to renounce their properties, and to consent to a new division of the land, and that they should live all together on an equal footing; merit to be their only road to eminence, and the disgrace of evil, and credit of worthy acts, their one measure of difference ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... an odd thing, and every man has enough of it, if he can only satisfy himself. What avails a superfluity of freedom which we cannot use? Look at this chamber and the next, in which, through the open door, you see my bed. Neither of them is large; and they are rendered still narrower by necessary furniture, books, manuscripts, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the Christmas of all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the Christmas of the Timminses and the Tiny Tims. But while he thought of these, by operation of the divine law which renders all things sensible by their opposites, he thought of the other kinds of Christmas ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... round several times, see you often, and become quite affable. There is nothing more intelligent than a tame seal, and I have heard people regret that seals can't talk, which is nonsense. When a seal can make you understand him without it, talking is a noisy superfluity. Toby can say many things without the necessity of talking. Observe his eyes fixed upon you as he approaches for the first time. He turns and swaps past with his nose in the air. "Pooh, don't know you," he is saying. But wait. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 26, February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... impracticable, Wallenstein, to the astonishment of all Europe, had in a short time effected. The charm of his name, his treasures, and his genius, had assembled thousands in arms, where before Austria had only looked for hundreds. Furnished, even to superfluity, with all necessaries, commanded by experienced officers, and inflamed by enthusiasm which assured itself of victory, this newly created army only awaited the signal of their leader to show themselves, by the bravery of their deeds, worthy of his choice. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... the economy they might effect by such practises, to show them that elegance and propriety in themselves cost nothing—nay, more, that they demand simplicity and moderation, and therefore exclude all that superfluity which is ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... to argue a paradox, one might maintain that Nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world. Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees. Precisely where the French man may come in, on the genealogical tree of parthenogenesis, one hesitates to say; but certain it is that the French ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... too busy to catch more—that is, if I had wanted to—which I didn't!" He was forced to add the last; it burst from his lips with sudden passion; then they curved a little as if to ask excuse for a superfluity. ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... extreme. Regiments seemed to have lost their colonels, colonels their regiments. Men of all arms and all commands were mixed in the wildest way. A constant fusillade of small arms and singing of bullets were kept up, indicative of a superfluity of disorder, if not of ammunition. One of my men was severely wounded in camp by a "stray," and derived no consolation from my suggestion that it was a delicate attention of our comrades to mitigate the disappointment of missing the battle. The elation of our people at their ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... preserved is cause not only for thankfulness but for some surprise also. For if its contents had been known, it is certain that all the public men of nearly two generations who figure in it would have combined into one vast and irresistible conspiracy to obtain and destroy it. There was always a superfluity of gall in the diarist's ink. Sooner or later every man of any note in the United States was mentioned in his pages, and there is scarcely one of them, who, if he could have read what was said of him, ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... which at last, becoming limpid and murmuring streams, were lost in the waters of the lake. Light vapors, which rose here and there, and floated in fleecy clouds from rock to rock, indicated hot springs, which also poured their superfluity into the vast ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... in these log huts were as rude as might be expected; yet there is evidence that although there was no superfluity of law or of learning, justice was substantially administered. The lawyers came mostly from Kentucky, though an occasional New Englander confronted and lived down the general prejudice against his region and obtained preferment. The ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... not invariably escape rebuke. But the slightest word of real bitterness, which he was infallible in distinguishing from pretended anger, seemed to sink into his heart and poison all his enjoyments till he became sensible that he was entirely forgiven. Of the malice which generally accompanies a superfluity of sensitiveness Ilbrahim was altogether destitute. When trodden upon, he would not turn; when wounded, he could but die. His mind was wanting in the stamina of self-support. It was a plant that would twine beautifully ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... population had suddenly increased to an extent sufficient to account for the enlarged consumption that was evidently taking place. I had heard that there were nations of savages who considered shirts a sort of superfluity, and who moved about in very much the same costume as that in which our primal mother clothed herself just previously to indulging in the forbidden fruit. But they could not have thus suddenly taken to the wearing of machine-made shirts. There was a paragraph also ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... in the Rockies; in fact, it is known all over the world as the finest Township for corn in Iowa." This sort of conduct is, I admit, unwarrantable in the extreme; but cycling is responsible for it all. If continuous cycling is productive of a superfluity of exhilaration, and said exhilaration bubbles over occasionally, plainly the bicycle is to blame. So forcibly does this latter fact intrude upon me as I shake hands with the farmer, and congratulate him on his rare good fortune in belonging to Carson Township that I mount, and with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... children. Then, since diet alters the evil state of the body to a better, those subject to barrenness must eat such meats as are juicy and nourish well, making the body lively and full of sap; of which faculty are all hot moist meats. For, according to Galen, seed is made of pure concocted and windy superfluity of blood, whence we may conclude, that there is a power in many things, to accumulate seed, and also to augment it; and other things of force to cause desire, as hen eggs, pheasants, woodcocks, gnat-snappers, blackbirds, thrushes, young pigeons, sparrows, partridges, capons, almonds, pine ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... to know thy face to morrow? Or to take note how many paire of Silk stockings y hast? (Viz. these, and those that were thy peach-colour'd ones:) Or to beare the Inuentorie of thy shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other, for vse. But that the Tennis-Court-keeper knowes better then I, for it is a low ebbe of Linnen with thee, when thou kept'st not Racket there, as thou hast not done a great while, because ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... from that region, that when there was for a time a scarcity of bread among his fellow-soldiers and troops, out of a small quantity of wheat, bread was so multiplied by his merits and prayers that a sufficiency and even a superfluity was forthcoming for all of his who sought and asked for it, whereas the rest that were opposed to him had to suffer from ...
— Henry the Sixth - A Reprint of John Blacman's Memoir with Translation and Notes • John Blacman
... was in a little neighborhood consisting of farmers, who tilled their own grounds, and were equal strangers to opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniences of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of superfluity. Remote from the polite, they still retained the primeval simplicity of manners; and frugal by habit, they scarcely knew that ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... mischief. Nature is a better guide than civilisation, because nature comes from God, and His works are good; culture from man, whose works are bad in proportion as he is remoter from natural innocence, as his desires increase upon him, as he seeks more refined pleasures, and stores up more superfluity. It promotes inequality, selfishness, and the ruin ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... part, a reunion of our Christmas crowd. Daisy is here and Hal, of course, and we all want you. Invite one or two of your beaux, if you like, but don't bring any more girls; for we have two or three new neighbours with a superfluity of daughters. Come as soon as you can, and stay as long as you will, and bring your prettiest frocks. Oceans of love from me ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... up in the eye of the world. You must somewhat reform your dress, upon a more grave and composed fashion; wear your cloak on both shoulders, and your falling band unrumpled and well starched. You must enlarge the brim of your beaver, and diminish the superfluity of your trunk-hose; go to church, or, which will be better, to meeting, at least once a month; protest only upon your faith and conscience; lay aside your swashing look, and never touch the hilt of your sword but when you would draw ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... "have an infinity of plans; but de Chateauroux has a carriage, and a superfluity of Bourbon blood; and Victoria has ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... persuade myself that industry and labour will be a sovereign preservative against the dangers of the former; but I consider, at the same time, that the share of labour and industry which is intended to procure but a simple subsistence, with hardly any superfluity, cannot have the same restrictive effects on our minds as when we tilled the earth on a more extensive scale. The surplus could be then realised into solid wealth, and at the same time that this realisation rewarded our past labours, it engrossed and fixed the attention of the labourer, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... where there is abundance of room and almost superfluity of nature, a well-kept churchyard, with all its venerable features, studiously protected and reverently cared for, is one of the best inheritances of a country life. Illustrations of this may occur to most observers, but as a case in point I may ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... what those wise old Hebrews said make one feel that one is committing a superfluity when one attempts to say anything along the line of practical advice, since anything that any man can say is nothing more than a very weak dilution of the concentrated thought of the most acute minds of the greatest business people, the most successful material people—yes, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... failing from the time of his return home. His invincible spirit belied and disguised the signs of weakness that afterward asserted themselves in my remembrance of him. He seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of life to draw on, and more than one of us was a pensioner on his superfluity. ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... the sacred hill at Prabat. They are then presented to the priests, who are supposed to make them into brushes with which they sweep the Footprint; but in fact so much hair is thus offered every year that the priests cannot use it all, so they quietly burn the superfluity as soon as the pilgrims' backs are turned. The cut hair and nails of the Flamen Dialis were buried under a lucky tree. The shorn tresses of the Vestal Virgins were hung on ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... soon as they are able to walk? But did ever any father provide a tutor for his son to instruct him betimes in the nature and improvements of that land which he intended to leave him? That is at least a superfluity, and this a defect in our manner of education; and therefore I could wish, but cannot in these times much hope to see it, that one college in each university were erected, and appropriated to this study, as well as there are to medicine ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... and a burden rather than a help. So it is that excessive riches, like steering oars of too great weight and bulk, serve to sink the ship rather than to guide it; for their bulk is unprofitable and their superfluity a curse. I have noticed that of the wealthy themselves those win most praise who live quietly and in moderate comfort, concealing their actual resources, administering their great possessions without ostentation ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... he will encounter obstacles and fall into the hands of those who will take away his robes and papers. About the same place you will meet one with a bowl on the roadside who will hail you, saying, 'Charity, out of your superfluity, noble mandarin coming from the north!' To him you will reply, 'Do mandarins garb thus and thus and go afoot? It is I who need a change of raiment and a chair; aye, by the token of the Locust's Head!' He will then lead ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... reaches a plantation for the first time, he fancies himself in paradise. He is amazed by the generosity with which he is fed with fruit and fresh provisions. His new clothes, red cap, and roasting blanket (a civilized superfluity he never dreamed of), strike him dumb with delight, and, in his savage joy, he not only forgets country, relations, and friends, but skips about like a monkey, while he dons his garments wrongside out or hind-part before! The arrival of a carriage or cart creates no little ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... ethics of the Principe is not diabolical. There is no inventive superfluity of naughtiness in the treatise. It is simply a handbook of princecraft, as that art was commonly received in Italy, where the principles of public morality had been translated into terms of material aggrandizement, glory, gain, and greatness. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... your cotton-spinners? Feed them?—why we would, for a little aid in our dire need, have poured in millions of bushels of wheat to your poor,—one brave, decided act of sympathy on your part for us would ere this have trampled down secession, and sent cotton to your marts, even to superfluity. Or, were you so minded, and could 'worry through' a single year, you might raise in your own colonies cotton enough, and be forever ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... pretensions. A light groining sprang from six stout columns, and hung down in two rich pendants from the centre of the vault. The place terminated behind the altar in a round end, embossed and honeycombed with a superfluity of ornament in relief, and pierced by many little windows shaped like stars, trefoils, or wheels. These windows were imperfectly is glazed, so that the night air circulated freely in the chapel. The tapers, of which there must have been ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... as the worldly people say, for her death, her money with her children being taken off his hands. I am just now wondering whether you will ever come to town again, Coleridge; 'tis among the things I dare not hope, but can't help wishing. For myself, I can live in the midst of town luxury and superfluity, and not long for them, and I can't see why your children might not hereafter do the same. Remember, you are not in Arcadia when you are in the west of England, and they may catch infection from the world without visiting the metropolis. But you ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... "The Innocents," and entered the gate. A few lounging peons in the shadow of an archway took off their broad-brimmed hats and made way for the padre, and a half dozen equally listless vaqueros helped him to alight. Accustomed as he was to the indolence and superfluity of his host's retainers, to-day it nevertheless seemed to strike some note ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... have a reasonable sense of his pastoral duty, gets, malgre lui, a very fair share of that open-air medicine which is supposed to be the great lack of his profession. For if he be a clergyman in a rural parish of tolerable extent and with no great superfluity of wealth, he will not want for either air or exercise. The George Herbert so situated finds by no means his whole round of duty in the study. Old Mrs. Smith, sick and bedridden, lives a couple of miles from the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... Little Britain men who combined publishing with second-hand bookselling, one of the more interesting is William Newton, who resided there during the earlier years of the last century. In 1712 he published Quincy's 'Medicina Statica,' at the end of which is this curious 'Advertisement' (minus the superfluity of capitals): 'Those persons who have any Librarys (sic) or small parcels of old books to dispose of, either in town or countrey, may have ready money for them of Will. Newton, Bookseller in Little Britain, London. Also all gentlemen, and schoolmasters, may be furnished with all sorts of classics, ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... went to Edinburgh, with the same view as formerly of burying myself in a philosophical retreat. I returned to that place, not richer, but with much more money, and a much larger income, by means of Lord Hertford's friendship, than I left it; and I was desirous of trying what superfluity could produce, as I had formerly made an experiment of a competency. But in 1767 I received from Mr. Conway an invitation to be under-secretary; and this invitation, both the character of the person, and my connexions ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... shelter a family of boys, and steps being a superfluity scorned by their agile legs, there was a sheer drop of three feet to the ground upon that side. Evadna made it in a jump, just as the boys did, and landed lightly ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... plethoric prosperity, anon extenuated into inanition and 'short time,' is of the nature of gambling; they live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious superfluity, now in starvation. Black, mutinous discontent devours them; simply the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the heart of man. English commerce, with its world-wide, convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus Steam demon, makes all paths uncertain ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... rich, applied their superfluity to works of common and public use; and this was in every state, the epoch of those works whose grandeur astonishes the mind; of those wells of Tyre, of those dykes of the Euphrates, of those subterranean conduits of Media,* of those ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... thither every evening and enjoyed his pipe and can; being very well satisfied with the behaviour of the landlord, whose communicative temper was a great comfort to his own taciturnity; for he shunned all superfluity of speech, as much as he ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... rents tend to rise': here 'if' means 'whenever' or 'all cases in which'; for to raise a doubt whether a straight line is ever conceived to fall upon another, whether bodies are ever unsupported, or population ever increases, is a superfluity of scepticism; and plainly the hypothetical form has nothing to do with the proof of such propositions, nor with ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... felt herself close to and looking into the stream of recorded history, within whose banks the littlest things are great, and outside which she and the general bulk of the human race were content to live on as an unreckoned, unheeded superfluity. ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... save the tiny creature, at the least sign of danger, from an imminent fall; we realize lastly the useful function that may be fulfilled by the elastic cirri of the flanks and legs, which are an absolute and most embarrassing superfluity when walking upon a smooth surface, but which, in the present case, penetrate like so many probes into the thickness of the Anthophora's down and serve as it were to anchor the Sitaris-larva in position. The more we consider this ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... drunken piper." They watched her while she set the table with tea and scones and strawberry jam and cheese, and smiled rather vacantly at her stream of gossip, their natural liking for the woman struggling against their sense of the superfluity of everybody on earth except each other. When she left them they ate and drank almost without speech, soberly delighted by the mellowing of the world that followed the dwindling of the sunset fires. All things seemed to become more modest and reconciled; ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... from the cold; his hands, however, are well defended by a pair of gauntlets that reach his elbows; and on his head he wears a cap richly ornamented with bear's and eagle's claws. His long thick hair, however, renders the head-gear an article of superfluity,—but it is the fashion. The dress of the women consists of a square piece of dressed deer-skin, girt round them by a cloth or worsted belt, and fastened over their shoulders by leather straps; a jacket of leather, and ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... from the Chateau, Oates, Meares's and Atkinson's two bunks came next, Meares above and Atkinson below. These two sleeping berths likewise were not conspicuous by any superfluity of scientific oddments, for Meares's work took him outside of the hut as a rule, unless he was engaged in making dog harness. Meares and Oates were the greatest friends, and these two, Atkinson, Cherry-Garrard and Bowers, were, if I remember rightly, known collectively as the Bunderlohg. ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... which he had superficially mastered with extraordinary rapidity under Mr. and Mrs. Blyth's tuition. Whatever Zack's friends did Zack always admired with the wildest enthusiasm, and without an instant's previous consideration. Any knowledge of what he praised, or why he praised it, was a slight superfluity of which he never felt the want. If Madonna had been a great astronomer, and had shown him pages of mathematical calculations, he would have overwhelmed her with eulogies just as glibly as—by means of the finger alphabet—he was ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... is perfect. Just large enough to allow the grace of order in domestic circumstance; just that superfluity of intramural space, to lack which is to be less than at one's ease. The fabric is sound; the work in wood and plaster tells of a more leisurely and a more honest age than ours. The stairs do not creak under my step; I am waylaid by no unkindly draught; I can open or close a window without muscle-ache. ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... corn, and with the other were proffering the equivalent of a cotton bale. We are indeed about to demand corn, but the answer of the foreigner will be this,—"You want grain, for your population is increasing, your land has gone out of cultivation, and you cannot support yourselves. Well, we have a superfluity of grain which we can give you—in fact we have grown it for you—but then it is for us to select the equivalent. We shall not take those goods which you offer in exchange. Twelve years ago we set ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... again after a moment and went on with his work. It was imperative he should make progress with it; he could not afford to waste his time—which was money—because another person—Mary Ann to wit—had come into a superfluity of both. In spite of which the comic opera refused to advance; somehow he did not feel in the mood for gaiety; he threw down his pen in despair and disgust. But the idea of not being able to work rankled in him. Every hour seemed suddenly precious—now that he had resolved ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... a fine house, and a train of servants, music, and pictures? What silly prejudice, to connect dignity and happiness with high ceilings and damask canopies and golden superfluity!" ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... imply that all difficulties in the working of the electoral process will disappear of themselves as men approach to social equality. Those who are now rich will, they believe, have neither motive for corrupt electoral expenditure, nor superfluity of money to spend on it; while the women and the working men who are now unenfranchised or politically inactive, will bring into politics a ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... to find some one else on her side, and, as they went to bed, she said to Ethel, "Don't you wish we had some of this superfluity of the Riverses for ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... but little trade in San Carlos, for Chile itself possesses in superfluity all the productions of Chiloe, and the inhabitants of the island are so poor, and their wants so limited, that they require but few foreign articles. The port is therefore seldom visited by any trading vessel from Europe. Some ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... undertaking was almost as hard to face as a rewriting of the last volume would have been. Reardon had such superfluity of sensitiveness that, for his own part, he would far rather have gone hungry than ask for money not legally his due. To-day there was no choice. In the ordinary course of business it would be certainly a month before he heard the publishers' ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... activity; as a manufacturing country she had no equal, and in trade the rival she chiefly feared was still the German Hansa. Chaucer's "Merchant" characteristically wears a "Flandrish beaver hat;" and it is no accident that the scene of the "Pardoner's Tale," which begins with a description of "superfluity abominable," is laid in Flanders. In England, indeed the towns never came to domineer as they did in the Netherlands. Yet, since no trading country will long submit to be ruled by the landed interest only, so in proportion as the English towns, and London especially, grew richer, their voices ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... splendid for making one believe in." -possibility of race of bears being rendered aquatic through. -with the principle of divergence the keystone of "Origin." -production of thorns through. -tends to progression of organisation. -providential arrangement and superfluity of. -struggle between reversion, variability and. -Scott on. -slowness of action. -and sterility. -success of. -tails of mice a difficulty as regards. -Sir W. Thomson's misconception of. -uses of. -value of. -and variation. -variation of species sufficient for selection ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... sigh of content as the unwieldiness of the wounded member increased, and held his fat little fingers wide apart to accommodate the superfluity of rag. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... semi-transparent. Then take it from the board, and give it a bath in the solution. Lay it in a dish, and cover it entirely with the solution, letting it remain there for a few minutes; lift it out, and again lay it on the board face downwards, and with a small sponge dab off any superfluity of liquid. Pour that which is left in the ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... people suspecting me for want of a little seasonable candour on my part. Mrs. Michelson believed in me from first to last. This ladylike person (widow of a Protestant priest) overflowed with faith. Touched by such superfluity of simple confidence in a woman of her mature years, I opened the ample reservoirs of my nature and absorbed ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... of savagery, and there is a superfluity of both in the Soudan. I have no desperate wish so to describe the vileness of the surroundings of the correspondents' camp at Dakhala that even casual thinkers will sniff at it. The place was bad enough in all conscience, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... importance; and it is probable that most women could modify their views and practice, so as to come nearer to the Saviour's requirements. No woman has a right to put a stitch of ornament on any article of dress or furniture, or to provide one superfluity in food, until she is sure she can secure time for all her social, intellectual benevolent, and religions duties. If a woman will take the trouble to make such a calculation as this, she will usually find that she has time enough to perform all her ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... them to amuse themselves, and they do so with a will. That is all. It may be wrong for A and B and C to own superfluous wealth, but then the fact is there—that they have got it, and the community agree that they may expend the superfluity as they choose. The rich man's stud gives wholesome employment to myriads of decent folks in various stations of life—farmers, saddlers, blacksmiths, builders, corn dealers, road-makers, hedgers, farriers, grooms, and half a score other sorts ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... practice of using a Printer's Mark is an extremely commendable one, not merely as a relic of antiquity, but from an sthetic point of view. Nearly every tradesman of importance in this country has some sort of trade mark; but most printers agree in regarding it as a wholly unnecessary superfluity. As the few exceptions indicated in the last chapter prove that the fashion has an artistic as well as a utilitarian side, Ihope that it will again become more general as ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... evident that the thing which Amos layeth to the charge of those who were at ease in Zion, in the words which the prelate citeth against us, is, that they slept upon beds of ivory (such was their softness and superfluity), and swimmed in excessive pleasures upon their couches; and, incontinent, their filthy and muddy stream of carnal delicacy and excessive voluptuousness which defiled their beds, led him back to the unclean fountain out of which it issued, even their riotous pampering of themselves at table; ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... of wealth recognized by common consent advances, the possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing superfluity undergoes a refinement. The possession and maintenance of slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues still higher ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... word 'Hellenic' implies absolute truth of form, absolute truth of taste, grace and elegance. It means the selecting and simplifying of essentials into an ideal shape; and therefore it implies the absence of all superfluity, incongruousness, bombast, extravagance or purposelessness. The Parthenon and the statue of the grey-eyed goddess standing up in faultless symmetry against the clear blue sky of Attica; Plato's Apology of Socrates breathing ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... custom has varied, or that the author has, in my opinion, pronounced wrong. Short directions are sometimes given, where the sound of letters is irregular; and if they are sometimes omitted, defect in such minute observations will be more easily excused, than superfluity. ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... which the alleged doctrine of Toryism, whenever brought into practice, exposes its idol; and more particularly in enlightened and speculative times, when the minds of men are in quest of the right and the useful, and when a superfluity of power is one of those abuses, which they are least likely to overlook or tolerate. In such seasons, the experiment of the Tory might lead to all that he most deprecates, and the branches of the Prerogative, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan Vol 2 • Thomas Moore
... Apostle, without the soul is dead, so is faith dead if it produce not good fruit. And as the Pagan King refused baptism because he found something wrong after it, so our Lord, I fear, will refuse our baptism at the day of judgment if superfluity of faults be found ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various
... is capital. Staid people generally neglect it as a frivolity; utilitarians, as a costly superfluity. Those whom we designate as pleasure-seekers forage in this delicate domain like wild boars in a garden. No one seems to doubt the immense human interest attached to joy. It is a sacred flame that must be fed, and ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Framers of it thought they had founded it. Why should this new AEra be introducd with Entertainments expensive & tending to dissipate the Minds of the People? Does it become us to lead the People to such publick Diversions as promote Superfluity of Dress & Ornament, when it is as much as they can bear to support the Expense of cloathing a naked Army? Will Vanity & Levity ever be the Stability of Government, either in States, in Cities, or what, ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
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