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Intelligible   Listen
adjective
Intelligible  adj.  Capable of being understood or comprehended; as, an intelligible account or description; intelligible pronunciation, writing, etc. "The intelligible forms of ancient poets."
Synonyms: Comprehensible; perspicuous; plain; clear.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Intelligible" Quotes from Famous Books



... architecture, neither would suffer if severed from the other. But as a panorama of the unfolding of heaven in the soul of Levin, and of hell in the soul of Anna, the story of Kitty and Levin cannot be read apart from the story of Anna and Vronsky and still remain a unit, and still remain intelligible. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... respectable appearance, his evident earnestness, his accumulated mass of figures, his engagement of the Accountant, the tone of his voice, his general attitude, all conveyed impression that he was really saying something intelligible and useful. The few Members present honestly endeavoured to follow him; might have got a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, May 24, 1890 • Various

... intelligible to him. He found the bathroom, and from it came the sound of running water. He had the air of a ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson

... answer for several moments, and then a man stepped forward gesticulating fiercely as he commenced a tirade that was less than half intelligible. Larry checked him with a ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... number of situations suggested by the Scriptures being now either represented for the first time or seen in a totally new form. Well-known subjects are enriched with numerous subordinate figures, making the picture more truthful and more intelligible; as in the Flight into Egypt, where the Holy Family is accompanied by a servant, and three other figures are introduced to complete the composition. In the Raising of Lazarus, too, the disciples behind the Saviour on the one side ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... Greeks or Romans, had no eye for the picturesque; nay, that it was a sense utterly unawakened amongst them; and that the very conception of the picturesque, as of a thing distinct from the beautiful, is not once alluded to through the whole course of ancient literature, nor would it have been intelligible to any ancient critic; so that, whatever attraction for the eye might exist in the Rome of that day, there is little doubt that it was of a kind to be felt only by modern spectators. Mere dissatisfaction with its external appearance, which must have been a pretty general sentiment, argued, therefore, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey

... vocabulary would admit, placing particular emphasis upon the scathing soour ("pig") and the withering gudha ("fool")—epithets more dreaded by the Hindoos than the most profane oaths. The man jabbered something in his native tongue, about as intelligible to me as if spoken in the language of the Bechuanas of South Africa or in that of our Sioux Indians. Returning to the shigram, I quietly prepared myself to await the issue. But the effects of my furious philippic had been ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various

... I thus talked the thought went through my mind of how I naturally sought out the phrases of his own vocabulary in order to make myself intelligible to him. The situation was bestial, with sixteen of our complement already gone into the dark; and the terms I employed, perforce, were terms of bestiality. And I thought, also, of I who was thus compelled ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... another composer had to come from Leipsic and give to the world the works of a colleague who not only had genius of the purest water, but the gift of giving utterance to his musical ideas in a clear style, intelligible to the public. Schubert died in 1828, and in 1842 Schumann could still write to one of his contributors: "It is time, it seems to me, that some one should write something weighty in behalf of Schubert; doesn't this tempt you? True, his larger works are not yet in print. But his vocal ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... still less ask him to repeat the answer. His replies came back sharp and swift as a pelota from a cesta. West Indians not only must hear the question an average of three times but could seldom give the simplest information clearly enough to be intelligible, though ostensibly speaking English. A Spanish card one might fill out and be gone in less time than the negro could be roused from his racial torpor. Yet of the Spaniards on the Zone surely seventy per cent, were ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck

... continually streaming out. Here, they say, a satyr, such as statuaries and painters represent, was caught asleep, and brought before Sylla, where he was asked by several interpreters who he was, and, after much trouble, at last uttered nothing intelligible, but a harsh noise, something between the neighing of a horse and crying of a goat. Sylla, in dismay, and deprecating such an ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... that of the latest works of Beethoven. For a long time it was regarded as impossible to understand, and as not worth understanding, the production of a great artist whose faculties had been impaired by age. By degrees it has, by careful labor, become intelligible to us, and the conviction is growing that it is the deepest and most important work ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... matter of the relation of the general government to the several States the most important factor to be considered at the present moment is undoubtedly the personality of President Roosevelt, and any attempt to make intelligible the change which has come over the United States of recent years would be futile without some recognition of the part which he has played therein. Mr. Roosevelt has been credited with being the author of "a revival of the sense of civic virtue" in the ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson

... controlling organ of the body, one would expect that in these diseases the major pain whose purpose it is to govern general muscular action would be located in the head and there we find it. How curious and yet how intelligible is the fact that, though a headache may be induced by even a slight auto-intoxication, an abscess may exist within the brain without causing pain. When an obliterative endarteritis is threatening a leg with anemic gangrene, or when one lies too long in the same position on a hard bed, there is ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile

... body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... hopefully tuned over a wide band. The radio beam swept through, ghostly faint from dispersion, wave length doubled by Doppler effect, ragged with cosmic noise. An elaborate system of filters and amplifiers could make it no more than barely intelligible. ...
— The Burning Bridge • Poul William Anderson

... myself the meaning of this outburst of feeling. At first there was no intelligible answer. Then it became clear that the bond against which I had been fretting inwardly, night and day, had broken. To my surprise I discovered that my mind was freed from all mistiness. I could see everything relating ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... the high-priest, sternly rebuking his colleague. "We only present to short-sighted mortals the creative power of the divinity in a form perceptible and intelligible ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... not only be expressed in different form but that they may be differently grouped among themselves; that some among them may be dispensed with; and that other concepts, not considered worth expressing in English idiom, may be treated as absolutely indispensable to the intelligible rendering of the proposition. First as to a different method of handling such concepts as we have found expressed in the English sentence. If we turn to German, we find that in the equivalent sentence (Der Bauer toetet das Entelein) ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir

... if it could be termed such, was spoken in terms too contradictory to be intelligible. In one moment he professed his regret for the laurels which he had hoped to gather in Palestine, and implored his uncle not to alter his purpose, but permit him to attend his banner thither; and in the next sentence, he professed his readiness to defend the safety of Lady Eveline ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... fortune, however, the position of capitalists would hardly be improved by the existence of political courts serving a malevolent majority. Whatever may be in store for us, here at least, we reach an intelligible conclusion. Should Nature follow such a course as I have suggested, she will settle all our present perplexities as simply and as drastically as she is apt to settle human perturbations, and she will follow logically in ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams

... result of the efforts of Nestorian missionaries, who were the Protestant Christians of their age. Their success in China is another proof that the Christianity which is to be welcomed there must be presented in an intelligible and ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always ...
— Sophist • Plato

... language of his hands, down to the lightest accent of the fingers, is intelligible to the dullest of those concerned in its interpretation, and is telepathically despatched from the nearest to the farthest driver in the block. While the policeman stands there in the open space, no wheel or hoof stirs, and it does not ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... valiant Constables: one is the Inspector himself, the others are ordinary P.C.'s. And now I hope you shall hear some better language. I was obliged to be plain and intelligible in my manifesto, because there was so much matter-of-fact ground for remonstrance, and even chiding; but still, 'i faith, I am proud of my men, who, in point of fact, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various

... the reference to cerebral localization, allow to pass unrecorded the researches of Fritsch, Hitzig, and Ferrier, on account of the intimate, although only partial relation in which they stand to mental pathology—a relation promising to become more intelligible and therefore more important as the true meaning of the psycho-motor centres becomes better understood; for that we are only on the threshold of this inquiry must be evident, when men like Goltz, Munk, and other investigators call in question ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... had been omitted in the operative part of a grant, but, as it was clear from another part of the grant who he was, the deed was held to be valid. (2) Latent ambiguity is where the wording of an instrument is on the face of it clear and intelligible, but may, at the same time, apply equally to two different things or subject matters, as where a legacy is given "to my nephew, John,'' and the testor is shown to have two nephews of that name. A latent ambiguity may be explained by parol evidence, for, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... of Argyle and Breadalbane is perfectly intelligible. They were the heads of a great clan; and they had an opportunity of destroying a neighbouring clan with which they were at deadly feud. Breadalbane had received peculiar provocation. His estate had been repeatedly devastated; and he had ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... writings on the subject in the English language put together. His presentation of Puritanism and the Commonwealth and Oliver Cromwell first made the most elevating period of the national history in any way really intelligible. The Life of Frederick the Second, whatever judgment we may pass upon its morality, or even upon its place as a work of historic art, is a model of laborious and exhaustive narration of facts not before accessible ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... increased by many tones, in some cases almost an octave, and these singers are successful artists and sound vocalists; while others have sought to add but two or three tones to their range, and in vain. This is quite intelligible. As a rule, those of the former class have fallen into the hands of very good teachers, while yet young, have had excellent health and well-formed vocal organs, and been patient and attentive students. The acquisition has been gradual, and ...
— Voice Production in Singing and Speaking - Based on Scientific Principles (Fourth Edition, Revised and Enlarged) • Wesley Mills

... fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde

... so often that we cannot but feel that he protesteth too much. He acknowledges it, and explains that "paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief." Whether the explanation is or is not perfectly intelligible, it must occur to every one that a writer who finds it necessary to give so remarkable an explanation can hardly be justified in his astonishment when people of merely average intelligence confess themselves puzzled. His aversion to Walter ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... interference,—a striking one among many less striking. But, in fact, nothing in Mr. Lincoln's life requires, for its explanation, the notion of divine inspiration. His doings, one and all, were perfectly intelligible as the outcome of honesty of purpose, strong common sense, clear reasoning powers, and a singular sagacity in reading the popular mind. Intellectually speaking, a clear and vigorous thinking capacity was his chief trait. This sounds ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... spiritual substance cannot be defended, and the chief and fatal argument I urge against it is, that we cannot represent it to our minds, we cannot think it, and we cannot see in these words "spiritual substance" any intelligible idea; for that which is mental is limited to "that which is of the consciousness." So soon as we endeavour to go beyond the fact of having consciousness to imagine a particular state which must be mental, ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... wrote with wonderful Exactness, and puts in nothing, but what is to the purpose. I have nevertheless taken the Liberty sometimes, to enlarge his Thoughts, for what was understood in his time, by half a Word, would hardly be Intelligible now, unless some Pains was taken to ...
— The Preface to Aristotle's Art of Poetry • Andre Dacier

... came a glossary of Scotch expressions. We have referred to it as we went along, and found everything quite intelligible. As, however, we have no room to publish the glossary, we can only appeal to the indulgence of our readers. The story itself was written in a very clear, legible hand, and was enclosed in a wrapper labelled, "Arcadia Mixture. Strength and Aroma combined. Sold in Six-shilling cases. Special ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various

... all, you know. I cleared up every thing in the completest way. In fact, I made a full, ample, intelligible, and perfectly satisfactory explanation of the whole thing. I showed that it was all a mistake, you know—that I was humbugged by the mails, and all that sort of thing, you know. So she relented, and we made it ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille

... the policy, or no-policy, of doing nothing still prevailed over the counsels of friends, and the menaces of enemies. The picture Mr. Grenville gives of the weakness and incapacity of the Government suggests the only intelligible explanation of the conduct ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham

... thou with the phial of Paravid in thy vest, that endoweth, a single drop of it, the flowers, the herbage, the very stones and desert sands, with a tongue to articulate intelligible talk?' ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... seldom so simple and intelligible as in the signature of Andrew Both, referred to above. In most of the earlier monograms, the initial of the family name is smaller than that of the Christian name. It is so in that of Albert Duerer; and it is remarkable that, through all the modifications of his signature which ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various

... attract more purchasers by this alluring title. Kant in his Logic calls the extreme of explanation Pedantry and Gallantry. This last expression would be very characteristic in our times, since one attains the height of popularity now if he makes himself easily intelligible to ladies—a didactic triumph which one attains only by omitting everything that is profound or complicated, and saying only what exists already in the consciousness of every one, by depriving the subject dealt with ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... Beth's eyes rested on the lively, dark face beside her with peculiar pleasure, and that she listened with intense interest to an account of some exciting cricket match, though the phrases, 'caught off a tice', 'stumped off his ground', and 'the leg hit for three', were as intelligible to her as Sanskrit. She also fancied, having set her heart upon seeing it, that she saw a certain increase of gentleness in Laurie's manner, that he dropped his voice now and then, laughed less than usual, was a little absent-minded, and settled the afghan over Beth's feet with an assiduity that ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott

... with storm and sea that something of their keen force had entered into her, and she was kin with them. Each wind to her was intimate as a friend, each rock and cave familiar as her hearthstone; and the ungoverned ocean spoke in terms intelligible. So heavy was the surf that now and then the spray of some foiled wave broke on the roof, but she only nodded at that, as though the sea were calling her to come forth, tapping on her rooftree ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... roll of elm bark, and extending it on the ground, drew forth his scalping knife, and with the point presently edged upon the back a plan of the country, its hills, woods, rivers, morasses, and roads—a plan which, if not as neat, was fully as intelligible as if a surveyor had prepared it. Pleased with this unexpected talent in Tecumseh, with his defeat of the Americans near Brownstown, and with his having, by his characteristic boldness, induced the Indians, not of his own tribe, to cross the river prior to the embarkation of the white troops, Major-General ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... before his death, discovered by mere accident that he was enrolled as a pensioner to a large amount on the civil list of almost every native prince in Upper India, from the emperor of Delhi downwards—his principal moonshee, or native secretary, having thrown out intelligible hints, as though from his master, that such douceurs would not be without their use in securing his powerful interest at Calcutta—the moonshee himself quietly pocketing the proceeds. This was certainly an ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... of amusing them is by taking vessels of gold, and brass, and silver, and the like, and mingling them, or distributing them without mingling. As I was saying, they adapt to their amusement the numbers in common use, and in this way make more intelligible to their pupils the arrangements and movements of armies and expeditions, and in the management of a household they make people more useful to themselves, and wide-awake." This, together with the well known expectation of the Egyptians to be judged after death according ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... there is most to gain and least to lose by recognizing a principle of authority. The first object and one of the principal advantages of religions, is to furnish to each of these fundamental questions a solution which is at once clear, precise, intelligible to the mass of mankind, and lasting. There are religions which are very false and very absurd; but it may be affirmed, that any religion which remains within the circle I have just traced, without aspiring to go ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... single moment, diverted his attention; and then he turned, suddenly, not to say fiercely, towards her companion. It is not necessary to repeat the description of the stranger's person, in order to render the change, which instantly occurred in the countenance of Ludlow, intelligible to the reader. His eye, at first, refused to believe there was no other present; and when it had, again and again, searched the whole apartment, it returned to the face and form of the dealer in contraband, with an ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper

... Soc.' ut supra pages 153, 308.) also became darker, and resembled in colouring the wild B. huttoni. On this view of the tiger-like marks being due to reversion, the persistency with which they are transmitted is intelligible. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... hand at a big Symphony (in C major); in this work I showed what I had learnt by using the influence of my study of Beethoven and Mozart towards the achievement of a really pleasant and intelligible work, in which the fugue was again present at the end, while the themes of the various movements were so constructed that they could ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... tree-trunks, and umbrellas (on account of the stretching-up which might be compared to an erection! all elongated and sharp weapons, knives, daggers, and pikes, are intended to represent the male member. A frequent, not very intelligible, symbol for the same is a nail-file (on account of the rubbing and scraping?). Little cases, boxes, caskets, closets, and stoves correspond to the female part. The symbolism of lock and key has been very gracefully employed by Uhland in his song about the ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... prefers this more humane saying, Misereor super turbam. As for me, I have no artistic authority, but from out the multitude where I live, I have the right to raise my cry to those who have been given talents, and say to them: Labor for men whom the world forgets, make yourselves intelligible to the humble, so shall you accomplish a work of emancipation and peace; so shall you open again the springs whence those masters drew, whose works have defied the ages because they knew how to clothe genius ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... which an Englishman can easily understand, but which may appear extravagant to the modern American. The Old South Meeting-House, to give a single instance, is an object of simple-hearted veneration to the people of Boston, and the veneration is easily intelligible. For there is scarcely an episode in Boston's history that is not connected, in the popular imagination, with the Old South Meeting-House. It stands on the site of John Winthrop's garden; it is rich in memories of Cotton and Increase Mather. Within its ancient walls was Benjamin Franklin christened, ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... a little out of the common Road; and so I shall make no Apology for publishing such Receipts as I am sure are good. If I do not use proper Terms in some of my Receipts in Cookery, I have at least put my Receipts into such a Method, as I suppose will make them intelligible, and what any one may understand: But I must take notice before I conclude, that the meaning of publishing this, is to instruct those who may not have had opportunity of observing or collecting so much as I have done, and not any way ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley

... not of excusing, but of rendering intelligible, the following scenes, that it is deemed necessary to bring out into the light some striking peculiarities in the truly original character of Miss ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue

... published materials; and have therefore merely collected, from the sources nearest at hand, such information as appeared absolutely necessary to render the series of Plates now published by the Arundel Society intelligible and interesting to those among its Members who have not devoted much time to the examination of mediaeval works. I have prefixed a few remarks on the relation of the art of Giotto to former and subsequent efforts; which I hope may be useful in preventing ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin

... resist obeying this command, which no one had given, which was heard by no single ear, yet was intelligible to every heart—who ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach

... again remind ourselves that only life in harmony with the point of view of the Scriptures and only an interest in the same human problems that engross the attention of spiritual writers can avail us for vital interpretation of the teachings concerning the Divine, or make intelligible to us the hold of the Scriptures on the life of the world. The Bible is conceived in a spirit of respect for men. Only those who enter into that same spirit can hope to make ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell

... "originality" one does not mean that Tennyson discovered the existence of the ultimate problems. But at Cambridge (1828-1830) he had voted "No" in answer to the question discussed by "the Apostles," "Is an intelligible [intelligent?] First Cause deducible from the phenomena of the universe?" {9} He had also propounded the theory that "the development of the human body might possibly be traced from the radiated vermicular molluscous ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... restore, where good taste or good sense required it, the lost text of the contemporary quartos. It is largely owing to a due co-ordination of the results of the efforts of the eighteenth-century editors by their successors in the present century that Shakespeare's work has become intelligible to general readers unversed in textual criticism, and has won from them the ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... account, because the most consistent and intelligible, of the Greek arithmetic, is that by Delambre, affixed to ...
— Notes and Queries 1850.04.06 • Various

... theatres; the finer tones of passion cannot be discriminated, nor the finer movements of the countenance perceived from the front, hardly from the middle of the house. Authors, therefore, substitute what is here called broad farce for genuine comedy; their jests are made intelligible by grimace, or by that sort of mechanical wit which can be seen; comedy is made up of trick, and tragedy of processions, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various

... looked at her mother, smiled and gurgled something which was intelligible to mother-ears, and the wife's hand slipped into the husband's, and the baby was named ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll

... naturalists, it is very reasonable to inquire into the nature and scope of those laws. I am not at all prepared at present to attempt anything like a digest of them. That would require a lifetime; and no small part of the task, after marshalling the evidence, would be to agree upon terms which would be intelligible to ourselves and yet not misleading. To take polity alone, are we to understand that any kind of Government resembling that of human societies obtains among them? When we talk of Queens or Kings of the Fairies, of Oberon and Titania, for example, are we using a rough translation of ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... words, these facts will have to be regarded as altogether miraculous. There are good reasons for admitting this view, when it is considered, first, that the information which this portion of Scripture gives equally concerns all of every age, and in order that it might be intelligible to all, it was necessary that in the infancy of the world it should be conveyed by objective representation; and, again, that various instances are met with in the Bible of analogous {11} teaching of essential doctrine ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis

... you General Meng-tien, with your great armies and find them! He did tremendous things, and all the while was thus dreaming wildly. From the business of state he would seize hours at intervals to lecture to his courtiers on Tao;—I think not in a way that would have been intelligible to Laotse or Chwangtse. Those who yawned were ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris

... evening he appeared to revive a little. The Abbe Jelowicki had never left him. Hardly had he recovered the power of speech, than he requested him to recite with him the prayers and litanies for the dying. He was able to accompany the Abbe in an audible and intelligible voice. From this moment until his death, he held his head constantly supported upon the shoulder of M. Gutman, who, during the whole course of this sickness, had devoted his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... must inevitably secure their recurrence. This continued battle of the brain with the ignobler organs goes far to explain, if it may not excuse, much of the less admirable side of his character. His irritability, his artifice, his meannesses even, are more intelligible in the case of a man habitually racked with pain, and morbidly conscious of his physical shortcomings, than they would be in the case of those "whom God has made full-limbed and tall;" and, in the noble teaching of Arthur's court, his infirmities should entitle ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... striking one another's breast in turn, to clinch arguments. Three others, with their heads in a bunch, spoke all together with a confidential air, and at the top of their voices. It was a stormy chaos of speech where intelligible fragments tossing, struck the ear. One could hear:—"In the last ship"—"Who cares? Try it on any one of ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... speech. He will 'carry them over the stream;' he will answer for them when the argument is beyond their comprehension; he is afraid of their ignorance of mathematics, and thinks that gymnastic is likely to be more intelligible to them;—he has repeated his words several times, and yet they cannot understand him. The subject did not properly take the form of dialogue, and also the literary vigour of Plato had passed away. The old men ...
— Laws • Plato

... bare nod, just intelligible, Mr. Cannon signified that the guess would do; and still meditating aloud in his small, grand ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... poetic," admitted Julius, regarding the old doctor with interest, "and therefore it is intelligible. The spirit of life is electric and elective, and it is 'imponderable:' it can neither be weighed nor measured! It flows and thrills in the nerves of men and women, animals and plants, throughout the whole of Nature! It connects the whole round of the Cosmos by one glowing, teasing, agonising ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban

... with it. Without it I was able to live quite contentedly for ten years . . . everything in my life was evenly distributed, and there was no room for religion. Then came a time when everything grew intelligible; there were no more secrets in life, but life itself had ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... Bruyere's Fault does not consist in having put Notes to his Translation, but rather in not having put enough. When a Translator of an antient Author intends to preserve the peculiar Character of the Original, Notes become absolutely necessary to render the Translation intelligible to a modern Reader. The Learn'd may pass them over; and those, for whom Explanatory Notes are chiefly designed, must not think it too much Trouble, to bestow a second Reading on the Text, after they have ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally

... the end of a log when a man, who had been working twelve hours in a packing-house, came out to smoke, after his supper. He had not washed himself. His bloody shirt stuck to his skin—he was haggard, pale; and we dropped naturally into conversation. In language intelligible to him I asked him what ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine

... glass fronts and strong locks and therein store postage-stamps, bits of old silks, autographs and books that are very precious only when their leaves are uncut; and so I will here endeavor to explain. At the same time I despair of making my words intelligible to any but those who are collectors, or mayhap to those others who ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... or like footsteps. There was hardly a chance that there could be any other human beings there besides ourselves. It recalled to me the Indian's dread of skookums (spirits) in the deep woods. To him, the mere flutter of a leaf had a meaning; the sighing of the wind was intelligible language. So many generations of Indians had crossed that trail, and so few white people, I felt as if some subtile aroma of Indian spirit must linger still about the place, and steal into our thoughts. Occasionally an owl stirred in the thicket beside us, or we caught a glimpse of the mottled ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... for a mere erratic comet— sans substance, or unformed nebulae hanging like a splotch of semi-luminous vapor in a great void. Year by year the voice of Carlyle rings clearer and clearer from the "Eternal Silence." And as we listen with rapt attention to the music of the spheres becoming audible, intelligible to our dull ear—the Waterloo and Lisbon earthquakes, the Revolutions and the Warring Religions, all the glory and shame, the wild loves and bitter hatreds of humanity—even Birth and Death—but minor notes ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... woman's." She submits quite decently in public, but immediately after the ceremony writes a letter[62] to her husband (whose character she has partly, though imperfectly, gauged) requesting permission to retire to the canoness till she is a little older, under a covert but quite clearly intelligible threat of suicide in case of refusal. There are of course difficulties, but the count, like a man and a gentleman, consents at once; the father, bon gre mal gre, has to do so, and the King, a tyrant who has had his way, gives a sulky and qualified acquiescence. What follows need only be very ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... his hair, smiled with great self-satisfaction, and looked up in the reader's face with the air of a man who had made up his mind to recollect every word he heard. The first two or three lines were intelligible enough; but then the technicalities began, and the little man began to look rather dubious. Then came a whole string of complicated trusts, and he was regularly at sea. As the reader proceeded, it was quite apparent that it was a hopeless case, and the little man, with his mouth ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... Parliament retains an effective or practically unlimited supremacy, the provision is futile and needless. What necessity is there for enacting that a sovereign Parliament, which institutes, may alter a scheme of taxation? But the provision is intelligible enough on one supposition, and on one supposition only. It is both intelligible and in place if Parliament gives up the real right of governing Ireland and occupies towards what is now a part of the United Kingdom the position, or something very like the position, ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... particularly intelligible, but if the Phoenix operator had been talking over the 'phone to me he couldn't have ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... not more of a body, than our present one. . . . Is this hope, to me at once inconceivable and contradictory, palpable and valuable enough to you to send you to that Italian Avernus, to get it made a little more certain? If so, I despair of your making your meaning intelligible to a poor fellow wallowing, like me, in the Hylic Borboros—or whatever else you may choose to call the unfortunate fact of being flesh and blood. . . . ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley

... spiritual, rational, psychic and physical planes of existence. It is by means of symbols that the spiritual intelligences signal themselves to our minds, and the most exalted vision is, as an expression of intelligence, only intelligible by reason of its symbolism. Something more may be said in regard to the interpretation of symbols which may possibly be of use to those who have made no special study of the subject, and this may conveniently form the ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... and took their revenge for the subjection of old times by systematically demanding the opposite to what they had. They reeled a little; the miracle of the voting-paper had gone to their heads. It was an intelligible transition; the feeling of responsibility would get hold of ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... Maria's delicate little face and neck became suffused with pink. Her reply was not as loud nor more intelligible than the murmur of the ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... obscure satirical allusions contained in this poem. Doubtless the joke was perfectly intelligible to the habitues of contemporary St. Petersburg society. Viazemski of course is the ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... him, and rode I know not whither; but in that night he was assassinated, and thrown into the river. The servant, after having been dismissed, was also assaulted and mortally wounded; and although he was attended with great care, yet such was his situation, that he could give no intelligible account of what had befallen his master. In the morning, the duke not having returned to the palace, his servants began to be alarmed; and one of them informed the pontiff of the evening excursion of his sons, and that the ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... "an artificial hybrid from Odont. vexillarium x Odont. Roezlii." That's a staggerer. But Dend. phalaenopsis Schroderae Dellense is a still bigger horticultural swaggerer. O. Coradenei! likewise O. Crispum! I only wish that your Godmother, Flora, Would insist upon shorter and more intelligible names for her modern offspring. By bright Aurora, I can't go on worshipping at your floral shrine if the ritual is polyglot gibberish, and what's more, I won't, Ma'am. In the word (queerly spelt) of which you seem very fond, I earnestly say, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, June 18, 1892 • Various

... was uttered. He saw his beloved oxen standing with bowed heads by the water trough, and he tried to make the soldier understand that he had come for those oxen, which belonged to him. On this point Pierre spoke very emphatically, as if to make his French more intelligible to the Englishman. But his struggles were all in vain. The soldier looked first puzzled, then vacuously wise; then he knit his brows and looked at the oxen. Finally he laughed, took Pierre by the elbow, and led him toward one of the tents. At this moment a pleasant-faced young officer ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts

... writer's ever shifting—not to say changing—point of view. An utterly ignorant or utterly lazy man, if possessed of a little ingenuity, can with the help of a dictionary and grammar give a word-for-word rendering, whether intelligible or not, and print 'Translation' on his title-page. On the other hand it is a melancholy spectacle to see men of high ability and undoubted scholarship toil and struggle at translation under a needless restriction to literality, as in intellectual handcuffs and fetters, when they might ...
— Weymouth New Testament in Modern Speech, Preface and Introductions - Third Edition 1913 • R F Weymouth

... shapes, associations of colour, divorced from their habitual significance. It was as though he looked at the written characters of a language unknown to him, observing the form of them, but attaching no intelligible meaning to that form. And so it happened that those many superimposed tiers of boxes were to him as the waxen cells of a gigantic honeycomb, against the angular darknesses of which little figures, seen to the waist, took the light—the blond face, neck ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... unveiled face and the light of God shining clear from it. Christianity is, and Christian teachers ought to be, the opposite of all this. It has, and they are to have, no esoteric doctrines, no hints where plain speech is possible, no reserve, no use of symbols and ceremonies to overlay truth, but an intelligible revelation in words and deeds, to men's understandings. It and they are plentifully to declare the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... if hypnotized by terror, her eyes wide open and fixed upon the door of the workshop. The noise still increases; there is a revolver shot, then a silence. Finally the voice of Monsieur Feliat is heard speaking, though the words are not intelligible, and a shout of men's voices. Then Monsieur ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux

... luminous circle round the head to import a Saint or holy person. It is now become a part of the symbolic language of painting, and it is much to be wished that this kind of hieroglyphic character was more frequent in that art; as it is much wanted to render historic pictures both more intelligible, and more sublime; and why should not painting as well as poetry express itself in metaphor, or in indistinct allegory? A truly great modern painter lately endeavoured to enlarge the sphere of pictorial language, by putting a demon behind the pillow of a wicked man on his death bed. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... reason about it at all. She only answered in a troubled sort of way that she thought every body, somehow or other, might in time find enough to do—to be happy in doing—and she was trying to put her meaning into more connected and intelligible form, when, greatly to her relief, Malcom entered ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... series of civil commotions. Those two great, parties, known by the uncouth names of Hook and Kabbeljaw, come into existence, dividing noble against noble, city against city, father against son, for some hundred and fifty years, without foundation upon any abstract or intelligible principle. It may be observed, however, that, in the sequel, and as a general rule, the Kabbeljaw, or cod-fish party, represented the city or municipal faction, while the Hooks (fish-hooks), that were to catch and control them, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... which poured upon him when his identity became apparent, Mok could make no intelligible answer. He did not possess English enough for that. But Cheditafa was quickly summoned, and he explained everything. He explained it once, twice, three times, and then he and Mok were sent away, and told to go to bed, ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton

... small grace; MS. sale grace.—The allusion in the following line to the notorious "dark lights" makes the MS. reading certain.—Lower down for "and other of thy blindnesses" the MS. gives "another": neither reading is intelligible. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... the sky, an enemy to filial affection so destructive as slavery. It had made my brothers and sisters strangers to me; it converted the mother that bore me, into a myth; it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass

... back. This time it was intelligible, for it was a lantern in the hand of a young man of about thirty. His face was open and smiling. He wore his hair rather long for an American, and it ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... this and the remaining part of the discourse may be intelligible, to explain the methods by which thieves became the better for thieving where they did not steal ready money; and of this we will speak in the clearest and most concise manner that ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... Indiana had made to her own history, though conveyed in broken and hardly intelligible language, had awakened feelings of deep interest for her in the breasts of her faithful friends. Many months after this she related to her wondering auditors the fearful story of the massacre of her kindred, which I will now relate, ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill

... calumny which was circulated charging Rufinus with having stirred up the Visigoths. For such a supposition, too, we might find support in the circumstance that the estates of Rufinus were spared by the soldiers of Alaric; it would be intelligible that Stilicho suggested the plan in order to bring odium upon Rufinus. To such a conjecture, finally, certain other circumstances, soon to be related, point: but it remains nothing more than ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... unready wooer both endures and inflicts agonies of mind if he tries to make a verbal offer. He had {48} much better write, for then he will at least be intelligible. The vacillating woman has no right to let a man propose to her and then accept him just because she cannot make up her mind to tell him the truth. She may mean to be kind, but she only causes unnecessary pain. No woman is justified in keeping a man ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux

... sight, however, such a lack of specification appears wofully incompatible with any intelligible transmission of ideas. So communistic a want of discrimination between the meum and the tuum—to say nothing of the claims of a possible third party—would seem to be as fatal to the interchange of thoughts as it proves destructive ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell

... are so simple and intelligible as this is: unfortunately most of them are mystical and hard ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... more human and emotional element than exists in the historical art of earlier centuries. In a word, nineteenth-century art is sympathetic, and has found inspiration in all countries and classes and has so treated its subjects as to be intelligible to all, from the favored children for whom Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, and many others have spent their delightful talents, to men and women of all varieties of individual tastes and of all degrees of ability to comprehend and ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement

... my burden, and sat me down to read. As I turned over page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible. I was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems, seemed to disappear. The effect was partially illusory in one sense, in ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... of this typical Frenchman, was clearness the genius of the national speech. Still, Montaigne, for example, was sometimes obscure; and even the tragedist Corneille wrote here and there what his commentator, Voltaire, declared to be hardly intelligible. So, too, Rabelais, coarsest of humorists, offending decorum in various ways, offended it most of all exactly in that article of taste, as distinguished from morals, which, with first-rate French authors in general, is so capital a point of ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... The intelligible reader may easily guess that we finished our dinner as quickly as we could, and we put on our outers, sympathising with Dicky and Dora, who, owing to boots, were out of it, and we went into the garden. There are five steps down to that door. They were red brick when they began, but ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... northern nations of Europe. The object of this book is to teach readers who are not yet familiar with the writers of Greece and Rome, or the ballads or legends of the Scandinavians, enough of the stories which form what is called their mythology, to make those allusions intelligible which one meets every day, even in the authors ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR

... chief delight in the hope that the completed book would gratify a venerable friend, to whose inspiration my first idea of the work was due, and that I might be allowed to place his honored name upon this page. The ambition was at once lofty and intelligible. While he was the foremost citizen of New York State, we of the Mohawk Valley thought of him as peculiarly our own. Although born elsewhere, his whole adult life was spent among us, and he led all others in his love for the Valley, his pride in its noble history, ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic

... he preached last Sunday, Mr. Hodder, for the first time in my life, made Christianity intelligible to me. I want him to know it. And there are other men and women in that congregation who feel as I do. Gentlemen, there is nothing I would not give to have had Christianity put before me in that simple and inspiring way when I was a boy. And in my opinion ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... half-past seven in the morning. It met again on the 14th, when Pitt moved for leave to bring in a new bill, for the better government and management of the affairs of the East India Company. In the previous debates Pitt had declared that he had accepted office upon one single, plain, intelligible principle, by which he desired to stand or fall with the people; namely, to save the country from Fox's India Bill, which threatened destruction to its liberties. His own bill, which he explained at great length, was in its turn severely criticised by Fox. No opposition, however, was made ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... minutes of the questions proposed, with the answers returned. A great number of questions were proposed, which Vincent Zuccaro answered with a facility that excited general admiration. We shall only extract two of the most simple, as some of the questions would be hardly intelligible to general readers: ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 397, Saturday, November 7, 1829. • Various

... fled in all directions. And some of them went so far as to shut their eyes. And then, O king at the gate of the kitchen, the princess of Panchala saw Bhimasena staying, like an infuriate elephant of gigantic proportions. And looking upon him with wonder-expanded eyes, Draupadi, by means of words intelligible to them alone, said, 'I bow unto that prince of the Gandharvas, who hath rescued me.' At these words of her, Bhima said, 'Hearing these words of hers in obedience to whom those persons were hitherto living in the city, they will henceforth range ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... sorts of work are really equally entitled to the designation of embroidery, yet for the sake of making our hints as intelligible as possible, we will adopt the popular terms, and confine our present remarks to that sort of embroidery which is not executed ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... benignly, as though rather tickled with that joke, and was understood by the boys to protest that she had eaten more than enough, though her squeak had not yet become intelligible to them. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... answered, 'What, is there no justice when the sun is down?' And when I entreat my questioner to tell me his own opinion, he replies, that justice is fire in the abstract, or heat in the abstract; which is not very intelligible. Others laugh at such notions, and say with Anaxagoras, that justice is the ordering mind. 'I think that some one must have told you this.' And not the rest? Let me proceed then, in the hope of proving to you my originality. ...
— Cratylus • Plato

... and we have "The Progresse of Warre," in a series, as part of a frieze for his Temple of Peace. This is most clear—for he who runs may read; yet, on a second view, we doubt that—for we see, what we did not at first see, writing under each tablet that is by no means intelligible. Having, with Mr Bell, seen an end of the battle, it is fit time, with Mr Herbert, to discuss "The Day after the Battle." "Next day did many widows come"— that verse of Chevy Chase is the subject. The slaughtered knight, the widow, and the dog, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various

... the Mosaic books of any reference to a future life is only intelligible by the prominence into which this truth is brought. Nothing could have been more familiar to the Hebrews of the Exodus than the doctrine of immortality. The continued existence of the soul, the judgment after death, the rewards and punishments of the future state, were the constant subjects ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... gallery! For there he was, still at work on his picture. The artist is the only really happy man. He need fear no exile; every land is his home. No foreign tongue can confuse him; his thoughts find a medium of expression intelligible to all. Wars have no terror for him; he paints them, but takes no part in them. Storms and tempests, by land or sea, speak to him not of danger, but are merely the symbols of nature's ever-varying moods. Popular insurrections furnish his canvas with picturesque groupings ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai

... is taken, and, in simple terms, intelligible to nearly every capacity, attention is called to its thousand fibres, its construction, growth, perfume, colour, delicacy of texture, loveliness, and to the wonders associated with its birth, death, ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... peculiar tunes,—the authorship of which is attributed to him. In general, his productions were upon subjects of local and temporary interest, and would consequently require a bulk of explanatory notes to render them interesting or intelligible to the world at large. A considerable proportion of the remainder are Anacreontics; though, in their construction, Hugh Crombie imitated neither the Teian nor any other bard. These latter have generally a coarseness and sensuality intolerable to minds even of no ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... set as the aim of human endeavor, an intelligible end, and a fairly definite one. Everyone has some notion of what happiness means, and is not without ideas touching the way to seek his own happiness, or to contribute to that ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... I know not if it be worth while to mention that the hills and glens on which my charge pastured at this period formed a portion of what in ancient times was termed the Forest of Rankleburn. The names of places in the district, though there were no other more intelligible traditions, might serve to shew that it is a range of country to which both kings and nobles had resorted. If from morning to night I was away far from the homes of living men, I was not so in regard to those of the dead. Where a lesser stream ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only brace himself to the prospect by the determination to take the English rural Sunday as the subject of severe scientific investigation. He would ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... justified the subsequent verdict of the Coroner's jury that Hunter committed suicide in a fit of temporary insanity, for they were covered with a lot of meaningless scribbling, the words wrongly spelt and having no intelligible connection with each other. There was one sum that he had evidently tried repeatedly to do correctly, but which came wrong in a different way every time. The fact that he had the razor in his possession seemed to point to his having premeditated the act, but ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... definite. The very badness of his style enables Cassiodorus to envelop his meaning in a cloud of words from which the Quaestor of Anastasius perhaps found it as hard to extract a definite meaning then, as a perplexed translator finds it hard to render it into intelligible English now. It is certainly difficult to acquit Cassiodorus of the charge of a deficient sense of humour, when we find him putting into the mouth of his master, who had so often marched up and down through Thrace, ravaging and burning, these solemn ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin

... pamphlets generally, and, being occupied with a great number of personal and particular matters, requires either much intimacy with the period or elaborate and probably tedious comparison and elucidation, to make it intelligible. No such drawback attaches to the almost more famous Drapier's Letters, of which I give the first and second. They were written at the very zenith of their author's marvellous powers, and at the time when his saeva ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury

... this collection appeared either in the Indian Antiquary, the Calcutta Review, or the Legends of the Punjab. They were then in the form of literal translations, in many cases uncouth or even unpresentable to ears polite, in all scarcely intelligible to the untravelled English reader; for it must be remembered that, with the exception of the Adventures of Raja Rasâlu, all these stories are strictly folk-tales passing current among a people who can neither read nor ...
— Tales Of The Punjab • Flora Annie Steel

... again, and took only parchments by the adventure. Practically there was no private Competitor of moment to Brandenburg, except this Wolfgang Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg; he alone having clutched hold.—But we hasten to SYMPTOM THIRD, which particularly concerns us, and will be intelligible now ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle

... Falco's "Antichita della Sicilia," Walpole's "Ansayrii," and Canon Tristram's "Land of Israel." The difficulty has been to select from these copious stores the most salient and noteworthy facts, and to marshal them in such a form as would make them readily intelligible to the ordinary English reader. How far he has succeeded in doing this he must leave the public to judge. In making his bow to them as a "Reader" and Writer "of Histories,"[04] he has to thank them for a degree of favour which has given a ready sale to ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... Lovely Jenny's Garland, as given with emendations by Professor Child. There is also a curiously perverted version in Herd's manuscript, in which the verses require rearrangement before becoming intelligible. ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick

... arrived. She was a charming woman, every one said so everywhere; and she charmed every one. In spite of this, or, perhaps, because of this, since Fate is so perverse, she cared only for one man, and he was Major Vansuythen. Had she been plain or stupid, this matter would have been intelligible to Kashima. But she was a fair woman, with very still gray eyes, the colour of a lake just before the light of the sun touches it. No man who had seen those eyes could, later on, explain what fashion of woman she was to look upon. The eyes dazzled him. Her own sex said ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling

... but the sounds were all "goos" and "ahs" without any resemblance to words. Bobby may have imagined he was talking, but he was not very intelligible. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne

... hard words of his native tongue. Indeed, he quotes so much Greek and Latin, and talks so finely, that it is only to be regretted that he does not now and then come down from his stilts in order to gratify himself with a little intelligible English and his readers with some homely grammar. It will be our painful duty to submit to the reader's notice a specimen or two of Mr. Jones' peculiar style, which, together with the profound simplicity of his original remarks, make up as curious a production as it has ever fallen to ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various



Words linked to "Intelligible" :   comprehensible, understandable, intelligibility, comprehendible, apprehensible, graspable, perceivable



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