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Narrowness   /nˈɛroʊnəs/   Listen
Narrowness

noun
1.
The property of being narrow; having little width.
2.
An inclination to criticize opposing opinions or shocking behavior.  Synonym: narrow-mindedness.
3.
A restriction of range or scope.  "The attraction of the book is precisely its narrowness of focus" , "Frustrated by the narrowness of people's horizons"
4.
A small margin.  Synonyms: narrow margin, slimness.  "The landslide he had in the electoral college obscured the narrowness of a victory based on just 43% of the popular vote"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Narrowness" Quotes from Famous Books



... the fragmentary utterances of stupor patients, we are surprised by the narrowness and uniformity of the ideational content. It seems to be confined to thoughts of death or closely related conceptions. Thirty-five out of thirty-six consecutive cases at one time or another referred literally to death. It is commonest during the onset, as all but five of these patients ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch

... their blood, and all youth's furies hot upon them. And surely in that other summons there was, besides, the thrill of romance, such as the young love. There was the trumpeting to high adventure. Few there were to touch, few to remember, even the saintliest life lived in a noble narrowness, a noble silence. But the word of truth, spoken from no matter what obscurity, will rise and ring round the world, and remain forever in the pattern of men's thought. Here, indeed, was a 'bliss ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... Confucius springs, first of all, from the narrowness and definiteness of his doctrine. He was no transcendentalist, and never meddled with supramundane things. His teaching was of the earth, earthy; it dealt entirely with the common relations of life, and the Golden Rule he must necessarily have stumbled upon, as the ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... to think of the power that strong conviction combined with extreme narrowness of mind gives a man possessing prestige. It is none the less necessary that these conditions should be satisfied for a man to ignore obstacles and display strength of will in a high measure. Crowds instinctively recognise in ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... difference that passes between this naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish; and he goes somewhat further than I should go in condemning it. "The French naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life." . . . It is characterized by sadness and narrowness. The prototype of this literature is the 'Madame Bovary' of Flaubert. I am an admirer of this novelist, and especially of this novel; but often in thinking of it I have said, How dreary would literature be if it were no more than this! There is something antipathetic ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... mere accident. A horrible sense of the unreality of everything that surrounded her began to oppress Susan. She saw the poisoned undercurrent of this glittering and exquisite existence, the selfishness, the cruelties, the narrowness. She saw its fundamental insincerity. In a world where wrongs were to be righted, and ignorance enlightened, and childhood sheltered and trained, she began to think it strange that strong, and young, and wealthy men and women should be content to waste enormous sums of money ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... them made a combined attack on Walthar, but because of the narrowness of the path they could not come at him with any better success than could one single warrior, and they too were put ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... punishment, if inflicted by a teacher's hand; they take the part of their child against legal authority; but, observe, this does not prevent them from laying their own hands heavily on their children. The same obstinate ignorance and narrowness that are exhibited without exist within also. Folly is folly, abroad or at home. A man does not play the fool out-doors and act the sage in the house. When the poor child becomes obnoxious, the same unreasoning rage falls ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... in the course of the meal, showed himself as superior to narrowness of view in the matter of food-stuffs as in other matters. The meal went merrily. Mr. Ancrum dropped his half-sarcastic tone, and food, warmth, and talk loosened the lad's fibres, and made him more and more human, handsome, and attractive. Soon his old friend knew all that he wanted to know,—the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Keranus, knowing in the spirit how useful this would be against future perils of the sea. For in the part of the sea which bears towards the monastery of I, there is a very great danger to those who cross, partly because of the vehemence of the currents, and partly because of the narrowness of the sea; so that ships are whirled round and driven in a circle, and thus are often sunk. For it is rightly compared to Scylla and Charybdis; I mean that by its grave and unmitigated dangerousness, evil is there the lot of sailors. When they were coming to this strait, they ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous

... be the human individual or the social mass, may render immense service to the world, but it never will be the only service necessary, and, if pursued to the exclusion of all other investigations, such study is likely to produce an aggravated narrowness of vision. Narrow vision is certain to eventuate ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... which he believed to be sincere, led him to trust too much to the undeserving. This exposed him to misrepresentation. He felt himself obliged to resign. The care of a rising family, and the narrowness of his fortune, made it a duty to return to his profession for their support. But tho he was compelled to abandon public life, never, no, never for a moment did he abandon the public service. He never lost ...
— Model Speeches for Practise • Grenville Kleiser

... therefrom being impossible. Then I blamed myself for having thus risked my life, and said, "If this passage grow any straiter, the raft will hardly pass, and I cannot turn back; so I shall inevitably perish miserably in this place." And I threw myself down upon my face on the raft, by reason of the narrowness of the channel, whilst the stream ceased not to carry me along, knowing not night from day, for the excess of the gloom which encompassed me about and my terror and concern for myself lest I should perish. And in such condition my course continued down ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... sky was rainy and dark, and completed the desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined the Sorgues and entered a little green valley running up into the mountain. The narrowness of the entrance entirely shut out the wind, and, except the rolling of the waters over their pebbly bed, all was still and lonely and beautiful. The sides of the dell were covered with olive trees, and a narrow strip of emerald ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... all the difference between religious zeal and the quiet contemplation of the beautiful. Both belong to the whole world, Shakespeare because his characters, humor, art, reflections, are universal in their validity and their appeal. Wherever he is read he becomes the spokesman against narrowness, dogmatism, and intolerance. To translate Shakespeare, he points out, is difficult because of the archaic language, the obscure allusions, and the intense originality of the expression. Shakespeare, indeed, is as much the creator as the user ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud

... objection is to the narrowness attributed in the tale to the river St. Clair. This was done in the license usually accorded to a writer of fiction, in order to give greater effect to the scene represented as having occurred there, and, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... already before the canal proposal there was, a plan in motion for a railway across the isthmus, which seems far enough from meeting the vast and growing necessities of the case. But be that as it may, with what right does any man in Europe, or America, impute narrowness of spirit, local jealousy, or selfishness, to England, when he calls to mind what sacrifices she is at this moment making for those very oriental interests which give to the ship canal its sole value—the men, the ships, the money spent, or to be spent, upon ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... the oar, and, notwithstanding the breach of the seas and the narrowness of the passage, steered the boat close to the ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne

... day they landed, and they were never more vigorous or prosperous than at the date of this narrative. With character compacted by the rigid Puritan discipline of more than two centuries, they had retained its strength and purity and thrown off its narrowness, and were now blossoming under the generous modern influences. Squire Oliver Montague, a lawyer who had retired from the practice of his profession except in rare cases, dwelt in a square old fashioned New England mile away from the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 3. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... would think and that is what I complain of. It is a strain that runs through the whole of you—except perhaps the Kitten—a dreadful narrowness of vision—don't tell me your sight is good—I'm only referring to your mental outlook. It is the fatal frivolous attitude of mind that always remembers the wholly irrelevant statement that the Earl of Warwick, the King-maker, was born when his ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker

... only they. In that day, even lost souls, though they will not be able to understand the blessedness of religion, will have no doubt at all of what they now doubt, or pretend to doubt, that religion is blessed. They laugh at religion, think strictness to be narrowness of mind, and regularity to be dulness; and give bad names to religious men. They will not be able to do so then. They think themselves the great men of the earth now, and look down upon the religious; but then, who would not have been a religious man, to have so great a reward? who will ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman

... principles, Varenka was able to devote herself to her work without mental reservation. However, she refuses to, because she has not enough enthusiasm for this sort of research. Her understanding, which is deeper and broader than Tanya's, sees the error, the narrowness of her doctrine; she cannot admit it, and, fired by a desire to devote herself body and soul to some useful work, she chooses the laborious profession of a school-mistress in the village. But this humble and unpleasant career does not satisfy her. Little by ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... is going on, McDowell has ridden in a Southerly direction down to Heintzelman's Division, at Sangster's Station, "to make arrangements to turn the Enemy's right, and intercept his communications with the South," but has found, owing to the narrowness and crookedness of the roads, and the great distance that must be traversed in making the necessary detour, that his contemplated movement is too risky to be ventured. Hence he at once abandons his original plan of turning the Enemy's right, and determines on "going ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... shorter road. Misinformed by the guides, Brigadier-General Moore's column fell in, an hour and a half sooner than it had expected, with the advanced picket of the enemy, who were thus put on their guard. At the moment when they were discovered, the troops, in consequence of the narrowness of the road, were marching in single file, and to halt them was impossible. In this state of things their leader resolved not to give his opponents time to recollect themselves, but to fall on them with his single division. ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis

... eat, by various juice control The narrowness or largeness of our soul. Onions will make e'en heirs or widows weep; The tender lettuce brings on ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss

... another which he had loathed is in reality right, a tremendous intellectual conversion will have taken place; his own case will constantly act as a warning to him whenever he is again tempted to prejudice or narrowness of outlook. ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... bookcase for its accommodation, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in a revolving bookcase I bestowed the volumes. Circumstances of an intimately domestic character, 'not wholly unconnected,' as Mr. Micawber might have said, with the narrowness of my study (in which it is impossible to 'swing a cat'), prevent the revolving bookcase from revolving at this moment. I can see, however, that the Fairy Cabinet contains at least forty volumes, and I think there ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various

... Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale, and they were the great instruments of his tyranny. None of them had the talents or audacity of Strafford, or the narrowness and bigotry of Laud; but their counsels were ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... had thus unexpectedly found I supposed must be Westernport; although the narrowness of the entrance did by no means correspond with the width given to it by Mr. Bass. It was the information of Captain Baudin, who had coasted along from thence with fine weather, and had found no inlet of any kind, which induced this supposition; and the very ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... for many years. Hearts that had grown cold and callous under slights, and chilling indifferences, were warmed anew in the social atmosphere which filled the whole house; and then the sound of music swept through the rooms, lifting all out of their narrowness into higher ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams

... the vulgar scorn of the claims of the wretched, which men calling themselves respectable and educated may oppose to his own warmer feelings and nobler principles, should be met, not with that invective which may be as vulgar as the narrowness it denounces, nor always with that indignation which is righteous as well as wrathful, but with that awful contempt with which Magnanimity shames meanness, simply by the irony of her lofty example and the sarcasm ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various

... nome. Namesake samnomulo. Nankeen nankeno. Nap (doze) dormeti. Nape nuko. Napkin busxtuko. Narcissus narciso. Narcotic narkotiko. Narrate rakonti. Narrative rakonto. Narrow mallargxa. Narrowly mallargxe. Narrowness mallargxeco. Nasal naza. Nasty malagrabla. Natation nagxarto. Nation nacio. National nacia. Nationality nacieco. Native landano, enlandulo. Native enlanda. Native-land patrujo. Nativity naskigxo. Natural ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... at the dance became more manifest, Henry found occasion to bless the moment when he had decided to take lessons. He shuddered sometimes at the narrowness of his escape from disaster. Every day now it became more apparent to him, as he watched Minnie, that she was chafing at the monotony of her life. That fatal supper had wrecked the peace of their little ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... of the bicycle, combined with its narrowness, counteract, to a great extent, the advantage which the tricyclist has of being able to stop so much more quickly, for the bicyclist can "dodge" past a thing for which the rider of the three-wheeler must pull up. In one other respect ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various

... steps the loud voice of a shaduf man came to them from some distant place by the Nile, reminding her of the great river which seemed ever to be flowing through her Egyptian life, reminding her of the narrowness of Upper Egypt, a corridor between the mountains of Libya and of the Arabian desert. She stood still at the bottom of the steps to listen. There was a pause. Then the fierce voice was lifted again, came to them ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... these to be the work of a Norwegian. To understand how the sun can be already high in the heavens when it rises, and how, when it sets, the shadow of the western mountain can creep as quickly as it does from the bottom of the valley up the opposite slope, one must have some conception of the narrowness of Norwegian valleys, with steep mountain ridges on either side. I felt also that readers would be interested in pictures showing how the dooryard of a well-to-do Norwegian farm looks, how the open fireplace of the roomy kitchen differs from our ...
— Lisbeth Longfrock • Hans Aanrud

... itself prevented from contributing to the response. In counter-suggestion, response to the suggestion itself is inhibited, and in positive {550} suggestion response to other stimuli is inhibited. Both involve narrowness of response, and are opposed to what we commonly speak of as "good judgment", the taking of all relevant stimuli into account, and letting the response be ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... people besides his own. For people who stay at home always are apt to think everything strange that differs from what they have been accustomed to. Thus it is that English-speaking people, where knowledge is limited, think that German names are uncouth, when it is only the narrowness of their own culture ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston

... extent, a specialist; he must do one thing well enough to earn the daily bread. The woman is the universalist; she must do a hundred things for the safeguarding and development of the home. The modern fad of talking of the narrowness of domesticity especially provoked Chesterton. "I ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... under the new system. The proportion was certainly small, but it was at any rate large enough to reflect credit upon the system as a whole and to disguise its inherent defects. It is characteristic of the narrowness of official interest in educational questions that, whereas abundant statistics are forthcoming on all subjects connected with material progress, no attempt seems to have been made to follow the results of Western education statistically into ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... Rhode Island, in colonial times, contrasted favorably with the other colonies, nearly all of which required a larger property qualification, and some a religious test for the suffrage. The home of Roger Williams knew nothing of such narrowness, but was an asylum for those who suffered persecution elsewhere. Nevertheless this is now, in many respects, the most ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... on quaintness, my love, and the narrowness and tyranny of it is intolerable. I hate it. When I go away from Bruges I never want to set eyes on it again as long ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan

... without sentiment, he himself set little store by that, smiling up his sleeve—for he was both kindly and prudent—at his wife who had been a Tomson. It was not in Stanley to appreciate the peculiar flavor of the Moretons, that something which in spite of their naivete and narrowness, had really been rather fine. To him, such Moretons as were left were 'dry enough sticks, clean out of it.' They were of a breed that was already gone, the simplest of all country gentlemen, dating back to the Conquest, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... remained the objects of his special study, D'Alembert was as free as the other great men of the encyclopaedic school from the narrowness of the pure specialist. He naturally reminds us of the remarkable saying imputed to Leibnitz, that he only attributed importance to science, because it enabled him to speak with authority in philosophy and religion. His correspondence with ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley

... temptations of so international, so universal a vision of wealth. I know that it must be your danger not to fall like many tradesmen into too dusty and mechanical a narrowness, but rather to be too broad, to be too general, too liberal. If a narrow nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the grocer. But I come to you in the name of that patriotism ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... unfortunate result of the narrowness of this escape was that the Irish Executive—stung by the sense of their own supineness, and utterly scared by the recent peril—threw themselves into the most violent and arbitrary measures of repression. The Habeas Corpus Act had already been suspended, and now martial law was proclaimed ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless

... Matilda had been annoyances to her ever since she could remember. Their continual nagging had fretted her, their constant restraint had chafed her, their narrowness had cramped her. To-day she saw them from a new point ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... relation of religion to the life of man, if it be not of this same enlarging and emancipating kind? Here we are, all shut in by our routine of business and study and preoccupation, and religion simply opens the door outward from this narrowness of life into a larger and a purer world. It is as if you were bending some evening over your books in the exhausted air of your little room, and as if you should rise from your task, and pass out into the night, and the open door should deliver you from your weariness and your ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody

... indefinitely by the roots. Everywhere else is the ligneous fence, generally too hard and thick to break through. It is inevitable therefore that all the Osmiae, when the time comes to quit their dwelling, should go out by the top; and, as the narrowness of the shaft bars the passage of the preceding insect as long as the next insect, the one above it, remains in position, the removal must begin at the top, extend from cell to cell and end at the bottom. Consequently, the order of exit is the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre

... products of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty and coarseness, Apollo's cheek, and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainable partly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partly from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, his narrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages in these respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer and nobler essence. We have these things by inheritance; they have been transmitted to us along a line of ancestors. Five centuries share with us the merit of the result. ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... of the ATTRACTION, above imputed to the Fairies towards our own kind, have been here imperfectly brought out; and already the narrowness of our limits warns us—with a sigh given to the traditions crowding upon us from all countries, and which we perforce leave unused—to bring these preliminary remarks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... Cilicia itself, owing to the natural strength of Mount Amanus—for there are only two defiles opening into Cilicia from Syria, both of which are capable of being closed by insignificant garrisons owing to their narrowness, nor can anything be imagined better fortified than is Cilicia on the Syrian side—but I was disturbed for Cappadocia, which is quite open on the Syrian side, and is surrounded by kings, who, even if they are our friends ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... the vision was necessarily limited like the valley in which he dwelt. There was no remote past on which his eye could rest, nor any future from which the veil was partly lifted up by the analogy of history. The narrowness of view, which to ourselves appears so singular, was to ...
— The Republic • Plato

... ridiculous,—of which, of course, you think I haven't a bit. It is, for instance, a constant vexation to me to be poor. It makes me frequently hate rich women; it makes me despise poor ones. I don't know whether you suffer acutely from the narrowness of your own means; but if you do, I dare say you shun rich men. I don't. I like to go into rich people's houses, and to be very polite to the ladies of the house, especially if they are very well-dressed and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various

... gloomily. "The whole point of the story depends upon its having been Jonah's whale. Under the circumstances, the only thing I can do is to sit down. I regret the narrowness of mind exhibited by my friend Jonah, but I must respect the decision ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs

... frankly confessed that he didn't know, but guessed that jays and many other birds carried their eggs in their mouths; and when I objected that a jay's mouth seemed too small to hold its eggs, he replied that birds' mouths were larger than the narrowness of their bills indicated. Then I asked him what he thought they did with the eggs while a new nest was being prepared. He didn't know; neither do I to this day. A specimen of the many puzzling problems presented ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... had all sorts of narrowness, sins and coniptions, but they thought dancin' wuz the wickedest thing ever done. This boy wuz brought up as strict as a he nun, and now see ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley

... law; they may be versed in statistics; they are most useful in their own place; I should shrink from speaking disrespectfully of them; still, there is nothing in such attainments to guarantee the absence of narrowness of mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, or men of information, they have not what specially deserves the name of culture of mind, or fulfils the type ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... his ambition for preferment, and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian days. That he was not a brigadier-general ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... by a fine iron bridge of five arches, erected in 1816, and by a tubular railway bridge designed by Sir Isambard Brunel. There is a free passage on the Wye for large vessels as far as the bridge. From the narrowness and depth of the channel the tide rises suddenly and to a great height, forming a dangerous bore. The exports are timber, bark, iron, coal, cider and millstones. Some shipbuilding is ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... form. The Aristotelian doctrines of the schoolmen come nearer in spirit to the doctrines which modern mathematics inspire; but the schoolmen were hampered by the fact that their formal logic was very defective, and that the philosophical logic based upon the syllogism showed a corresponding narrowness. What is now required is to give the greatest possible development to mathematical logic, to allow to the full the importance of relations, and then to found upon this secure basis a new philosophical logic, which may hope to borrow some of the exactitude and certainty of ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... Sydney, nor rectify their crookedness. They were originally dug out by cart-ruts, whereas those of nearly every other town in Australia were mapped out long before they were inhabited. But if they were not so ill-kept, and the footpaths so wretchedly paved, I could forgive the narrowness and crookedness of the Sydney streets, on account of their homely appearance. They are undeniably old friends, such as you can meet in hundreds of towns in Europe. Their very unsuitableness for the practical wants of a large city becomes a pleasant contrast to the practical ...
— Town Life in Australia - 1883 • R. E. N. (Richard) Twopeny

... would excite laughter in a well managed nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... held more than one fortunate chance in his hand. Developing the country was a new and attractive watchword. He had no prejudices as to who should rule, except that he understood that the French narrowness and bigotry had served them ill. Religion was, no doubt, an excellent thing; the priests helped to keep order and were in many respects serviceable. As for the new rulers, one need to be a little wary of too profound a faith in them. The Indians ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... be read with the same unbiassed mind, the same open eye, the same faith, and the same reverence as all other Revelation. All that is found there, whatever its place in Theology, whatever its orthodoxy or heterodoxy, whatever its narrowness or its breadth, we are bound to accept as Doctrine from which on the lines of Science there is no escape. Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond

... that sooner or later the cause would triumph had never wavered. His patience was inexhaustible, his temper beyond proof. The incapacity of many in whom he had trusted, the jealousies and religious differences which prevented anything like union between the various states, the narrowness and jealousy even of those most faithful to the cause, would have ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty

... yet," said Henry in a whisper, lest he wake the sleepers. "I think we'll come into the Susquehanna pretty soon, and its width will be a good thing for us. I wish we were there now. I don't like this narrow stream. Its narrowness affords too ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler

... excuse than a house-breaker or a suspicious husband might have had. Tete Jaune would not countenance cold-blooded shooting, even of criminals. He should have taken old Donald's advice and waited until they were in the mountains. An unpleasant chill ran through him as he thought of the narrowness of his ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood

... are active; their field is wide, their nets are far spread. Anybody who has read history knows that the Extremist often beats the Moderate by his fire, his heated energy, his concentration, by his very narrowness. So be it; we remember it; we watch it all, with that lesson of historic experience full in our minds. Yet we still hold that it would be the height of political folly for us at this moment to refuse ...
— Indian speeches (1907-1909) • John Morley (AKA Viscount Morley)

... career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial knowledge with the prestige of erudition, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... You have always been grumbling about the narrowness of your sphere, and envying men abroad who send and bring such fine collections home. Be off together, and make a big collection for yourselves of everything you come across ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... Tractarian movement, the conversations to which he listened, the morbid frame of mind to which he succumbed are deplorable reading. Indeed the reminiscences of Newman's conversation in particular, the pedantry, the hankering after miracles, the narrowness of view, are an extraordinary testimony to the charm with which Newman must have invested all he did or said. Pattison is even more severe on Pusey, and charges him with having betrayed a secret which ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... forward, learnt that Narcisse had engaged lodgings for him and his suite at one of the great inns, and Berenger returned his thanks, and a proposal to the Chevalier to become his guest. They were by this time entering the city, where the extreme narrowness and dirt of the streets contrasted with the grandeur of the palatial courts that could be partly seen through their archways. At the hostel they rode under such an arch, and found themselves in a paved yard that would have been grand had it been clean. Privacy had scarcely ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... light came sparingly. In a corner many women were sitting silently. Near them stood one of the beautiful red baskets for which the Katingans higher up the river are famous. As I proceeded a little further an extremely fine carved casket met my astonished eyes. Judging from its narrowness the deceased, who had been ill for a long time, must have been very thin when she passed away, but the coffin, to which the cover had been fastened with damar, was of excellent proportions and symmetrical in shape. The material was a lovely white wood of Borneo, on which were ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz

... science, not being able to see that science is a grander and more unquestionable revelation than any they have derived from tradition, and scientists deride religion and theology, not being able in their narrowness to recognize the higher forms of science in the great spiritual truths which have been apparent to all races from the most ancient limits of history. Of the scientific class the majority are averse to the religion of the times, partly ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various

... above the transepts and nave, and, while the general proportions are not such as to suggest undue narrowness, the effect is of much greater height than really exists. This, too, is apparent when viewing ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun

... is always a limit to human capacity; and no one can be a great genius without having some decidedly weak side, it may even be, some intellectual narrowness. In other words, there will foe some faculty in which he is now and then inferior to men of moderate endowments. It will be a faculty which, if strong, might have been an obstacle to the exercise of the ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... found at Court gave my relatives some grounds to hope that I might have the coadjutorship of Paris. At first they found a great deal of difficulty in my uncle's narrowness of spirit, which is always attended with fears and jealousies; but at length they prevailed upon him, and would have then carried our point, if my friends had not given it out, much against my judgment, that it was done by the consent of the Archbishop of Paris, and if they had not suffered the ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... spruce, frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against and into the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round a bar of the trap. His posture was as of one caught and striving frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness of the interval between the rails precluded so extravagant an idea. He stood quite motionless—taut and on the strain, as it were—and nothing of his face was visible but the back ridges of his jaw-bones, showing white through a bush ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... quite certain that he would not knock them down physically. Of women's preaching he curtly observed that it was like a dog walking on its hind legs: 'It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.' English insular narrowness certainly never had franker expression than in his exclamation: 'For anything I can see, all foreigners are fools.' For the American colonists who had presumed to rebel against their king his bitterness was sometimes ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... be entered at or near high water, when, unless it blows very hard, it seldom breaks on the bar. The tide of ebb runs with great rapidity, sometimes nearly four miles per hour, owing to the great quantity of fresh water in the Hastings River, and the narrowness of the channel. The flood tide seldom exceeds one mile and three quarters per hour. The tides are however very irregular in their operation, being considerably influenced by local circumstances. The port is perfectly capable to receive vessels of the ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley

... interior bastion, for the purpose of charging the enemy. Major Hall, assistant inspector general, very handsomely tendered his services to lead the charge. The charge was gallantly made by Captain Foster and Major Hall, but owing to the narrowness of the passage up to the bastion, admitting only two or three men abreast, it failed. It was often repeated, and as often checked; the enemy's force on the bastion was, however, much cut to pieces and diminished by our artillery and small arms. At this moment every operation was ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat

... insane, will give it one of the highest places in the hierarchy of sciences; and its persistent neglect and obloquy during the last sixty years, will be referred to as an example of the almost incredible narrowness and prejudice which prevailed among men of science at the very time they were making such splendid advances in other fields ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz

... so far had been good, but after crossing Slippery Creek it proved to be almost a continuous mud-hole, due to its extreme narrowness and the wet weather, closely bordered, as much of it was, by dense forests. It revealed a good farming country, however, free from stones, and the soil a rich, loamy clay throughout. It was well timbered, in some places, with the finest white poplar I had yet seen. The ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... briskly as they could, but on the rough moorland path it was impossible to keep the pace at four miles an hour. They were going uphill, and, unless they went in single file, one of them, owing to the narrowness of the track, was obliged to keep stepping into the heather. At the top of the crest they dipped down again into a high, narrow valley between two fells. It was swampy here, and in places there were quite wide pieces of water to jump across. The path, which had been growing worse and ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... let the dogs put their noses to the opening. They were simply furious, and at once began most vigorously to dig into the snow around the hole. Of course, they were quickly stopped and again fastened to the sleds, which on account of the narrowness of the tunnel had to be backed in. Cautiously they worked, and soon were only within four or five feet of the obstruction, whatever it was, that prevented the pole being ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... advanced to the attack, but they made no impression. Their superior numbers gave them no advantage, on account of the narrowness of the defile. The Greeks stood, each corps at its own assigned station on the line, forming a mass so firm and immovable that the charge of the Persians was arrested on encountering it as by a wall. In fact, as the spears of the Greeks were longer than those of the Persians, and their muscular ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... the graceless. My particular perspective may magnify a little wildly—when it doesn't even more weirdly diminish; but I read into the great hooded and guarded resource in question an evidential force: as if it must really have played for us, so far as its narrowness and its exposure permitted, the part of a buffer-state against the wilderness immediately near, that of the empty, the unlovely and the mean. Interposing a little ease, didn't it interpose almost all the ease we knew?—so that when amiable friends, arriving from New York by the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... worship, and for instruction in Christian truth and duty from the saintly lips of John Robinson. The extreme radicals of their day, they seem to have been divinely preserved from the besetting sins of radicalism—its narrowness, its self-righteousness, its censoriousness and intolerance. Those who read the copious records of the early New England colonization are again and again surprised at finding that the impoverished little company of Separatists at Leyden and Plymouth, who ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... filled the valley. Common sense urged a careful pace, because it had never been possible to stop and adjust the powerful headlights, while the luminous haze of an occasional street lamp served only to reveal the narrowness of the road and the presence ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... disappeared. What other figures in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who lived as Elijah did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding—the very brood of the forest's innermost heart—had found a voice. Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in the severity of the forest ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... by "narrowness" in a teacher? What is meant by "bigness"? What is their effect if the teacher ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson

... after eleven when the concert was over and the party started on its homeward trip. Krayne and Roeselein walked behind the others, and soon the darkness and the narrowness of the road forced him to tread after the girl. The moon's rays at intervals pierced the foliage, making lacelike patches of light in the gloom. At times they skirted the edges of a circular clearing and saw the high pines fringing the southern horizon; overhead the heavens were almost black, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... for the careful housewife lighted the room with a tall tallow candle always guttering down into the flat brass candlestick which held it. Madame Saillard's face, despite its wrinkles, was expressive of obstinacy and severity, narrowness of ideas, an uprightness that might be called quadrangular, a religion without piety, straightforward, candid avarice, and the peace of a quiet conscience. You may see in certain Flemish pictures the wives of burgomasters cut out by nature on the same ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac

... seemed to come in aptly. Each of the four had very different characteristics, and I fancy they did not agree very well together. All have long since gone to their rest; peace be with them! Four is an awkwardly small number for a mess-table of equals; friction is emphasized by narrowness of sphere. "I didn't like the man," said the boatswain afterwards to me of the sailmaker, narrating the destruction of the Congress; "but he is brave, brave as can be. Getting the wounded over the side to put them ashore, he was as cool ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan

... Mary's Church was the hub. Cat Street, School Street running parallel with it from High Street to the north boundary, and Schydyard Street, the continuation of School Street on the southern side of High Street, alleys of the usual medieval narrowness and mean appearance, the buildings on either hand almost touching one another, and the way dark—were the haunts of masters and scholars and all those depending on them. Students, old and young, of high ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... claim upon its workmen, is the representation of its own best; but the loudest demand of the present day is for the representation of that grade of humanity of which men see the most—that type of things which could never have been but that it might pass. The demand marks the commonness, narrowness, low-levelled satisfaction of the age. It loves its own—not that which might be, and ought to be its own—not its better self, infinitely higher than its present, for the sake of whose approach it exists. I do not think that the age ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... disagreement," continued Mr. Strathmore, "is in regard to the best method of meeting this want of sympathy, this feeling which often seems to amount almost to general indifference. Is it to arouse all the suspicion and opposition possible? Is it to seem to justify the charges brought against us of narrowness, of formalism, of repression, and of obstructing the progress of the race? It does not seem to me that this is the wisest course. I agree that it is our duty to forward the interests of the church, and to make our administration of charity a means to this end. It is ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... Scorned by the musician, yet how expressive of a people's temper, how suggestive of its history! At the moment when this strain broke upon my ear, I was thinking ill of Cotrone and its inhabitants; in the first pause of the music I reproached myself bitterly for narrowness and ingratitude. All the faults of the Italian people are whelmed in forgiveness as soon as their music sounds under the Italian sky. One remembers all they have suffered, all they have achieved in spite of wrong. Brute races have flung themselves, one after another, upon this sweet and glorious ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... I hesitated. The memory of her prejudice against me would not down. Then I had an illuminative look into the narrowness of my own soul. The sight did not please me. With a sudden resolve I bent down and kissed the cheek of ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... informed could behold only in an insulated and unconnected manner;—but that for many years past we suffered under all the evils, without any one of the advantages of a government influence; that the business of a minister, or of those who acted as such, had been still further to contract the narrowness of men's ideas, to confirm inveterate prejudices, to inflame vulgar passions, and to abet all sorts of popular absurdities, in order the better to destroy popular rights and privileges; that, so far from methodizing the business of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... the second map of Lemuria is the great length, and at parts the extreme narrowness, of the straits which separated the two great blocks of land into which the continent had by this time been split, and it will be observed that the straits at present existing between the islands ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... them by nature, where the first strange hands were now busied in feeling, squeezing, compressing the lips, then opening them again, with a finger between, till an "Oh!" expressed her hurting me, where the narrowness of the unbroken passage refused ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland

... a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers, bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as chapels,—I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which there was still some "fine small dust" of the martyrs, warned us that to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... body and helping each other, these people seemed to detest one another, and to lose no opportunity of snatching some little advantage or telling some scandalous tale. In fact, this in-and-in breeding seems one of the curses of village life, and a cause of stagnation and narrowness of mind. This marrying and giving in marriage is not singular to well-to-do leaders of chapel society, but goes on with equal fervour among the lower members. The cottage girls and cottage boys marry the instant they get ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... high degree of finish characterizing many of the remains; but as already seen in the discussion of masonry, the latter results were attained by the patient industry of many hands, although laboring with but little of the spirit of cooperation. The narrowness of the largest doors and windows in the ancient pueblos suggests timidity on the part of the ancient builders. The apparently bolder construction of the present day, shown in the prevailing use of horizontal openings, is not due to greater constructive skill, but rather to the ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... and more grieved, as I re-read this and other portions of the most affected and weak of all my books, (written in a moulting time of my life,)—the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'—at its morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book was, like my others, honest; and in substance it is mostly good; but ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... the management of the present bishop, who is a very exemplary man, these things are being changed. The old Priests of New Mexico were formerly educated in Old Mexico. Their information was very imperfect, and their minds were contracted down to extreme narrowness, from want of observation; hence, they were the means of retarding the natural progress of the people. It cannot be denied but that the Catholic religion has been the pioneer system in the far West, and that, in the hands of good ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... would see a shedding off of many things dogmatic theologians consider to be vital to Christianity, and the closer apprehension by society of the meaning of Christ's life and words. He believed not only that God was, but that he is. Though reared in New England, he had little of that provincial narrowness which so often mars and cramps the minds of those who otherwise are the most agreeable of all Americans,—the cultivated New Englanders. No sermon so moved Carleton, and so kindled responsive radiance in his face, as those which showed that God is to-day leading and guiding humanity ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... not think of this then; I did not even bestow a thought upon the narrowness of our escape, or the price which the darling of my heart might be called upon to pay for this supreme act of self-defence. My mind, my heart, my interest were with Felix, in whom the nearness of death had called up all ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green

... decreased for many in the country is a matter of doubt. Certainly most minds need the stimulus of human association for both happiness and healthiness, and even yet the minds of farmers disclose the narrowness, suspiciousness, and discontent of place that isolation brings. It makes a difference in social attitude whether the telephone, automobile, and parcel post draw the people nearer together in a common community life or whether they bring the people under the magic ...
— Rural Problems of Today • Ernest R. Groves

... exercised for the good of his health by the stable-boy. It was expensive, but expense was not a first consideration with the Squire, and when he had once decided a matter, he was not apt to worry himself with regrets. As to Amabel the very narrowness of the white horse's escape from death exalted him at once to the place of first favorite in her tender heart, even over the head (and ears) ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... very sign-manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, a drawback from which she did not live long enough to emancipate her nature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in what is delicate and complex; it excused to herself a narrowness of vision which we are sometimes tempted to find quite distressing. It is probably the cause of a fault that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her characters express themselves with a lyrical extravagance which sometimes comes close ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... the mere narrowness and crookedness of a road a defect within the meaning of the statutes. Towns and cities are only required to keep highways in suitable repair as they are located by the public authorities, and they have no right to go outside the limits defined by the location in order to make the ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter

... appreciate this side of religion without being blind to other aspects of it. Our religion comes not only from Judaea, but also from Greece. The Jewish passion for the divine righteousness lies at its roots. But that passion is consistent with narrowness, bigotry, inhumanity. For the modifications of it which come from the working of the spirit of humanism we have to turn to the Hellenes, for the feeling of the likeness in nature between God and man, the love ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... the sentiment by-and-by draw you away to oblivion of the style, however much it may at first strike you as redundant and affected. They are not the letters of a literary man. They have nothing suggestive of the studious chamber and the midnight lamp. There is often a narrowness of idea in the merely literary man which limits his auditory to men of his peculiar pattern. To this narrowness Burns, with all his faults of style, was a stranger. His letters are the utterances of a man who refused to be imprisoned ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... from society, ceaselessly afraid of receiving less than his due; privately, meanwhile, he deplored the narrowness of the social opportunities granted to his daughter, and was for ever forming schemes for her advantage—schemes which never passed beyond the stage of nervous speculation. They inhabited a little house in a western suburb, a house illumined with every domestic virtue; but scarcely a dozen persons ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... cloistered world. Women who lived merely womanish lives, without knowledge of and comradeship with men, seemed to her limited and parochial creatures. She was impatient of her sex, and the narrowness of her sex's sphere. She dreamed of a broadly human, practical, disinterested relation between men and women, based on the actual work of the world; its social, artistic, intellectual work; ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... influence, especially as in matters pertaining to the financial interests of the country and of the city of Philadelphia he manifested a degree of public spirit which contrasted marvelously with his narrowness, meanness, and even inhumanity, in dealing with individual and private interests. He was certainly a patriotic man. Nevertheless, as his biographer demonstrates, he always contrived to make his patriotism tributary to the increase of his immense wealth. His ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... of marble—for us no more the vault of gold—but for us there is the loftier and lovelier privilege of bringing the power and charm of art within the reach of the humble and the poor; and as the magnificence of past ages failed by its narrowness and its pride, ours may prevail and continue, by its universality ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin

... his views; and, as teaching divides and subdivides into specialities, this abnormal one-sideness tends more and more to appear. Here we find a parallelism in the profession of Medicine, with a corresponding danger of narrowness; for that, too, is in a process of constant specialization, and the physician who treats nervous diseases is likely to be of the opinion that all trouble arises from that part of the organism, or, at least, that all remedies should be applied there. This tendency ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... pictures of the sufferings of those who were opposed to the Revolution, and who were not slow to express their sense of the ruin that had fallen upon their country. King George's native shrewdness and native narrowness of mind had made him from the first an active opponent of the Revolution. He declared that if a stop were not put to French principles there would not be a king left in Europe in a few years. To him, whose business above all things it had been ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... recognition, never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in the divine message which he felt himself commissioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a certain rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. That plastic temperament which we associate with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not possess, or it hardened early. Whole sides of life were beyond the range of his sympathies. He {231} touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, but touched ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... was burning brightly on the ceiling. It was burning all the time, so that Max did not know now what darkness was. There was no furniture in the room, and Max had to lie on the stone floor. He lay curled together, as the narrowness of the room did not permit ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... evenings to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them than the neighbourhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... these changeable Colours, is apt to shame us out of any particular Vice, or animate us to any particular Virtue, to make us pleased or displeased with our selves in the most proper Points, to clear our Minds of Prejudice and Prepossession, and rectify that Narrowness of Temper which inclines us to think amiss of those ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... of the souls of his characters, has, naturally, memory and perception for all. Yet Mary Shelley, in this as in most of her work, has great insight into character. Elizabeth's grandfather in his dotage is quite a photograph from life; old Oswig Raby, who was more shrivelled with narrowness of mind than with age, but who felt himself and his house, the oldest in England, of more importance than aught else he knew of. His daughter-in-law, the widow of his eldest son, is also well drawn; a woman of upright nature who can acknowledge the faults ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti

... unimaginably, before Rigours of law fastened like creeping habit Upon their measureless wont, and forced them drive Their ranging music of delighted being Through the fixt beating tune of a circling world.— Is not love so? Amazement of an anger Against created shape and narrowness? The bound rage of the uncreated Spirit Whose striving doth impassion us and the world? A wrath that thou and I are ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie

... prove to be disagreeable. God grant that it may prove to be profitable. There is need of it. Disguise it as we may talk as we choose about man in his narrowness, in his degradation, a wicked woman was, and to a large extent is, the means employed by Satan in leading astray the unwary. The manner of her fall has been declared. It may be profitable to review the steps of her downward descent from the bliss of Eden to the woe of the desert; ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... too, called Rougement, a name which preserves the identity of its Norman origin. Exeter's High Street is a curious stagy affair, with great jutting house gables, pillars, and pignons, undeniably effective, but a terror to automobilists because of its narrowness and ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield

... recommenced her stitching without a word. Her thoughts were in confusion. She had so long held one attitude towards him that she could not readily adjust herself to another. She was cramped with the extreme narrowness of the enthusiasm of youth. At noontime she heard all the talk which went on about him. She heard some praise him, and some speak of him as simply doing his manifest duty, and some say openly that he should have put the wages back upon the former footing, and she did not know which ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... shadow of the Hall, and plunged between the lines of maples, they were obliged to go in single file, for the narrowness of the way. The young mathematician glanced at the last melancholy glow of the sunset which spread out in a faint, fan-shaped aurora above a dun rampart of clouds. His love of nature was no less keen than his appreciation of people and events. The ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... the narrowness, must not be understood of the gate simply, but because of that cumber that some men carry with them, that pretend to be going to heaven. Six cubits! What is sixteen cubits to him who would enter in here with all the world on his back? The young man in the gospel, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... even one of the more important inhabitants the Ulysses of his vicinage—in short, a spot, as so many more that once could be found in Germany, with all the failings and the virtues, all the originality and the narrowness that can flourish only ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... as Alfieri would speak and act, could he, without losing his peculiar characteristics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues which would become quite secondary matters by the side of his essential qualities of pride, narrowness, decision, violence, and self-importance. Whether he paint his face into a smile or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig of innocence, or the black wig of villainy, the man's movement and gesture, the tone of his voice, the accent of ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... and scholarship, or in music and literature — he retained a vital faith in the Christian religion. He reacted against the Calvinism of his youth to almost as great a degree as did some of the New England poets. He at times felt keenly the narrowness and bigotry of the church — the warring of the sects over the unessential points.* In his thinking he found no place for the rigid and severe creed which dominated his youth. He gave up the forms, not the spirit, of worship. He lived the abundant life, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... is at no time an unchanging organization; it reflects with singular exactness the dominating ideas of its environment. That division into government and subjects which is its main characteristic is here noteworthy for the narrowness of the class from which the government is derived, and the consistent inertia of those over whom it rules. There is curiously little controversy over the seat of sovereign power. That is with most men acknowledged to reside in ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... toward the enemy is very apparent in these letters. The man whose mind is filled with great ideals of sacrifice and duty has no room for the narrowness of hate. He can pity a foe whose sufferings exceed his own, and the more so because he knows that his foe is doomed. The British troops do know this to-day by many infallible signs. In the early days of the war untrained men, poorly equipped with guns, were pitted against the best ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson

... to ransoming their vessels, greatly underrating their cargoes, he ordered them all to be burnt. Going thence to Dabul, where he found the Calicut fleet, he anchored off the mouth of the river, and called a council of his officers to consult on the proper measures for an attack; but owing to the narrowness of the river it was carried in the council not to attack, contrary to the opinion of Lorenzo, who was eager to destroy the enemies ships. Passing on therefore to a river four leagues beyond Dabul, a brigantine and parao which led the van saw a ship sailing up the river, and pursued the vessel till ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr

... century science bowled down the old supports of the belief in immortality, there grew up a tendency to regard that belief as an evidence of ignorance, narrowness, and incapacity to face the music. May not disregard of the possible new supports be rapidly becoming an evidence ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... philosophy by which it creates within its members the belief that their lot is much to be preferred to that of other comradeships and associations. Western Americans take satisfaction in living in a free, progressive, hospitable way in "God's country." They try not to be pharisaical about the narrowness of the East, but they achieve a sincere scorn for the hidebound conventions of an effete society. Easterners in turn count themselves fortunate in having a highly developed civilization, and they usually attain real pity for those who seem to live ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... They were honest, thrifty, devout, tolerant of the opinions of others. As Holland sheltered the English Puritans from ecclesiastical intolerance, so New Netherland welcomed within her borders the victims of New England bigotry and narrowness. ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... planet. They looked as if their thoughts had never strayed beyond the jobs of the day, and they were glad of it. Their mother was one of those shrunken, faded patterns of woman who have never done anything to keep smooth the cheek and dignify the brow. The father had a Scotch look of shrewd narrowness, and entire self-complacency. I could not endure this family, whose existence contradicted all my visions; yet I could not forbear ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... Alan Hawke, "his writings to-day are the pride of Genevan scholars; his library was the nucleus of the Geneva University; his defiant spirit broke the chains of Calvin's narrowness, and his resistant, spiritual example caught up has made Geneva the home of the oppressed, the central, radiant point of mental light and liberty for the world! Geneva since 1536 has harbored the brightest ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... out against you because you leave them to starve and to weep while you give your hearts to revolution and your bodies to the sword. Their cry is the cry of selfishness, of weakness, of narrowness, the cry of the sex that sees no sun save the flame on its hearth: yet there is truth in it—a truth you forget. The truth—that, forsaking the gold-mine of duty which lies at your feet, you grasp at the rainbow of glory; that, neglectful of your own secret sins, you ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... last].—But perhaps the desire of the thing called fame will torment thee. —See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of [the present], and the emptiness of applause, and the changeableness and want of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is circumscribed [and be quiet at last]. For the whole earth is a point, and how small a nook in it is this thy dwelling, and how few are there in it, and what kind of people are they ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius

... centre, by which the urine escapes. In others, the urine makes its exit between the calculus and the side of the urethra, which it dilates. In this latter way the foreign body becomes loosened in the canal and gradually pushed forwards as far as the meatus, within which, owing to the narrowness of this aperture, it lodges permanently. If the calculus forms a complete obstruction to the passage of the urine, and its removal cannot be effected by other means, an incision should be made to ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise



Words linked to "Narrowness" :   narrow, fineness, denominationalism, limitation, thinness, sectarianism, margin, provincialism, parochialism, breadth, broad-mindedness, restriction, pettiness, wideness, intolerance, width



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