Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Point of departure   /pɔɪnt əv dɪpˈɑrtʃər/   Listen
Point of departure

noun
1.
A place from which an enterprise or expedition is launched.  Synonym: jumping-off place.  "My point of departure was San Francisco"
2.
A beginning from which an enterprise is launched.  Synonyms: jumping-off point, springboard.  "Reality provides the jumping-off point for his illusions" , "The point of departure of international comparison cannot be an institution but must be the function it carries out"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Point of departure" Quotes from Famous Books



... we would as we would, drives us to look for help. And this brings us to a new point of departure. Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces, checks some tendency to abandon the strait path, leaving open only the way ahead. But there is a reality of being in which all things are easy and plain—oneness, that is, with the ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald

... belonged to the army of Porsenna, and, being defeated at Ariccia, took refuge in this part of Rome. This street, so often mentioned by classic writers, led to the Circus Maximus, and is now identified with the Via dei Fienili; the point of departure from the Forum being marked by a statue of Vertumnus, the Etruscan god, the ruined pedestal of which, in all likelihood, is that which has lately been unveiled on the steps at the north-east corner of the Basilica Julia. It ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... is to this day, except Wordsworth's "Excursion," the best purely didactic poem in the English language. The "Sofa" stands only as a point of departure:—it suits a gouty limb; but as the poet is not gouty, he is up and off. He is off for a walk with Mrs. Unwin in the country about Olney. He dwells on the rural sights and rural sounds, taking first the inanimate sounds, then the animate. In muddy winter weather he walks alone, finds ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... judgment intervened. He hadn't always been like that. Where had the point of departure started? He traced back the weakness till he came to the moment when he had permitted his sense of justice to be over-ruled by a woman. It had started with Maisie, when he had allowed her to persuade him to hide ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... cycle of operations by which the seed produces the plant, the plant the flower, the flower again the seed, the causal line, returning with the fidelity of a planetary orbit to its original point of departure. Who or what planned this molecular rhythm? We do not know—science fails even to inform us whether it was ever 'planned' at all. Yonder butterfly has a spot of orange on its wing; and if we look at a drawing made a century ago, of one of the ancestors of that butterfly, we probably ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall

... present instance I could see only the start and the "finish," when the bird several times passed directly by and over me, as I stood in a cluster of low birches, within two or three rods of his point of departure. His angle of flight was small; quite as if he had been going and coming from one field to another, in the ordinary course. Once I timed him, and found that he was on the wing for a few seconds ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... individual point of view, Cape Town, on that New Year morning of nineteen hundred and one, was either a point of departure for the front, or a city of refuge for the sleek and portly Uitlanders who thronged the hotels and made too audible mourning for their imperiled possessions. Viewed in either light, it was hot, crowded and unclean. From his caricature of a hansom, Weldon registered his swift ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... boats, and always tried to convince us they had none. What with absorbed attention first, and this submersion afterwards, I had lost all my bearings but the stars, having been long out of sight of my original point of departure. However, the difficulties of the return were nothing; making a slight allowance for the floodtide, which could not yet have turned, I should soon regain the place I had left. So I struck out freshly against the smooth water, feeling ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... the general political conditions of the Mediterranean. She carried from him letters to the King and Queen of the Sicilies, to their Prime Minister, Acton, and to the British minister to the Court of Sardinia. To these succeeded, upon his arrival in Malta,—as a better point of departure for the farther East, now that the French held the west coast of the Adriatic,—despatches to the British minister to the Porte, to the Grand Vizier and the Capitan Pacha, to the Republic of the Seven Islands, as the group of Corfu and its sisters was now ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... international wires. One is that lately examined by Sir Leopold M'Clintock and Captain Young, under the auspices of the British Government. This route, taking the extreme northern coast of Scotland as its point of departure, and touching the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Greenland, strikes our continent upon the coast of Labrador, making the longest submarine section eight hundred miles, about one-third the length of the Atlantic cable. There is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... intrigue against him that he could not exercise his functions. There was no church fit for services. This furnished him with a pretext to return to the Peninsula. When Ponce arrived the bishop was on the point of departure. There can be no doubt that King Ferdinand, in reappointing Ponce to the government of the island, trusted to the captain's military qualities for the reestablishment of order and the suppression ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk

... his beautiful songs in Vienna. From one end of Germany to the other, and in all Europe, these operas made their way. "Der Freischuetz" has lasted fifty years, and is still presented with success. More than that, as already noticed, Weber furnished the model, or point of departure, for a multitude of smaller composers, who developed the opera in various side directions; and last, but not least, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews

... the Gothic and Saracenic styles of architecture; but it seems to me impossible to contemplate many Byzantine edifices without feeling persuaded that this manner is the parent of both. Taking the Lower Empire for the point of departure, the Christian style spread north to the Baltic and westwards to the Atlantic. Saint Stephen's in Vienna, standing half way between Byzantium and Wisby, has a Byzantine facade and a Gothic tower. The Saracenic style followed the Moslem ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton

... official communication has been suspended by the Grand Lodge of England. It will be known further that outside recognised Masonic systems many rites have arisen which are only Masonic to the extent that their point of departure is from the Master-grade. As a special instance may be cited the Supreme Oriental Rite of Memphis and Misraim. In England the Lodge meetings of these rites are never suffered to take place in the great central institution of Freemasons Hall; in France, the Grand Orient has consistently ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... Dowager had been sapping and mining and laying plans to bring about the marriage almost from Nelly's infancy, when she had come in and altered the constituents of Nelly's baby bottles, and had infuriated Nelly's wholesome country nurse to the point of departure. The General had come just in time then to find Mrs. Loveday fastening the cherry-coloured strings of her bonnet with fingers that trembled, and had been put to the very edge of his simple diplomacy to undo the Dowager's work. He knew his own helplessness ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan

... essential transformations this primitive philosophy may afterwards undergo, a judicious sociological analysis will always expose to view this primordial base, never entirely concealed, even in a religious state the most remote from the original point of departure. Not only, for example, the Egyptian theocracy has presented, at the time of its greatest splendour, the established and prolonged coexistence, in the several castes of the hierarchy, of one of these religious epochs, since the inferior ranks still remained in simple fetishism, whilst ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... direction. Another result was the establishing a line of telegraph from Adelaide to Port Darwin. This might, therefore, be considered the eastern boundary of the unknown districts, and, moreover, was the point of departure for the South Australian expeditions in a westerly direction. It was also the limit I desired to reach, and reaching it, I should achieve the object I had so much ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne

... realistic handling of one of the cleverest of his ladies of light reputation, Madame Schontz; his studies of such characters of the demi-monde—especially of the wonderful Esther of the 'Splendeurs et miseres'—serving plainly, by the way, as a point of departure for Dumas fils. Yet 'Beatrix' is an able rather than a truly great book, for it neither elevates nor delights us. In fact, all the stories in this series are interesting rather than truly great; but all display Balzac's remarkable analytic powers. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... on the heath now, and the smoke of London hung in the wintry air beyond and below them. The sun was already beginning to wear the aspect of a traveller on the point of departure for a journey. His once golden face was sinister with that blood-red hue which it so often assumes on winter afternoons, and which seems to set it in a place more than usually remote, more than usually distant from our world, and in a clime that is sad and strange. Winds danced over the ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... You cross the channel in fifty minutes from Dover to Calais, you cross the Rhine in five minutes, and the peoples seem thousands of miles apart. "How did it happen," asks Voltaire, "that, setting out from the same point of departure, the governments of England and of France arrived at nearly the same time, at results as dissimilar as the constitution of Venice is unlike that ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... always a foliated one, generally proceeding from a common center, representing a basket or a knot of ribbon, which confined the branching forms to the point of departure. The edges were heavily scalloped, with an extension of the ornamentation which included a rose or leaf for the filling of every scallop. The centers of flowers, and even of leaves, were often filled with beautiful variations of lace stitches worked into the meshes of ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler

... Nubian girls, who wore their hair in a million greased braids. Here the influence of the Dam faded out of sight. Forlorn trees and houses no longer crawled half out of water. Mountains crowded down to the shore, wild and dark and stately as Nubian warriors of ancient days. Then came Korosko, point of departure for the old caravan route, where kings of forgotten Egyptian dynasties sent for acacia wood, and Englishmen in the Campaign of the Cataracts fought and died; deserted now, with houses dead and decayed, their windows staring like ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... A.D. 180, to the last of the Western Caesars, A.D. 476, three centuries elapsed. The first date is a real point of departure, the commencement of a new stage of decay in the empire. The second is a mere official record of the final disappearance of a series of phantom sovereigns, whose vanishing was hardly noticed. Between these limits the empire passed from the autumnal calm of the Antonine period, through the dreadful ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... telling consideration in Benton's favor was the general demand, in which he himself joined, for the immediate organization of the western territory in order to facilitate the building of a system of railways reaching the Pacific, with St. Louis as the point of departure. For a time, in 1859, and 1853, Benton was apparently triumphant, and Atchison was himself willing to consent to the organization of the new territory with slavery excluded. The national leaders, however, were not ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy

... two extremes; now let us return to our point of departure, and the first question to be asked is, "What are the traditions of our people?" This nation is not as it was one hundred and thirty-odd years ago when we asserted the traditional right of Anglo-Saxons to rebel against injustice. We have ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... interest are the verses entitled 'Rousseau', whose neglected grave (he died in 1778) is made the point of departure for a vigorous denunciation of the bigotry that had driven him from place to place and denied him peace among the living. The poem foresees a time when streams of blood shall flow for the honor of calling him son. There is no ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... arrived home, my housekeeper screamed as I entered, and fled away. And when I rang, I found the housemaid had likewise fled. I investigated. In the kitchen I found the cook on the point of departure. But she screamed, too, and in her haste dropped a suitcase of her personal belongings and ran out of the house and across the grounds, still screaming. I can hear her scream to this day. You see, we did not act in this way when ordinary diseases smote us. We were always calm over such ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London

... concealed himself in a place, and darkness protected him until the opening of the city gate, when he went out with the people and hastening his march he arrived at Aleppo and entered the great mosk. There he saw a crod of strangers on the point of departure and Attaf asked them whither they were going, and they answered, To Baghdad. Whereupon he cried, And I with you. They said, Upon the earth is our weight, but upon Allah is our nourishment. Then they went on their march until they arrived at Koufa after a travel of twenty days, and then continued ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... possible to construct a history of Persian painting. Until quite lately all attempts were frustrated by what is sure to frustrate the attempts of the first historians of any "school" or "slope," or, for that matter, of any subject whatever—a false point of departure. So long as it was supposed that Behzad was the first mature master of Persian painting, Persian art-historians were as inevitably out in their conjectures as were the people who used to believe that Raphael was what they would have called "the ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... he, as she was on the point of departure. "I may want to speak to you again. I mun know where to find ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell

... above them through their special telescopes, seeking some hint of the location of the point of departure of that devastating column of light. He could think of no ray that would nullify gravitation—yet that column of light had been the visual manifestation that the thing had somehow been ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks

... and found his other guests, too, on the point of departure. But the last had scarcely left before a ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... dinner or supper is to be immediately set before him. Their love of entertaining strangers is carried to such a length, that not long ago, when a Christian silversmith, who came from Jerusalem to work for the ladies, and who, being an industrious man, seldom stirred out of his shop, was on the point of departure after a two months residence, each of the principal families of the town sent him a lamb, saying that it was not just that he should lose his due, though he did not choose to come and dine with them. The more a man expends ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... ideas had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In music we see the point of departure where art leaves the domain of myths, Christian as well as Pagan, and occupies itself with the emotional activity of man alone, and for its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected from words, are capable of receiving most varied interpretations, so that the same combinations ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds

... fundamental symptoms of mental diseases as a point of departure, let us consider the cases of Mohammed, Jesus, and Moses, three of the most influential prophets ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... suggesting that if Miss Pontifex had known how large the sum would become she would have left the greater part of it to Theobald. This compromise was accepted by Christina who forthwith, ill as she was, entered with ardour into the new position, and taking it as a fresh point of departure, began ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... of painting the note of realism is naturally still more universally apparent; but as in the work of the painters of decoration it is often most noticeable as an undertone, indicating a point of departure rather than an aim. Bonvin is a realist only as Chardin, as Van der Meer of Delft, as Nicholas Maes were, before the jargon of realism had been thought of. He is, first of all, an exquisite artist, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... received my license, so as to take advantage of the escort of some of the deputies with whom I had a slight acquaintance. I also hoped to avoid M. de Lamont's leave-takings, but I was not fortunate enough to do this. The absurd man, learning that I was on the point of departure, came rushing headlong into the court where the carriages stood, having first disordered his hair and untied his scarf, so as to give himself a distracted appearance, and thus he threw himself on his knees between me and the coach door, ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge

... now was the trail? He dismounted, and leaned over the edge of the precipice; and there he discovered that he had missed the exact point of departure by some fifteen yards, and that at this distance to his left there was a break in the sharp brink, where the trail fell off precipitately to a heap of broken stone and sand. The cliff had been shattered in some convulsion of nature, or loosened and disintegrated by the elements, and ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham

... which Melville took upon himself to teach, in order to train future teachers, was the point of departure of the courses in all the Universities during the second period. With variations of time and place, the Arts' course may be described as made up of the Greek and Latin classics, with Rhetoric, Logic, and Dialectics, Moral Philosophy, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain

... even his own amendment did not satisfy him. He amended the amendment by further proposing that the Irish Legislature should not be allowed even to "discuss" any of these questions. The speech in favour of these proposals started from the point of departure common to all the Unionists, namely, that the Irish people were hereditary and irreconcilable enemies, and that the moment they had a native Legislature, it would immediately proceed to make alliances with every Power in the world which ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... and the zoological garden are always centers of interest to little children and may be used to great advantage to furnish the point of departure in the study of animal life. Making the animals in some form crystallizes the interest in the animals represented, and awakens interest in their habits ...
— Primary Handwork • Ella Victoria Dobbs

... on the point of departure when through the open doorway which communicated with the baccarat rooms beyond came a man of sufficiently arresting personality, a man remarkably fat, with close-cropped grey hair which stuck up like bristles all over his head; a huge, clean-shaven ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... parts, repeating the same movements to obtain the same result. The finality it understands best is the finality of our industry, in which we work on a model given in advance, that is to say, old or composed of elements already known. As to invention properly so called, which is, however, the point of departure of industry itself, our intellect does not succeed in grasping it in its upspringing, that is to say, in its indivisibility, nor in its fervor, that is to say, in its creativeness. Explaining it always consists in resolving it, it the unforeseeable ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson

... off; in fact, the fatigue of progressing over them was simply overpowering. Having climbed up half-a-dozen steps among the loose cutting stones, we felt ourselves sliding back to almost our original point of departure, followed by a small avalanche of shifting material that only stopped when it got to ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... that experience if it is really to have meaning. At least half of the young citizens of America live in an environment that is essentially rural. Hence their need for civics instruction that takes its point of departure in, and refers back to, a body of experience that differs in many ways from that of the ...
— Community Civics and Rural Life • Arthur W. Dunn

... laughter. Now, if I had turned to them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them. Which brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the futility ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... and the illustrious and impossible Maskwell were found 'old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails.' An audience, whatever its epoch, wants action; and still action, and again and for the last time action; also it wants a point of departure that shall be something tinctured with humanity, a touch of the human in the term of everything, and at least a 'sort of a kind of a strain' of humanity in the progress of events from the one point to the other. This it gets in Wycherley, brute as he is; with ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... last of these three men who stands in the attitude of full and true appreciation. The first of the three uses the picture simply as a point of departure; his thought travels away from the canvas, and he builds up the entire experience out of his own knowledge and store of associations. The second man comes a little nearer to appreciation, but even he falls ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes

... go back to our point of departure, and draw our conclusions. Why do you think it so improbable and impossible that the countess Claudieuse should have betrayed her duties? Because she has a world-wide reputation for purity and prudence. Well. ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau

... deep interest in the animal kingdom gave Miss Bailey the point of departure for which she had been seeking. She abandoned Wordsworth and Shelley, and she bought a rabbit and a pair of white mice. The First Reader Class was enchanted. A canary in a gilded cage soon hung before the window and "scupped" most energetically while gold-fish in their bowl swam lazily ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly

... emphasis that we now lay on the Logos doctrine, in that period it was the centre, the vital germ of the whole Christian teaching. If we read any of the writings of Athanasius, or of any of the older church fathers, we shall be surprised to see how all of them begin with the Word (Logos) as a fixed point of departure, and then proceed to prove that the Word is the Son of God, and finally that the Son of God is Jesus of Nazareth. Religious and philosophical are here closely related. If the Christian philosophers gain on the one hand the divinity of ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... redeemed to the civilization of Europe, but holding in its remoter depths a genuine relic of the old barbarism. The Goerlitz Railway skirts this forest for twenty-five miles before reaching Luebben, some two hours from Berlin in a southerly direction. This is the best point of departure from the train for a visit to the forest, which is cut by more than two hundred arms of the Spree, some parts of the wood only to be reached by boats or skates. Here, in their villages reclaimed from the swamps, live the descendants of the aboriginal ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... must be made before this goal was reached! No matter! Now that she had a positive and fixed point of departure, she felt that she possessed enough energy to sustain her in her endeavors for years, if need be. What troubled her most was that she could not logically explain the conduct of her enemies from the time M. de Fondege had asked her hand for his son up to the ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... Chronologically the point of departure for such a study as this is the decade from 1880 to 1890. This is only an approximation but it will do. It was a particularly decorous decade. There was no fighting save on the outposts of colonial empires, the little wars of Soldiers Three and Barrack Room Ballads—too far away for their ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins

... long-deferred hope; the other, what he had seen and heard at his mother's. In the relief of having this companion, and of feeling that he could trust him, he passed on to both, and both brought him round again, with an increase and acceleration of force, to his point of departure. ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... prepared to devise and control means to carry these judgments into effect. Here he approaches the problems of statescraft. He must have in his mind a general scheme of government, with a sense of legislative, judicial and executive functions. He must realize the value of a constitution, as a point of departure; and have a theory as to safe ways of modifying it. He must have fairly clear notions of legislation, and of the kinds of laws that are desirable and effective. He should know how far representative ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... over, he opened a book about the size of an atlas, dipped a pen in an inkstand, recorded my point of departure—Cologne, and my point of arrival—Paris; dried the inscription with a pinch of black sand filched from a saucer—same old black sand used in the last century—cut a section of the page with a pair of shears, tossed the coin in the air, listened ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... circular letters. These, begun on great sheets of paper, at either end of the line, were passed along from one to another, each one adding his or her budget of news to the general stock. When the filled sheet reached the last person for whom it was intended, it was finally remailed to its point of departure. Except in the cases of Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Perkins, the simple address "Rev. Mr. Beecher" was sufficient to insure its safe delivery in any town ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... character of amendment. Efforts to defeat it in the courts. Unusual course taken by Supreme Court. Discussion of its true place in the development of American constitutional law. Less a point of departure than a spectacular manifestation of a change already under way. Effect of the change on the principle of ...
— Our Changing Constitution • Charles Pierson

... and announced that their friends from the earth would be leaving next day, and he trusted that all who could do so would attend at our point of departure to give us a ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... not his major concern, numbering only twenty-four original pieces and eighteen translations, it had a surprising effect upon his followers. It marked a point of departure, a reaction against both the too-polished and over-rhetorical verse of his immediate predecessors and the dehumanized mysticism of many of his associates. In that memorable preface to his Poems he wrote ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various

... the Austrians vainly made every effort to retake captured positions. An Austrian column attempted a surprise attack against Italian lines east of Hill 652 on the Vodice. It was counterattacked and driven back to its point of departure, which was then carried and held by Italian troops. East of Plava the Italians extended their ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... to leave Ste. Anne de Beaupre, twenty miles east of Quebec, instead of Ste. Anne on the Ottawa, the usual point of departure. We had not our full complement of men. Some of the Indians and half-breeds had gone northwest overland through the bush to a point on the Ottawa River north of Chaudiere Falls, where they were awaiting us, and Hamilton, through the courtesy of my uncle, was able to come with us ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... is, indeed, hardly possible to over-appreciate their value in this point of view. Every well-determined star, from the moment its place is registered, becomes to the astronomer, the geographer, the navigator, the surveyor, a point of departure which can never deceive or fail him, the same for ever and in all places, of a delicacy so extreme as to be a test for every instrument yet invented by man, yet equally adapted for the most ordinary purposes; as available for regulating a town clock as for conducting ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball

... he called a day or two afterwards. The captain was out, but, encouraged by Mr. Tasker, who represented that his return might be looked for at any moment, he waited for over an hour, and was on the point of departure when Miss Drewitt entered. ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... from confirming this idea. When he shakes the body, the others imitate him and push, but without combining their efforts in a given direction, for, after advancing a little towards the edge of the brick, the burden goes back again, returning to the point of departure. In the absence of any concerted understanding, their efforts of leverage are wasted. Nearly three hours are occupied by oscillations which mutually annul one another. The Mouse does not cross the little sand-hill heaped about it by ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... further additions might be erected. When the excrescences fell off, I thought, this Hermon, his shadow Soteles, and the others who follow him will perhaps open new paths to the declining art which is constantly going back to former days. Our time will become the point of departure of a new art. But for that very reason, let me confess it, I regret to see you fall back from your bold advance. You now claim for your work that it cleaves strictly to Nature, because the model is taken from life itself. It does ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... an island does so; one of the most effective of the common forms in legend is the arrival of a boat with a precious cargo from a distant land, often bringing corn to stay a famine, and every one is now familiar with the opening of Lohengrin. Tunis would not do for the point of departure, not only because it is where pagan Astarte came from when she arrived in Sicily, but also because it had been Moslem since the seventh century and could not have been accepted by the people as a Christian seaport. ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones

... blamed fog is so thick. What's that over there?" We zigzagged back and forth for some time and then realized that we had missed it and must go back to the vessel and get our inner buoy. This seemed easy, but we found that it is as important to have a point of departure as it is to have a destination, and not knowing just where we were we could not head our boat to where the vessel was. We shouted, and listened, rowed this way and that way but not a sound came to us through the fog, although we knew that the boy must be ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober

... difficult work, there is always the difficulty of difficulties, that of inducing the child to lend himself to all this endeavor, and to second the master, and not show himself recalcitrant to the efforts made on his behalf. For this reason the moral education is the point of departure; before all things, it is necessary to discipline the class. The pupils must be induced to second the master's efforts, if not by love, then by force. Failing this point of departure, all education and instruction would be impossible, and the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... Modern historians at first placed their mythical birthplace in the wilder regions of Central Asia, near the Oxus and the Jaxartes, and not far from the so-called table-land of Pamir, which they regarded as the original point of departure of the Indo-European races. They believed that a large body of these primitive Aryans must have descended southwards into the basin of the Indus and its affluents, and that other detachments had installed themselves ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... is intended rather to give an account of the present status of the subject, and to place before the workers in this field of scholarship the data now existing and the conclusions already reached, so as to constitute a point of departure for new work. With this end in view Mr. Pilling is engaged upon the bibliography of the subject and is rapidly publishing the same, and Mr. Henshaw is employed on the tribal synonymy. Altogether it is hoped that ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various

... into the historical origin of Freemasonry, as a necessary introduction to any inquiry into the character of its symbolism. To do this, with any expectation of rendering justice to the subject, it is evident that I shall have to take my point of departure at a very remote era. I shall, however, review the early and antecedent history of the institution with as much brevity as a distinct understanding of the subject ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... purpose, lucidity of relation, yet diversity for stimulation and totality. There must be a selective scheme to absorb what is congenial and reject the unfit. This sense for form in life may lead to the same results as morality, but the point of departure and the sanction are different. Morality is largely based on conformity, on submission to the general will, and is rendered effective by fear of public disapproval and supernatural taboos; while the aesthetic direction of life has its roots in the love of form and meaning, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... say something handsome about himself, as a fit chronicler of such brilliant deeds. As he got near his point of departure, he threw in a word for his native town of Miletus, adding that he was thus improving on Homer, who never so much as mentioned his birthplace. And he concluded his preface with a plain express promise to advance our cause and personally wage war against ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata

... his reasonable way of telling it. Moreover, he was a discoverer, an innovator, a maker of new types, since he was the first to introduce in his stories the blend of calm, logical science and wild fancy of a terrifying order; so he served as an inspiration as well as a point of departure for Jules Verne and other writers ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... the one we had marked as our point of departure, and, Saturday being wash-day, there was nothing suspicious in the fact that we had hung our clothes there to dry. They ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung

... call you in the morning, for the only stage, they say, "Just as it happens;" (indeed, it was only by accident that the stage-driver discovered he had one more trunk than his complement of passengers, and so awoke me just as the coach was on the point of departure;) if you can submit to all this, then, reader, go to Twelve-Mile ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens

... possibilities discovered through other clubs, in one of Greek women or in the "circolo Italiano," for a social club often affords a sheltered space in which the gentler social usages may be exercised, as the more vigorous clubs afford a point of departure into larger social concerns. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, philosophy took a new point of departure among the Italians, and all the fundamental ideas which have since formed the staple of modern European systems were anticipated by a few obscure thinkers. It is noticeable that the States of Naples, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella

... door, just as they were on the point of departure, Meg paused. "You must enjoy having her all to yourself for a little while," she said in honeyed, sympathetic tones such as Hugo, certainly, had never heard from her before. "I fear we've been rather selfish about it, ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker

... hacked and hewn by ferocious hordes of dervishes. Major-General Sir Herbert H. Kitchener had so managed that the decisive blow should be delivered in the most effective manner. Stage by stage he had moved forward and improved his lines of communication. The advanced base, or point of departure for the campaign, was no longer Wady Halfa, or Korti in the province of Dongola, as in 1884, but Dakhala. Nay, with the unassailable power and command of the Nile his flotilla gave him, it might be said the real base of the Sirdar's army was where he chose to fix it, ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... is a subtle criticism. The man oppressed by material wants is not in the best of moods for the more ambitious forms of moral adventure. He not only lacks the means; he is also deficient in the self-assurance, the sense of superiority, the secure and lofty point of departure. If he is haunted by notions of the sinfulness of his neighbours, he is apt to see some of its worst manifestations within himself, and that disquieting discovery will tend to take his thoughts from the other fellow. It is by no arbitrary ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... fundamental tone, the tonic. The tonic is the beginning and lowest note in the scale in question, and all notes and chords are understood according to their place in that scale. But the conception of the scale of course does not cover the ground, it merely furnishes the point of departure,— the essential is in the reference of every element to the fundamental tone. The tonic is the centre ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... was a man, not a God. And here again is another point of departure from Brahmanism. In that system, the final result of devotion was to become absorbed in God. The doctrine of the Brahmans is divine absorption; that of the Buddhists, human development. In the Brahmanical system, God is everything ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... Colonel, pushing his belt closer about his hips, as a soldier always does when he is on the point of departure, "what he says is true, every word of it. I see nothing more ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... the light of faith to those regions. It will, therefore, be one of the memories of my life most dear to me that I had the blessing of taking part in the famous Pilgrimage to Iona on June 13th, 1888. The town of Oban, on the mainland of Scotland, is generally made the point of departure for Iona, which ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir

... does when they are lacking. The first effect of these feelings, these few sensations, is the association of their traces, left behind in the central nervous system, with inborn movements. Those traces or central impressions develop gradually the personal memory. These movements are the point of departure for the primitive activity of the intellect, which separates the sensations both in time and in space. When the number of the memory-images, of distinct sensations, on the one hand, on the other, of the movements that have ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... took her first to Spirit River Crossing, the point of departure for "outside" where she discharged her fur and took on supplies for the posts further up-stream. Proceeding up to Cardigan and Fort Cheever, she got their fur and brought it back to the Crossing. Then, putting on supplies for Fort Enterprise, ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner

... A point of departure for very much thinking in this matter is the recent speech of President Wilson that heralded the present discussion. All Europe was impressed by the truth, and by President Wilson's recognition of the truth, ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... I do suggest that there have been throughout the whole Archipelago various movements of peoples, some of which may have been relatively pure communities of these two races. There can be little doubt that we must look to the neighbouring regions of the mainland of Asia for their immediate point of departure southwards, for we now know that two similar races have inhabited this area from a remote antiquity. The light- (or light-brown) skinned dolichocephals of south-east Asia, assuming for the present that they are all of one race, have frequently been termed Caucasians — for the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... railway, and about half a mile short of Lymington, is a fine circular prehistoric entrenchment called Buckland Rings. The road now drops to the one-time parliamentary borough and ancient port of Lymington, now only known to the majority as the point of departure by the "short sea route" to the Isle of Wight, and those who make the passage when the tide is out do not usually regret the shortness of their stay on this particular bit of coast. But their self-congratulation is wasted, Lymington itself is a very pleasant and clean town, even if its shore is a ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes

... large body of the Upper Sioux. An expedition against them was devised by General Pope, to be commanded by General Sibley. It was to assemble at a point near the mouth of the Redwood river, some twenty-five miles above Fort Ridgely. On the 7th of June, 1863, General Sibley arrived at the point of departure, which was named Camp Pope, in honor of the commanding general. The force composing the expedition was as follows: One company of pioneers, under Captain Chase; ten companies of the Sixth Regiment, under Colonel Crooks; eight ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau

... shrill whistle, made a run for the lift and caught it just on the point of departure. The lift was unlit and full of black shadows; only the sapper who conducted it was distinct. As Lewisham peered doubtfully at the dim faces near him, a girl's voice addressed him ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells

... next the skin. Everything else—the supply of the larder, with an excellent cook, beds, and so forth—would be found amply provided by De Aery and himself for the comfort and accommodation of their guests. The station, or point of departure, Mr. Bonflon informed me, was a retired spot but a few miles out of the city of Baltimore; and he promised to be at hand at the proper time to accompany me in person, and see me safely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... felt that the frail edifice of her hope had been crushed into ten thousand atoms. For all this, however, she did not lose courage. She was not one of those women who, at the first check, beat a retreat. She had not yet decided upon a fresh point of departure, but she had fully made up her mind that she would gain the victory. The first thing was to see Norbert with as little delay as possible. Just then the carriage pulled up at the widow's ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau

... to think that if I get into a dhow I will be sure to burn it. As the two dhows on the Lake are used for nothing else but the slave-trade, their owners have no hope of my allowing them to escape, so after we have listened to various lies as excuses, we resolve to go southwards, and cross at the point of departure of the Shire from the Lake. I took lunars several times on both sides of the moon, and have written a despatch for Lord Clarendon, besides ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone

... featherless wing. See them stretched haphazard in the sun without distinction of species, swelling themselves with milk or meal, and dare to say that they are not alike. Who knows whether all these children of nature have not a common point of departure, if they are not brothers ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz

... words of the group may be referred. The great source of vagueness, error, and perplexity in many discussions of synonyms is, that the writer merely associates stray ideas loosely connected with the different words, sliding from synonym to synonym with no definite point of departure or return, so that a smooth and at first sight pleasing statement really gives the mind no definite resting-place and no sure conclusion. A true discussion of synonyms is definition by comparison, and for this there must be something definite with which to compare. When the standard is settled, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald

... Bennet chatted pleasantly about his bees for an hour, and would, I believe, have gossiped all day, notwithstanding that he had so little time for anything. Nothing more was said about the delayed visit, but just as we were on the point of departure, and Cicely had already taken the reins, he said to her, as if it were an afterthought, 'Tell your mother, I s'pose I must look down that ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies

... spends his time on his head mistake. Milton and Mantegna were intellectual artists: it may be doubted whether Caravaggio and Rostand were artists at all. An intellectual artist is one who feels first—a peculiar state of emotion being the point of departure for all works of art—and goes on to think. Obviously Picasso has a passionate sense of the significance of form; also, he can stand away from his passion and consider it; apparently in this detached mood ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell

... two agents were continued all over the house; but their most minute researches resulted in discovering absolutely nothing; not one piece of evidence to convict; not the faintest indication which might serve as a point of departure. Even the dead woman's papers, if she possessed any, had disappeared. Not a letter, not a scrap of paper even, to be met with. From time to time Gevrol stopped to swear or grumble. "Oh! it is cleverly done! It is a tiptop piece of work! The ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau

... others in their confusion of dates, we find ourselves provided with a satisfactory point of departure and with some facts well defined. The drift of Provencal ideas over the borders into Lombardy may or may not have given some impetus to the growth of certain forms in Tuscany and Umbria, but at any rate it is clear that the Italian form of "Sacre Rappresentazioni" grew chiefly out ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson

... establishment for which he had paid three quarters of the price down, he had the right to view, and did view, the future in glowing colors; all the more when he measured the path which led from his original point of departure. Roguin, notary of Ragon, who had drawn up the marriage contract, gave the new perfumer some sound advice, and prevented him from paying the whole purchase money down with the fortune ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac

... delicate instances than these. In the choruses of Samson Agonistes, where he reaches the top of his skill, Milton varies even the length of the line. So he has hardly a rule left, save the iambic pattern, which he treats merely as a point of departure or reference, a background or framework to carry the variations imposed upon it by the luxuriance of a perfectly controlled art. The great charm of the metre of Wither, which Charles Lamb admired and imitated, ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... lodger. A wedding is a great human event. To the principals the event becomes the pivot of existence; to the relatives and friends it is at once the consummation of a series of happenings that have absorbed their anxious and amused attention, and the point of departure for a new phase of existence offering infinite possibilities in the way of speculation. But even for the casual onlooker a wedding furnishes a pleasant arrest of the ordinary course of life, and lets in ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor

... noble language to the rapid reporter of news for an apathetic public. Further, he discovered in astonishment the subordination of all literary Americans to the decrees of their literary authorities; marking a Transatlantic point of departure, and contrasting ominously with the unruly Islanders 'grunting the higgledy-piggledy of their various ways, in all the porker's gut-gamut at the rush to the trough.' After a week's privation of bat and ball, he is, lighted or not, a gas-jet of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... yet more apparent. The two squadrons of the 5th Lancers, who were on the left, drew back over the plain, whilst the 19th Hussars retraced their path under the ridges, both rejoining General French under the lee of Lombards Kop, north of Gun Hill and of their original point of departure. French immediately threw his command forward again, and his two regiments, with some of the Natal Carbineers, all dismounted, crowned the high ridges running northward and downward from the summit of Lombards Kop, and were soon deep in action with superior ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice

... business of a soldier was to be as useful to his country and as destructive to the enemy as possible, and not to make needless exhibitions of personal foolhardiness. Thus swings the pendulum as to danger and fear. The point of departure, the primary ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... plays—is arbitrary and mostly a matter of convenience. Some division was necessary, and it seemed advantageous to present introductions which could use Johnson's reaction to comedy, tragedy, and history plays—and Shakespeare's comedies, tragedies, and histories—as a point of departure. Were the notes reprinted in the order of appearance of the plays one would find Macbeth, coming after The Winter's Tale (the last of the comedies), introducing the history plays. Since Johnson had written Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... formulated, and that in his imagination it had assumed colossal proportions. He says: "'La Peau de Chagrin' is the formula of human life, an abstraction made from individualities, and, as M. Ballanche says, everything in it is myth and allegory. It is therefore the point of departure for my work. Afterwards individualities and particular existences, from the most humble to those of the King and of the Priest, the highest expressions of our society, will group themselves according to their rank. In ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... man less capable of making a Rule than Francis. In reality, that of 1210 and the one which the pope solemnly approved in November 29, 1223, had little in common except the name. In the former all is alive, free, spontaneous; it is a point of departure, an inspiration; it may be summed up in two phrases: the appeal of Jesus to man, "Come, follow me," the act of man, "He left all and followed him." To the call of divine love man replies by the joyful gift of himself, and that quite naturally, by a sort of instinct. At this height of mysticism any ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... excellent description of Indian customs. It was also the means of composing a dangerous quarrel between the Hurons and the Algonquins. Once committed to spending the winter among the Indians, Champlain planned to make Huronia a point of departure for still further explorations to the westward. Early in 1616 there seemed to be a favourable opportunity to push forward in the direction of Lake Superior. Then came this wretched brawl of Hurons and ...
— The Founder of New France - A Chronicle of Champlain • Charles W. Colby

... seal-skin sack and arctics; besides four small boys' hats and coats and arctics. It seemed as if some modern Elijah, a family man, expectant of translation, had made with thrifty forethought an "arrangement" that Mr. Isaacs's shop should be the point of departure, and flying off in joyous haste, with wife and children, had left the general raiment on the counter. You would naturally have looked for a ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin

... a moral phenomenon. Riot is Masaniello; insurrection, Spartacus. Insurrection borders on mind, riot on the stomach; Gaster grows irritated; but Gaster, assuredly, is not always in the wrong. In questions of famine, riot, Buzancais, for example, holds a true, pathetic, and just point of departure. Nevertheless, it remains a riot. Why? It is because, right at bottom, it was wrong in form. Shy although in the right, violent although strong, it struck at random; it walked like a blind elephant; it left behind it ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... women of no age before or since have possessed, were, above all women, great and heroic lovers, and that those two fundamental facts cannot be cut asunder. But this failure, temporary as it is doubtless destined to be, will work for good if it is the point of departure for a revival among men of the ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... They were on the point of departure, when a letter from Philip required them to remain at their posts. Contrary to their expectation, the king promised to support England in insisting on the restoration, and his own commissioners were instructed equally to agree to nothing unless ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude

... they had sunk large sums of money there. The business alliance between the two men added to the belief that Bailey knew something of the looting. His unexplained absence from the bank on Monday lent color to the suspicion against him. The strange thing seemed to be his surrendering himself on the point of departure. To me, it seemed the shrewd calculation of a clever rascal. I was not actively antagonistic to Gertrude's lover, but I meant to be convinced, one way or the other. I took no ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... defined limits of the city, the neighbourhood of St. Paul's, Fleet Street, the Strand and Covent Garden, the explorer of the inns and taverns of old London may encircle the metropolis from any given point and find something of interest everywhere. Such a point of departure may be made, for example, in the parish of Lambeth, where, directly opposite the Somerset House of to-day, once stood the Feathers Tavern connected with Cuper's Gardens. The career of that resort was materially interfered with by the passing of an act in 1752 for the regulation ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley

... whom I would naturally pay, and pay well, out of my own pocket, feed and clothe, during the entire time the expedition lasted, as well as pay all their expenses back and wages up to the day of reaching their original point of departure. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... important for our purposes as an indication of the rising mood of the times and an emerging awareness of the physiochemical analysis of biological systems. Although this mood and awareness coexist in Browne's writings with a continued reverence for some traditional attitudes, they mark a point of departure toward a variety of embryological thought prominent in England during the second ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer

... St. Helena. There he spent the last seven years of his life. He tried to write his memoirs, he quarrelled with his keepers and he dreamed of past times. Curiously enough he returned (at least in his imagination) to his original point of departure. He remembered the days when he had fought the battles of the Revolution. He tried to convince himself that he had always been the true friend of those great principles of "Liberty, Fraternity and Equality" which the ragged soldiers of the convention ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon

... generalization that these are not fixed because racial characteristics, but variable ones dependent on the social order. Many years ago when the late Dr. Neesima, the founder, with Dr. Davis, of the Doshisha, was on the point of departure for the United States on account of his health, he made an address to the students. In the course of his remarks he stated that there were three principal considerations that made him regret the necessity ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... of the remotest future to the track of their childrens' children. Can you make an angle of a single degree's subtension in the hereditary conditions of these generations, or a dozen beyond? Can you detect a point of departure by which the second generation would have diverged from the first, or the third from the second, and have attained to a higher life of comfort, intelligence, social and political position had they remained ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... to get her going," Peter apologized to himself, "in order to get a point of departure. Not if I vote for women, Beulah, dear," he ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... consequence of the chronometer's having thus accedentally stoped, I determined to come too at the first convenient place and make such observations as were necessary to ascertain her error, establish the Latitude & Longitude, and determine the variation of the nedle, in order to fix a second point of departure. ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... up a considerable space; for although it was perfectly calm, a breeze might arise. And what with these and the pole for punting occasionally, the deck of the vessel was in that approved state of confusion which always characterises a ship on the point of departure. Nor must Orion's fishing-rod and gear be forgotten, nor the cigar-box at the stern (a present from the landlady at the inn) which contained a chart of the mere ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... by Sieur du Monts in Normandy. In a word all the gardens of the place were in an admirably fine condition, being planted with peas, beans, and other vegetables, also squashes, and very superior radishes of various sorts, cabbages, beets, and other kitchen vegetables. When on the point of departure, we left two of our fathers at the settlement; namely, Fathers Jean d'Olbeau and Pacifique, [199] who were greatly pleased with all the time spent at that place, and resolved to await there the return of Father Joseph, [200] who was expected to ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain V3 • Samuel de Champlain

... Judaism, in consequence of inner and outer developments, then reached a point at which it must either altogether cease to grow or burst its shell. This community is the presupposition of the history of dogma, and the position which it took up towards the Jewish tradition is, strictly speaking, the point of departure for all further developments, so far as with the removal of all national and ceremonial peculiarities it proclaimed itself to be what the Jewish Church wished to be. We find the Christian Church ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... mariner in coming to this coast from beyond the seas is to run his ship so that on arrival, if after dark, he shall see the proper coast-light in fair weather, and, if in thick weather, that he shall hear fog-signal, and, taking that as a point of departure, to feel his way from the coast-light to the harbor-light, or from the fog-signal on the coast to the fog-signal in the harbor, and thence to his anchorage or his wharf. And the custom of the coaster or ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various

... That Chopin did not repeat himself is an artistic miracle. A subtle turn takes us off the familiar road to some strange glade, wherein the flowers are rare in scent and odor. This Mazurka, like the one that follows, has a dim resemblance to others, yet there is always a novel point of departure, a fresh harmony, a sudden melody or an unexpected ending. Hadow, for example, thinks the A flat of this opus the most beautiful of them all. In it he finds legitimately used the repetition in various shapes of a single phrase. To me this Mazurka seems ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... African civilization essentially different from European: not inferior, but different. The culture which the blacks have acquired, or may attain in further contact with foreign influence, will be used as a point of departure in future intelligent development along lines following the characteristics of the race. This tendency to differentiate he regards as natural and inevitable; it ought to be recognized and encouraged in every way, that the ...
— History of Liberia - Johns Hopkins University Studies In Historical And Political Science • J.H.T. McPherson

... with the furs of the American Fur Company. They started with the annual flood, and, drawing but nine inches water, hoped to make a speedy and prosperous voyage to St. Louis; but, after a lapse of forty days, found themselves only one hundred and thirty miles from their point of departure. They came down rapidly as far as Scott's bluffs, where their difficulties began. Sometimes they came upon places where the water was spread over a great extent, and here they toiled from morning until night, endeavoring ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont

... further trouble. As it was, the message in which Captain Wilson took such pride, reached Mrs. Gething just as Mr. Glover—who had been sitting in her parlor all the afternoon, listening as patiently as he could to her somewhat uninteresting conversation—was on the point of departure. The effect on him was hardly less marked than on his hostess, and he went on his way to the railway station in a condition in which rage and jealousy strove for the mastery. All the way to town he pondered over ways and means to wrest from his rival the prize which ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs

... reached by rail. It cannot be called a convenient centre, for one returns to centres, and Croydon has little that would recall a traveller. But it is an easy point of departure either for the country east, by Addington and the Kentish border, or south through Sanderstead to Coulsdon and Chaldon, or west by Beddington and the Carshalton trout ponds to Epsom. You may walk in any direction, except ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... staircase which led to the box above. She thought she heard voices, and stopping at the door, listened. Perhaps Crewe had come down or the colonel. But it was not Crewe's voice she heard. The door was slightly ajar, and the man who was talking was evidently on the point of departure, because she glimpsed his hand upon the handle and his voice was so distinct that he must have been quite ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace

... hearts of thickets of spruce-tuck and alder. He investigated frozen swamps, wooded slopes, rocky knolls and hummocks, and gazed down through black ice at the brown waters of frozen ponds. He carried on his search scientifically, taking his camp as a point of departure and moving away from it in ever widening and lengthening curves. He found the shed antlers of a stag, the barrel of an old, long-lost sealing gun, the skeleton of a caribou, and the bones of a fox with one shank still gripped in the jaws of a rusty ...
— The Harbor Master • Theodore Goodridge Roberts

... mile down the stream, without finding shallow water, and, then coming back, discovered the ford only a hundred yards above his original point of departure. The water here ran over rocks, and, for a space of ten or fifteen yards, it was not more than four feet deep. The Indians undoubtedly knew of this ford, and here they ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler

... into a second volume,—but I am going to send this letter to town by Mr. Witherspoon, who, in a very high collar and the blackest of evening clothes, is on the point of departure for a barn dance at the country club. I told him to pick out the nicest girls he danced with to come and tell stories to ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... for this particular task. After seven years' experience in border warfare he was as skilled in woodcraft as the Indians themselves. He had now to lead a force over the road, two hundred odd miles long, which connected Fort Pitt with Carlisle, his point of departure in Pennsylvania; but every foot of the road was known to him. In 1758, when serving under General Forbes, he had directed the construction of this road, and knew the strength of every fort and block-house on the way; even the rivers and creeks and morasses and defiles were familiar ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... certain things that Christ forgot to say. I take historic Christianity with all its sins upon its head; I take it, as I would take Jacobinism, or Mormonism, or any other mixed or unpleasing human product, and I say that the meaning of its action was not to be found in asceticism. I say that its point of departure from Paganism was not asceticism. I say that its point of difference with the modern world was not asceticism. I say that St. Simeon Stylites had not his main inspiration in asceticism. I say that the main Christian impulse cannot be described ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... fiacre on the point of departure, having just set down a fare, he made a sign to the ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac

... Reden Schleiermacher had contended that religion is a condition of devout feeling, specifically the feeling of dependence upon God. This view dominates his treatment of Christianity. It gives him his point of departure. A Christian is possessed of the devout feeling of dependence upon God through Jesus Christ or, as again he phrases it, of dependence upon Christ. Christianity is a positive religion in the sense that it has direct relation to certain facts in the history of the race, most ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... authority. In studying the etiology of diseases we have, as a rule, been content to accept the disease when fully formed and properly labeled, being apparently satisfied with beginning our investigation not at the initial point of departure from health, but at some distant point from this, at the point where this departure has elaborated itself, on favorable ground, into a tangible general or local disease. As truthfully observed by T. Clifford Albutt: ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... necessity of adhering to careful, honest observation of mental phenomena, however homely may be the results of such observation, and the astounding conclusions to which a train of thought rigidly pursued may conduct us, if, at its very point of departure, it has broken loose from this the first obligation of philosophy. The whole career of German speculation manifests a disregard of some of those fundamental principles of human belief, which, according to M. Cousin himself, it is the peculiar merit of the Scotch to have seized ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... we arrived at our halting-place for the night and point of departure for the morrow—a hollow in the hills, hemmed in by high rocks, almost circular in shape and about a quarter of a mile in diameter. The air was motionless and the temperature mild, the ground covered with grass and shrubs and flowers, over which hovered clouds of bright-winged ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall

... Japanese met at the rendezvous, to escort the Regent's palanquin. At the point of departure Okamoto (one of the Japanese Minister's two right-hand men) "assembled the whole party outside the gate of the Prine's (Regent's) residence, declaring that on entering the palace the 'fox' should be dealt with according as exigency might require, ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie

... rapidity of the wind, for they are extremely agile. In their flight they hurled insults at the Spaniards, and they never shot an arrow that failed to hit its mark. Much depressed and inclined to abandon the country, the Spaniards returned to their point of departure, where they found the natives had destroyed the blockhouse built by Hojeda, and burned the village of thirty houses as soon as Francisco Pizarro and his companions, deserted by Hojeda, ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... at the starting-point of life, have now entered together the haven of philosophy. It is not a final haven, but only the point of departure for the field of philosophy proper. Nevertheless that field is now in the plain view of the man who occupies the practical stand-point. He must recognize in philosophy a kind of reflection that differs ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... the Earth had been Full, the Moon would have been New, that is to say, invisible to us on account of solar irradiation. Of the two it is much preferable to be able to keep the point of arrival in view rather than the point of departure." ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... thus at length on the subject of medical science, because it was chiefly in this field that progress was made in the Western world during the mediaeval period, and because these studies furnished the point of departure for the revival all along the line. It will be understood, however, from what was stated in the preceding chapter, that the Arabian influences in particular were to some extent making themselves felt along other lines. The opportunity afforded a portion of the Western ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... further extent than its consideration in this paragraph. The object held in view in giving any name to the succeeding lucubrations was merely to obtain a starting-point; it being conceded that the commencement of a tas of papers need have no greater influence on their course than the point of departure of a railroad-train exercises on its terminus and intermediate stopping-places. To resort then to my heading or its derivations for any indication of my purpose in what may follow, would be futile, and I am free to disclaim any premeditate purpose of governing ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... of his sleeve with more facility than does Strauss—and that is saying a lot. No, the style of Strauss is his own, notwithstanding his borrowings from Liszt and Wagner. He is not as original as either one, for he employs them both as his point of departure; but when you begin to measure up the power, the scope, and the versatility of his productions you are filled with a wholesale admiration for the almost incredible activity of the man, for his ambitions, his marvellous ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... philosophy and as little religion as possible. Locke played in the eighteenth century very much the part that fell to Kant in the nineteenth. When quarrelled with, no less than when embraced, his opinions became a point of departure for universal developments. The more we look into the matter, the more we are impressed by the patriarchal dignity of Locke's mind. Father of psychology, father of the criticism of knowledge, father of theoretical liberalism, god-father ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana

... "Mysticism is the philosophy of Spain.[284]" This does not mean that idealistic philosophy flourished in the Peninsula, for the Spanish race has never shown any taste for metaphysics. The Mysticism of Spain is psychological; its point of departure is not the notion of Being or of Unity, but the human soul seeking reconcilation with God. We need not be on our guard against pantheism in reading the Spanish mystics; they show no tendency to obliterate ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge

... sexual organs. She rose and ran away with a feeling of shame, though she could not comprehend what had happened. The impression thus made was so profound that it persisted throughout life and served as the point of departure of sexual perversions, while the contact of a dog's tongue with her mouth alone afterward sufficed to evoke sexual pleasure. (Fere, Archives de ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... on the 28th. On that day Francis wrote to his son-in-law: "My Brother and Dear Son-in-Law,—Count Nicolai has this moment delivered to me the two letters of Your Majesty. Since I am unwilling to delay a courier, who is on the point of departure, and will carry to Your Majesty and to the Empress the first expressions of my delight at the happy event, I postpone my formal answer to Your Majesty's invitation to hold his son at the baptismal font, but I hasten to take this opportunity to say that I ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... to a consciousness of its responsibilities and to a knowledge that it is in a moral order from which escape is forever impossible. This is our point of departure ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... troops and armaments to the Peloponnesus was scrupulously carried out under the supervision of an Allied Military Commission, which counted and examined every man, every gun, every rifle and cartridge both at the point of departure and at the point of arrival. The Reservists' leagues were dissolved, and the people, in so far as such a measure is possible, were compelled to give up the firearms, mostly obsolete, in their possession. ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... method, after having fixed a definite accepted point of departure, was to link the memory of events to a period made signal by identity of figures. Thus, he finds the fall of Assyria, the first of the Olympiads, and the building of Rome to date from about the year 777 B.C. That is his starting-point in definite chronology. Then he takes ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... all."—On the mantle of snow that swathed the balcony, the sun had appeared and was stitching seams of gold, with embroidered patches of dark shadow. That day we found no one there, or else a solitary girl, on the point of departure, who assured me that Gilberte was not coming. The chairs, deserted by the imposing but uninspiring company of governesses, stood empty. Only, near the grass, was sitting a lady of uncertain age who came in all weathers, dressed always in an identical style, splendid and sombre, to make whose acquaintance ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust



Words linked to "Point of departure" :   root, beginning, rootage, start, commencement, origin, jumping-off place, source, jumping-off point, springboard



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com