"Straightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... boxes in the front tier were already on fire, and still more were smouldering, but the straightness of the vent up which the flame was coming, together with the closeness and stillness of the vault, made the flame mount straight up as in a chimney. I therefore divined rather than saw what remained for me to do. I leaped over and began, at the risk of a severe scorching, to throw ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... come to be the intention to do what Joe told him to do: that, and to keep Claudine as straight as he could. In a measure, these were the two things that had brought him to the pass in which he now stood, his loyalty to Joe and his resentment of whatever tampered with Claudine's straightness. He was submissive to the consequences: he was still loyal. And now Joe asked him to tell "just what happened," and Happy obeyed with crystal clearness. Throughout the long, tricky cross-examination he continued to tell "just what happened" ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... for a course of action so wholly unlike any he had ever yet taken in the case of Lucy Marsham's son, Oliver's thoughts found themselves engaged in a sore and perpetual wrangle. Ferrier, he supposed, suspected him of a lack of "straightness"; and did not care to maintain an intimate relation, which had been already, and might be again, used against him. Marsham, on his side, recalled with discomfort various small incidents in the House of Commons which might have seemed—to ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in places above it) in water, and looks still as if it had been thoroughly soaked—as if it had faded and shrivelled with a long steeping. The fields and copses, of course, are more forgiving. The railway line follows as well the charming Canal du Midi, which is as pretty as a river, barring the straightness, and here and there occupies the foreground, beneath a screen of dense, tall trees, while the Garonne takes a larger and more irregular course a little way beyond it. People who are fond of canals—and, speaking from the pictorial standpoint, I hold the taste to be most legitimate—will delight ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... Beatrice's mouth were of a kind that have twisted many men's lives awry; and those men have thought straightness well lost for such red lips. Yes, Beatrice was good to look upon. She had a way of throwing her head back, and showing the smooth, round whiteness of her throat when she laughed, that had thrilled me time and again. And how often, ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... allowing for the difficulty of the march, Vane gazed at it earnestly. The trees were bare—there was no doubt of that, for the dwindling ranks, diminished by the distance, stood out against the snow-streaked rock like rows of thick needles set upright; their straightness and the way they glistened ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... of Christian charity by dealing indiscriminate condemnation against all except those who belonged to his own exclusive and somewhat ignorant school of religious intolerance. His face was the reflex of his mind; his lank black hair stuck down in stiff dry straightness over a contracted forehead and an ill-shaped head; his spectacles gave additional glassiness to a lack-lustre eye, and the manner in which he carried his chin in the air seemed like an acted representation of "I am holier ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... abundance of Gurjun (Dipterocarpus turbinatus). This is the most superb tree we met with in the Indian forests: we saw several species, but this is the only common one here; it is conspicuous for its gigantic size, and for the straightness and graceful form of its tall unbranched pale grey trunk, and small symmetrical crown: many individuals were upwards of 200 feet high, and fifteen in girth. Its leaves are broad, glossy, and beautiful; ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... overflowing with fun, came Miss Squeers's tea-drinking—the result of her suddenly falling in love with the new usher, and that chiefly by reason of the straightness of his legs, "the general run of legs at Dotheboys Hall being crooked." How John Browdie (with his hair damp from washing) appeared upon the occasion in a clean shirt—"whereof thecollars might have belonged to some giant ancestor,"—and greeted the assembled company, including his intended, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... of his wig his appearance was not so perfect. There was then a hard, long straightness about his head and face, giving to his countenance the form of a parallelogram, to which there belonged a certain meanness of expression. He wanted the roundness of forehead, the short lines, and the graceful curves of face which are necessary to unadorned manly ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa Maggiore by keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of the Via Sistina. I reached that church by quite another way after many postponements; for I thought I remembered all about it from my visit in 1864. But really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the exceptional dignity of the church, and the sole fact that the roof of its most noble ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Hear a prayer for fleetness. Keeper of the deer's way, Reared among the eagles, Clear my feet of slothness. Keeper of the paths of men, Hear a prayer for straightness. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... shadow," said his teacher; "and you will know." Liehtse turned his head and looked at his shadow. When his body was bent the shadow was crooked; when upright, it was straight. Thus it appeared that the attributes of straightness and crookedness were not inherent in the shadow, but corresponded to certain positions in the body . . . . "Holding this Theory of Consequents," says Liehtse, "is to be at home in the antecedent." ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... lessons, at any rate, had not been forgotten, and carelessness of life is certainly conducive to steadiness of nerve. Jack Vavasour, who was out one day, was under the impression she wished to break her neck. Mrs. Fane became noted in her county for going with the most unflinching straightness, but so little did she care for the reputation, that sometimes she would stick unambitiously to the roads and ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... and jerk, to his long oar, as if there were wires inside him. His grey picture-frame beard seems to have the effect of concentrating the expressiveness of his face, the satiric glint of his eyes, the dry smile, the straightness of his shaven upper lip, and the kindly lighting-up of the whole visage when he calls to the sea-gulls and they answer him back, and he says with the delight of a child, "There! Did 'ee hear thic?" ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... backward a step. Villas with the titles of royalty and bloody battles claimed five feet of garden, and swelled in bowwindows beside other villas which drew up firmly, commending to the attention a decent straightness and unintrusive decorum in preference. On an elevated meadow to the right was the Crouch. The Hall of Elba nestled among weather-beaten dwarf woods further toward the cliff. Shavenness, featurelessness, emptiness, clamminess ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... as in Figure 21 or 22. If, however, the slope be too much in the direction shown in Figure 21, practice is necessary to enable the drawing of straight lines if they be long ones, because any variation in the angle of the instrument to the paper obviously vitiates the straightness of the line. If, on the other hand, the square be too close to the line, and the pen therefore requires to be sloped as in Figure 22, the ink flowing from the pen-point is apt to adhere to the square-edge, and ...
— Mechanical Drawing Self-Taught • Joshua Rose
... that don't lick creation for smartness!" he cried. "And how are we to get to this safe? It would serve him right if we collar the lot. It'll teach him that if he ain't honest by nature he's got to be when he deals with the like of us. I like straightness, and by the Lord I'll have it!" He brought his great fist down upon the table ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... path is presented in the designation 'paths of uprightness,' which seems to be equivalent to those which belong to, or perhaps which consist of, uprightness. The idea of straightness or evenness is the primary meaning of the word, and is, of course, appropriate to the image of a path. In the moral view, it suggests how much more simple and easy a course of rectitude is than one of sin. The one goes ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... differs, according to Montano, from that of the Manbo only in one particular, namely, in the straightness of the middle part of the antero-posterior curve of the cranium. In other respects his cranium is similar to that of the Manbo. The face is oval rather than lozenge-shaped and has a pleasant, sympathetic look, due no doubt to the greater width of the palpebral opening, the largeness of ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... to swear that she was the fairest of her species. In point of fact, however, it was no less vivid to him than it had been before that he loved Dora Temperly for qualities which had nothing to do with straightness of nose or pinkness of complexion. Her figure was straight, and so was her character, but her nose was not, and Philistines and other vulgar people would have committed themselves, without a blush on their own flat faces, to the assertion that ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... tell thee. The thirst for love, without love of learning, sinks into simpleness. Love of knowledge, without love of learning, sinks into vanity. Love of truth, without love of learning, sinks into cruelty. Love of straightness, without love of learning, sinks into rudeness. Love of daring, without love of learning, sinks into turbulence. Love of strength, without love ...
— The Sayings Of Confucius • Confucius
... a sign of weakness or surrender, and the desire to cry down and hurt and demolish with argument gives rise to this kind of intellectual fireworks. These attempts of mine to establish my superiority by revilement might have occasioned me amusement to-day, had not their want of straightness and ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... favourable to a democracy destroy a democracy, and many things seemingly favourable to an oligarchy destroy an oligarchy. Those who think this the only virtue extend it to excess, not considering that as a nose which varies a little from perfect straightness, either towards a hook nose or a flat one, may yet be beautiful and agreeable to look at; but if this particularity is extended beyond measure, first of all the properties of the part is lost, but at last it can hardly be admitted to be a nose at all, on account of the excess of the rise or sinking: ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... front of us in a perfectly straight line, with neat stone borders on either side, and one got so tired of seeing that line in front of one's nose that one welcomed the smallest change—even a slight ascent or a curve—in its endless, monotonous straightness. We came by and by to a little ascent—quite steep enough for camels. We could have easily avoided it by leaving the road and making a detour at the foot of the hill close to the Afghan boundary. Some ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... every step that took him from her. But as he reached the next corner his shoulders snapped back into defiant straightness, he thrust his hands into the side pockets of his top-coat, and strode away, feeling that he had shaken off a burden of "niceness." He had, willy-nilly, recovered his freedom. He could go anywhere, now; mingle with any sort of people; be common and comfortable. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... again with this tribute to his physical straightness and bloom. Yes, he looked his part, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... one or the other, would necessitate lowering the neck end, which is not what I want to do. First the knife, then the files (coarse ones), and, little by little, I get nearer and nearer to a fit, when I try angle and the straightness of the whole with the fiddle, using compasses to measure from inner point of purfling, upper corner, to corner of fingerboard on corresponding side, with their exact counterparts on the other; and testing height of fingerboard from belly. This ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... experience in the first instance, to attain to the notion of whole and part; but the notion, once arrived at, implies that the whole is greater. In fact, we could not have the notion without an experience tantamount to this conclusion.... When we have mastered the notion of straightness, we have also mastered that aspect of it expressed by the affirmation that two straight lines can not inclose a space. No intuitive or innate powers or perceptions are needed in such case.... We can not have the full meaning of Straightness, without going ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... French plonger is plumbicare, while in Italian piombare is cadere a piombo, to fall straight like the plummet. To plunge, therefore, has nothing to do with the splashing sound of heavy bodies falling into the water, but with the concept of straightness, here symbolized by ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... frame, was now assisting his circulation by boxing at a looking-glass with great science and prowess. A fresh and healthy portrait the looking- glass presented of the Reverend Septimus, feinting and dodging with the utmost artfulness, and hitting out from the shoulder with the utmost straightness, while his radiant features teemed with innocence, and soft-hearted benevolence ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... burnt-brown hair was candid; her firm little chin just dimpled. Altogether, a face difficult to take one's eyes off. But Nedda was far from vain, and her face seemed to her too short and broad, her eyes too dark and indeterminate, neither gray nor brown. The straightness of her nose was certainly comforting, but it, too, was short. Being creamy in the throat and browning easily, she would have liked to be marble-white, with blue dreamy eyes and fair hair, or else like a Madonna. And was she ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... business with her usual Boston probity she was really all the while holding herself. She wore her "handsome" felt hat, so Tyrolese, yet some how, though feathered from the eagle's wing, so truly domestic, with the same straightness and security; she attached her fur boa with the same honest precautions; she preserved her balance on the ice-slopes with the same practised skill; she opened, each evening, her "Transcript" with the same interfusion of suspense and resignation; she attended her almost daily concert ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... strong, your voice is full; and you are going to make all these a sacrifice to Hecate! has your good genius fed that plump frame, ripened those goods looks, nerved your arm, bestowed that breadth of chest, that strength of loins, that straightness of spine, that vigour of step, only that you may feed the crows? or to be torn on the rack, scorched in the flame, or hung on the gibbet? is this your gratitude to nature? What has been your price? for what have you sold yourself? Speak, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... proportion with the upper part; that the nose, in escaping the aquiline bend (always hard and cruel in a woman, no matter how abstractedly perfect it may be), has erred a little in the other extreme, and has missed the ideal straightness of line; and that the sweet, sensitive lips are subject to a slight nervous contraction, when she smiles, which draws them upward a little at one corner, towards the cheek. It might be possible to note these blemishes in another ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... would rapidly give way before the insidiousness of Schweinebraten, but her hair would always be beautifully done, each plait smooth and in its proper place, each little curl exactly where it ought to be, the parting a model of straightness, and the whole well deserving to be dignified by the name Frisur. English girls have hair, but they do ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... development and altogether legitimate. Clear, well-digested perception and rational choices follow upon those primary creative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At every stage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered for aesthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythm are at first sensuously defined; they are characters arrested by aesthetic instinct; but they are the materials of mathematics. And long after these initial forms have disowned their sensuous values, and suffered a wholly dialectical expansion or analysis, mathematical ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... own: So much the restless eagerness to shine And love of singularity prevail. Yet this, offensive as it is, provokes Heav'n's anger less, than when the book of God Is forc'd to yield to man's authority, Or from its straightness warp'd: no reck'ning made What blood the sowing of it in the world Has cost; what favour for himself he wins, Who meekly clings to it. The aim of all Is how to shine: e'en they, whose office is To preach the Gospel, let the gospel sleep, And pass their own inventions ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... government. Incessant discussion of the theoretical bases of the social union is naturally considered worse than idle. It is felt by many wise men that the chief business of the political thinker is to interest himself in generalisations of such a sort as leads with tolerable straightness to practical improvements of a far-reaching and durable kind. Even among those, however, who thus feel it not to be worth while to be for ever handling the abstract principles which are, after all, only clumsy expressions of the real conditions that bring and keep men together in society, yet ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... its inertia of straightness, or centrifugal (or centre-flying) force, tends more away from the centre of motion towards the bottom of the vessel, than ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... red lips is more pronounced in the African than in the European,[3] and if there is anything in what has been called the "god-like erectness of the human carriage" then it must be admitted that the Bantu women exhibit a straightness of form which may well be envied by ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... I would remark, quite impossible to give directions as to attitudes, but on one point I might advise, in order to save the many inquiries addressed to me, from time to time, upon the subject of the straightness or otherwise of gulls' legs. The fact is—gulls, when standing, tuck the tibia quite close to the abdomen, apparently under the wing, and reveal only a very little portion of the tibio-tarsal joint, keeping the metatarse perfectly ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... denounce unto you a worse thing than this, as to the reward which ye are to expect with God? He whom God hath cursed, and with whom he hath been angry, having changed some of them into apes and swine, and who worship Taghut, they are in the worse condition, and err more widely from the straightness of the path. When they came unto you, they said, We believe: yet they entered into your company with infidelity, and went forth from you with the same; but God well knew what they concealed. Thou shalt see many of them hastening ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... marriage. I never saw that man that was worthy of you. I never saw man or woman that at all parts equalled you. Lately at Delos (where I touched) I saw a young palm which grew beside Apollo's temple; it exceeded all the trees which ever I beheld for straightness and beauty: I can compare you only to that. A stupor past admiration strikes me, joined with fear, which keeps me back from approaching you, to embrace your knees. Nor is it strange; for one of freshest and firmest spirit would falter, approaching near to so ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... many hours of painful walking, two things alone had impressed themselves upon his consciousness: the dark illimitable forest and the double line of rails, which with the absolute straightness of exact science had stretched behind and in front till the tree-tops in the far distance seemed to touch, and the rails themselves to vanish into the black heart of the close-growing pines. For miles he had limped along the painfully ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... differentiation of the one quality of extension into time and space. ({beta}) It gives a meaning to the observed facts of geometrical and temporal position, of geometrical and temporal order, and of geometrical straightness and planeness. ({gamma}) It selects one definite system of congruence embracing both space and time, and thus explains the concordance as to measurement which is in practice attained. ({delta}) It explains (consistently with ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... Boston be embalmed with the bulls of Egypt! A white heifer should be perpetually grazing, at her tether, in the shadow of the Great Elm. Would it be wholly unbecoming one born in full view of that lovely inclosure to suggest that the straightness of the lines in which the trees are planted on Boston Common, and the rapidly increasing thickness of their foliage, destroy in the summer season the effect of breadth and liberty, hide both the immediate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... deal, the size of the copy, an appendage now nearly exploded—their cheek-bones laid within half an inch of the left side of the copy, and the eye set to guide the motion of the hand across, and to regulate the straightness of the lines and the forms of the letters. Others, again, of the more grown boys, are working their sums with becoming industry. In a dark corner are a pair of urchins thumping each other, their eyes steadily fixed on the master, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... stirring, bent as double as the living body can be bent. If a regular snowdrift fell on him it seems as though even then he would not think it necessary to shake it off.... His little mare is white and motionless too. Her stillness, the angularity of her lines, and the stick-like straightness of her legs make her look like a halfpenny gingerbread horse. She is probably lost in thought. Anyone who has been torn away from the plough, from the familiar gray landscapes, and cast into this slough, full of monstrous lights, of unceasing uproar and hurrying people, ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... should rather have said there is another explanation of a line marked on the stone next below the vertical one. I should imagine this line, which is nothing more than a mark such "as might be ruled with a blunt steel instrument, but by a master hand for power, evenness, straightness, and still more for rectangularity to the passage axis," was a mere sign to show where the upright stone was to come. But Professor Smyth, who gives no explanation of the upright stone itself, except that it ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... feet with a swiftness that implied that if it was to go he wanted, she was more than ready to oblige him. As she mounted her bicycle, the shut firmness of her mouth, the straightness of her back, and the grip of her little hands on the handle bars were eloquent of her determination to be gone. And her face, he noticed, was pinker than he ever remembered having ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... an engineer and miner who seems to have a strange sense of direction practically unknown to many other animals. How he manages to form tunnels and burrows in lines of such unusual straightness is unknown; he always works in darkness, unless it is that he can see in the dark. His little hills are not deliberate structures; they are only shaft ends through which this miner throws out the earth that he has scooped from ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon |
