"Abstraction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... propensities, but to the malorganization of society, has shown itself in a strange and ominous indulgence to crime. It was the old fashion, he says, upon hearing of any enormity, to level our indignation against the perpetrator; it is now the mode, to direct it against that culpable abstraction, society. Society is, indeed, the sole culprit. When the novelist has detailed some horrible assassination, or gross adultery, he exclaims, Behold what society has done! The criminal himself passes scathless; if, indeed, he may not put in a claim to our especial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... form of his daughter. The April day was receding, and Eugenie de Pastourelles was sitting very still, her hands lightly clasped upon a letter which lay outspread upon her lap. These moments of pensive abstraction were characteristic of her. Her life was turned within; she lived more truly in thought than in speech ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fool enough to wonder that, while she was most attentive and devout during the reading of the service, her face assumed, during the sermon, a far off look of abstraction, that indicated no reception of what I said, further than as an influence of soporific quality. I felt that there was re-proof in this. In fact, it roused my conscience yet more, and made me doubt whether there was anything genuine in me at all. Sometimes I felt as if I really could not go on, but ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... and before I had concluded it, my ardent friend Sheringham was announced; he was waiting in the breakfast-room. At the same moment, a note from the lovely Fanny Haywood was delivered to me—from the divine girl who, in the midst of all my scientific abstraction, could "chain my worldly feelings for a moment." "Sheringham, my dear fellow," said I, as I advanced to welcome him, "what makes you so early a visiter this morning?"—"An anxiety," replied Sheringham, "to tell you that my uncle, whose interest I endeavoured to procure ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... mountains and cliffs seemed to whirl past him in a vast headlong procession. So it was in Meynell's mind with thoughts and ideas. Gradually they calmed and slackened, till at last they passed into an abstraction and ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
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