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More "Impersonal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... depressing. Only her ability to sleep quickly and soundly made them endurable. The first night that she spent in her completed house behind barred windows and barricaded door was one of almost undiluted peace and happiness. The night noises seemed far removed and impersonal and the soughing of the wind in the trees was gently soothing. Before, it had carried a mournful note and was sinister in that it might hide the approach of some real danger. That night ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... remember whether it was George II. or James II. who was so fond of that particular story, and now he regards me with politely-draped dislike. I'll do my best for you, if the opportunity arises, but it will have to be in a roundabout, impersonal manner." ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... I should prefer to think of you like that. Impersonal, nameless—I only do know one of your names. I'd like to christen you myself—let me see, what ought you to be called? I've got it. Eve! (With a gesture towards the wings.) Trumpets! (The funeral march is heard again.) There it is again! Now I must invent your age, for I don't ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... syllogistic formulae, logical deductions, etc., etc.), because they compel assent as soon as recognized;—thus a ray of divine wisdom itself must exist in our spirits, which cannot be perverted, and which elevates the human mind to the immediate perception of impersonal, abstract, and conviction-compelling truths. We cannot deny them, even if we would! All sound logic has its power in the light ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... That "great impersonal artist," of whom Matthew Arnold has so much to say, is at work in us all, subtly making us into illusions, first to ourselves and later to the historian. It is the business of history, as of analytic fiction, both to feel the power ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... I could stay away as long as that?" asked George. His manner the night before had been almost reverential in the depth of his honest emotion; the kiss he had imprinted on her forehead had seemed of an impersonal nature, and she a princess who regally allowed it. She was conscious now of ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... him, a vast longing, a hopeless ambition, nameless as it was strange. His bronzed face paled and he breathed heavily. His eyes absorbed every detail of the girl's face and figure. There was wonder in his eyes at her girlish face, and something like awe at her powerful diction and her impersonal emotion. She stood there like an incarnation of the great dream-world that lay beyond his horizon, the world of poets and singers in the far ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... ironstone portion dishes, stood between him and the men who were still regarding him as a joke. And since Maggie's displeasure manifested itself in cold coffee and tough cuts of the beef, the long table made its most excruciating jests elaborately impersonal. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... the pronoun shows how clearly the ideas of personality and of individuality have been developed; but in the Japanese language there really are no pronouns, in the sense of the word as used by the Germanic nations, at least, although there are hundreds of impersonal and topographical substitutes for them.[14] The mirror, of the language itself, reflects more truth upon this point of inquiry than do patriotic assertions, or the protests of those who in the days of this Meiji era so handsomely employ the Japanese language as ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... poem it is the tenderness, the purity, the delicacy of women, which draws and allures him. Their more feline, more raptorial attributes are only alluded to in the verses where he is obviously objective and impersonal. In the excessive gentleness of his eroticism Verlaine becomes, among modern poets, strangely original; and one reads him with the added pleasure of enjoying something that has disappeared from the love-poetry of the ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... active leader in the foreign relief work during the war. Her portrait had even been published in the papers as one who was devoted to the cause of the stricken women and children abroad. But that had all been impersonal, while this—Already in her heart she was echoing the old familiar cry of the comparative few, "If only the people knew! If only they could be made to see as she had been made to see! The people are not so cruel. They ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... the nurse, with the calm impersonal manner of her kind. "I heard the ring and heard what he said to the maid; and, like her, I was surprised to hear that it was Miss Burton's father. However, I paid little attention, but went on ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... chaotic. He saw before him no clear course. Whichever way he looked at it the horrible tangle grew more horrible. There was a recurring sense of unreality, a visionary feeling of detachment which enabled him to view the situation from an impersonal standpoint, as one criticises a nightmare, confident in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But in this case the confidence was based on nothing tangible and the illusion faded as quickly as it rose and left him confronted ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... for the world suddenly shrank to five feet two of femininity, and he heard a gay, impersonal voice saying: ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... said this was our battery shelling the French and English in those woods yonder, but you could hardly be expected to believe that, since no reply came back and no French or English whatsoever showed themselves. Altogether it seemed a most impotent and impersonal proceeding; and when the novelty of waiting for the blast of sound and then watching for the smoke plumes to appear had worn off, as it very soon did, we visited the guns themselves. They were not under our feet ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... express his own judgment, indicate his own design, and convey his own feeling. His individuality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a common hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. But, in truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative action, like other minds, within the limits of its personal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... she plead overmastering desire, the pressure of loneliness and poverty, and, last of all, the power of a man who stood, in her fancy, among the most brilliant of her world. She felt herself in the grasp of forces as vast, as impersonal, and as illimitable as the wind and the sky, but, reduced to words, her poor plea for mercy would have been, "I could not ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... small hands; and the wrap that, cut upon full and flowing lines, cloaked her figure beyond suggestion, was grey. Yet even its ample drapery could not dissemble the fact that she was quite small, girlishly slight, like the woman in the doorway; nor did aught temper her impersonal and detached composure, which had also been an attribute of the woman in the doorway. And, again, she ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... politician that, long before 1863, when its announcement opened the memorable year for freedom, not only had its demonstration been implored by his friends, but some of his subordinates had tried to launch its lightning with not so impersonal a sentiment. To a religious body, pressing him to verify his title ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... who have not met him, it may appear paradoxical to say that his tastes were at the same moment acutely fastidious and widely sympathetic; but anyone who has talked with him will recall the blend of high impersonal ideas with a remarkable personality which seldom failed to stimulate other minds—even if those others shared few if any ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... a greater popular hero now than Captain March ever was," she remarked with an elaborately impersonal air. "The first thing we know, Peggy, we shall hear that Lady Di is engaged to him; don't you think? She adores heroes. She once told ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... was pretty—and her hair—the way it grew about her forehead and ears and the back of her neck. She gazed at her young curve and colour and flame of life's first beauty with deep curiosity, singularly impersonal for ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... means of the bold, broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures are, indeed, but the component features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character,—that of the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic illustration as being the most advanced ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... find music soothing; but that night proved an exception—perhaps because my moderately well-ordered life had crumbled into pieces; because I was conscious of a new and overmastering passion—the music appealed to me in an altogether different way. My enjoyment was no longer impersonal—a matter of the brain and the judgment. I felt the excitement of it throbbing in my pulses. The gloomy, half-lit auditorium seemed full of strange suggestions. I felt in real and actual touch with the great things that throbbed beneath. I was no longer ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... my disappointment, that the "Guardian" exhibited more than the usual dearth of domestic intelligence, although it was singularly oracular on "The State of Europe," and "Jeffersonian Democracy." A certain cheap assurance, a copy-book dogmatism, a colloquial familiarity, even in the impersonal plural, and a series of inaccuracies and blunders here and there, struck some old chord in my memory. I was mutely wondering where and when I had become personally familiar with rhetoric like that, when the door of the office opened and a man entered. I was surprised ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... opening offered for the development of the dramatic and emotional side of music, in Italy, on the contrary, the emotional style of music was being neglected and an absolutely serene style of what may be called "impersonal" music encouraged. Italy, however, soon had opera on which to fall back, and thus music in both countries developed ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... first how deeply he had been stirred by Florence's beauty and how ready he was to offer her his hand; but as a matter of fact he never did so in set terms, and treated her more as a comrade than a divinity. He talked of his own devotion to her as something detached and impersonal, willing as much as she to laugh over it and treat it lightly. He was never jealous, never exacting, and seemed to be as happy to share her with others as when he had her all alone in one of their tete-a-tetes. What he coveted most of all was her intimacy, her confidence, the frank expression ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... curious mistake of first suggesting that she is a complainer about nothing, and then showing her to us as a suffering victim of her husband's folly and of hopeless disease. The lover (who is to a great extent a replica of the masterful mill-owner in Shirley) is uncertain and impersonal: and the minor characters are null. One hopes, for a time, that Margaret herself will save the situation: but she goes off instead of coming on, and has rather less individuality and convincingness at the end of the story than at the beginning. In short, Mrs. Gaskell seems ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... was surprisingly pleasant. He spoke very deliberately, so that one felt occasionally that he was pausing to find the right words. And, in addition to the quality of that deep voice, he had an impersonal way of looking his interlocutor squarely in the eye, a habit that pleased the men of the mountain desert. On this occasion his companion responded at once with a grin. He was a younger man than Riley Sinclair, but he gave an impression of as much ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... she said to the steward. "When did you take his temperature?" She drew a little morocco case from her pocket and from that took a clinical thermometer, which she shook up and down, eying the patient meanwhile with a calm, impersonal scrutiny. The Lieutenant raised his head and stared up at the white figure beside his cot. His eyes opened and then shut quickly, with a startled look, in which doubt struggled with wonderful happiness. His ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... down at her strong but shapely shoes (she was a bit vain of her neat foot), and thought that she would not be so unladylike as to 'bet her boots' on anything. But, as Will's observation was entirely impersonal, and intended as a pledge that he would follow her instructions, she made no comment. Moreover, she had now brought about the state of affairs which she had mischievously designed. Each of the party except Joe supposed that he or she had a secret with Ellen ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley
... the Desires*, mainly in these two particulars: first, that the Desires are for impersonal objects, the Affections, for persons; and secondly, that the Desires prompt to actions that have a direct reference to one's self; the Affections, to actions that have a direct ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... automaton, almost terrifyingly impersonal, loomed always above them, throwing its powerful and gigantic shadow across their lives. As they grew old enough to understand, it became to them the embodiment of occult and unpleasant authority which controlled their coming and going; which chose for them their personal but not ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... associated men in certain limited circles of relationships. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work, in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with one another. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... voluntary, spontaneity is involuntary; reflection is personal, spontaneity is impersonal; reflection is analytic, spontaneity is synthetic; reflection begins with doubt, spontaneity with affirmation; reflection belongs to certain ones, spontaneity belongs to all; reflection produces science, spontaneity gives truth. Reflection is a process, more or less tardy, in the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... But why does not the Barrister reserve a part of his wrath for Dr. Priestley, according to whom a villain has superior claims on the divine justice as an innocent martyr to the grand machinery of Providence;—for Dr. Priestley, who turns the whole dictionary of human nature into verbs impersonal with a perpetual 'subauditur' of 'Deus' for their common nominative case;—which said 'Deus', however, is but another 'automaton', self-worked indeed, but yet worked, not properly working, for he admits no more freedom or will to God than to man? The ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... she might to put the sham deck-hand into his proper place as an impersonal unit of a class with which society is at war, he perversely refused to surrender his individuality. At the end of every fresh effort she was confronted by the inexorable summing-up: in a world of phantoms there were only two real persons; a man who had sinned, and a woman ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... never be a living Book to us until we are convinced that God is articulate in His universe. To jump from a dead, impersonal world to a dogmatic Bible is too much for most people. They may admit that they should accept the Bible as the Word of God, and they may try to think of it as such, but they find it impossible to ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... peculiar vision of the artist, not yet recognizing that it is the brain that sees and not the eye. But there is this which makes the nature-worshiper's creed a more exalting one than that of the art-lover, that it is impersonal and compels the forgetting of one's self, which for an apostolate ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... looks of admiration which Mr. Orville cast at the beautiful girl. It seemed to me that with the exception of Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Porter, who were family friends, the jurors should have maintained a formal and impersonal attitude. ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... only to efface himself, and therein he succeeded admirably by never sleeping two following nights in the same house: so that, when Cartouche was the terror of Paris, when even the King trembled in his bed, none knew his stature nor could recognise his features. In this shifting and impersonal vizard, he broke houses, picked pockets, robbed on the pad. One night he would terrify the Faubourg St. Germain; another he would plunder the humbler suburb of St. Antoine; but on each excursion he was companioned by experts, and the map of Paris was rigidly apportioned among ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... came across Lizzie's mind that this glowing language had a taste of the Bible about it, and that, therefore, it was in some degree impersonal, and intended to be pious. She did not relish piety at such a crisis as this, and was, therefore, for a moment inclined to be cold. But she liked being called a flower, and was not quite sure whether she remembered ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... been an active, helpful worker, and what made me popular everywhere - harmless, impersonal, without any unpleasantly obtrusive originality in actions or opinions. In the diplomatic world above all, a vigorous originality is quite intolerable unless it manifest itself in a ruling personality. And even then this ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... for whom or whose, e. g., "Who (whom) did you wish to see?" "Washington, than who (whose) no greater name is recorded." Impersonal objects should be referred to by ...
— Word Study and English Grammar - A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses • Frederick W. Hamilton
... want to marry at all. It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was with Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity—"teleological" activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... to retrace the history of a great statesman's career. That statesman's name, but for the dark and tragic scenes with which it was ultimately associated, might after the lapse of two centuries and a half have faded into comparative oblivion, so impersonal and shadowy his presence would have seemed upon the great European theatre where he was so long a chief actor, and where his efforts and his achievements were foremost among those productive of long enduring and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to attract him; indeed, a few years later he openly expressed his expectation of some time marrying. That he did not was clearly due to temper and circumstance rather than to romantic fidelity or abnegation. In the end his susceptibility became purely impersonal; his satisfaction in the exercise of a gentle old-school gallantry did much to take the sting from his life-long bachelorhood. Plainly, Irving was the sort of man who finds a grace in ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... the microscope, stare at it with a telescope, stick the X-ray through it, lay it on the operating table—show what is the matter with it—even to itself. Anything that is said about the scientific mind which is not said in a big, bow-wow, scientific, impersonal, out-of-the-universe sort of way will not ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... illustration of this position a contrast might be drawn between the policy of Athens in Melos, as set forth by Thucydides in the singular dialogue of the fifth book, and the part assigned to Justice by a writer equally impersonal, grave, and unimpassioned—the author of the Politics—in the recurrence throughout that work of such phrases as "The State which is founded on Justice alone can stand." "Man when perfected (teleothen) is the noblest ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... my mind. It is not a place which delights one by its actual sensual beauty, as Italy does; it is not as in England, where a thousand associations link one to every scene and aspect—Ireland seems to me to contain some unique and most impersonal charm, ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... four solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. The soprano takes the part of the Woman of Samaria, the other parts being impersonal. The music for the contralto is mainly declamatory. Tha tenor has a single aria, while the bass, with one exception, has the part of Narrator, the words of our Saviour being attributed to him and invariably introduced in the ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... knew now what that anguish was. It was the twining of body from spirit that is called the bitterness of Death; for not all of the body are the pangs of that severance. With that terrible sword of impersonal Pain the God of Peace makes sorrowful war that Peace may come again. With its flame He ringed the bastions of Heaven when Satan made assault. Only on the Gorgon-image of that Pain in the shield may weak man look; and ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... chimney-piece in the room called the study (because it was consecrated to idleness), and sat there far into the night, talking of the few times we had met Falconer at the club, and of his reticent manner, which was broken by curious flashes of impersonal confidence when he spoke not of himself but of his art. From this we drifted into memories of good comrades who had walked beside us but a few days in the path of life, and then disappeared, yet left us feeling as if we cared more for them than for the men whom we see every day; and of ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... longer contemptuously mutter, 'Soap! Soap!' when a hero comes down to breakfast. Some of our older politicians, to be sure, still wear a standard costume of Prince Albert coat, pants (for so one must call them) that bag at the knee, and an impersonal kind of black necktie, sleeping, I dare say, in what used jocularly to be called a 'nightie'; but our younger leaders go appropriately clad, to the eye, in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear clothes. So, too, does the Correspondence-School graduate, rising like an escaped ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... Sampaolo, and marry your cousin. So"—her eyes on her drawing, she spoke slowly, with an effect supremely impersonal—"so you would come to your own again; and so a house divided against itself, an ancient noble house, would be reunited; and an ancient historic line, broken for a ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... merits and sins disappear, and the fruits, in the form of joy and sorrow, arising therefrom, are destroyed, men, unattached to everything, take refuge at first on Brahma invested with personality, and then behold impersonal Brahma in their understandings.[826] Jiva in course of its downward descent under the influence of Avidya lives here (within its cell formed by acts) after the manner of a silk-worm residing within its cell made of threads woven by itself. Like the freed silk-worm again that abandons its cell, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... French ateliers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. These are so frequently brought before us as to seem almost like products of our own day. The earlier ones seem (as ever) the purer art, the less sensual, appealing to the more impersonal side of man, dealing in battles and in classic subjects. Later, the drawings, becoming more directly personal, in the time of Louis XIV portrayed events in the Life of the King; in the next reign, slipping ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... reaction—the last scene of the soul's impersonal drama. The constellation (if Pisces is the symbol of rest and expectation. The soul has now completed the first round, or rung, in the Cycle of Necessity; and its next state is that of incarnated man. It has triumphed over every sphere ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... connection with my daughter Marion, the accidents of my social position and personal tastes, have placed me in a position to give a very full account of what actually happened. The first two chapters of this book will therefore be written in the impersonal manner of the ordinary history; I myself occupying the position of unseen spectator. The rest of the book is largely founded upon the diary which ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... difference on that point, but only its quality or mode of operation. The Orthodox attribute to God a strictly moral, which is a specific method of action, addressed to purely personal or subjective issues; their opponents, a strictly physical, which is a universal method, addressed to purely impersonal and objective issues. The one party assigns to God a finite personality, or one limited by Nature; the other, an indefinite personality, as identified with natural law. The Orthodox, of course, maintain that God's creative ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... Nothing so insulting. This is strictly impersonal. The Scanning Center has picked apartments at complete random and we're to ...
— The Junkmakers • Albert R. Teichner
... he could have to say to her, led the way past the church to the open road that encircled the island. Then she moderated her pace and looked up at him from the deeps of her bonnet. Her gaze was cooler and more impersonal than he was wont to encounter, but it crossed his burdened mind that a blooming face even if unfashionably sunburnt, and a supple vigorous body were somewhat attractive after a surfeit of dolls with their languid fine-lady airs and affectation of physical delicacy; ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... behind the kitchen stove, was keenly alive to the fact that supper was being served. He had had his own supper, so that his interest was purely impersonal. ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... Paris, however, are French,—which is to say that they are incapable of seeing their duty from a strictly impersonal point of view, but are lax to the utmost indifference and partiality or brutal to the ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... develop the new inventions in a scientific manner, and individual personality is not called out. With the exhaustion of the means in the attainment of perfection a new stage is reached, in which individual expression is prominent, and seems to take the place of the scientific impersonal interest which aimed at nothing but beauty: so that the chief distinction between early and late art is that the former is ...
— A Practical Discourse on Some Principles of Hymn-Singing • Robert Bridges
... came between his fingers. In the far Algerian distance, a city of low square forms was set against a sky that was faint with the last sunset hues. The correspondent, plying the oars and dreaming of the slow and slower movements of the lips of the soldier, was moved by a profound and perfectly impersonal comprehension. He was sorry for the soldier of the Legion who lay ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... cause for which he was fighting. That must suffice; it must take the place of wife and love. Cold, impersonal, inadequate as it seemed now, he knew that in the end it would suffice to fill great part of that inner heart which she had occupied. He turned to it with the kindling affection which a man ever has for the resource that is left him when he is scorned elsewhere. And he felt his ardour for ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... editorial expression in the magazines of 1889 was also distinctly vague and prohibitively impersonal. The public knew the name of scarcely a single editor of a magazine: there was no personality that stood out in the mind: the accepted editorial expression was the indefinite "we"; no one ventured to use the first person singular and talk intimately to the reader. Edward Bok's biographical ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... a matter of surprise to many to find the work in sheds and quarries proceeding with its accustomed regularity; to find that to the new comers in Flamsted the affair was an impersonal one, that Champney Googe held no place among the workmen; that his absconding meant to them simply another one of the "high rollers" fleeing from his deserts. Little by little, during that first week, the truth ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... under whatever name, clubs, syndicates, &c., constitute perhaps the most redoubtable danger resulting from the power of crowds. They represent in reality the most impersonal and, in consequence, the most oppressive form of tyranny. The leaders who direct the committees being supposed to speak and act in the name of a collectivity, are freed from all responsibility, and are in a position to do just as they choose. The most savage tyrant ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... that God is the object of happiness, we must remember that He is no cold, impersonal Beauty, but a living and loving God, not indeed in the order of nature our Father and Friend, but still our kind Master and very good Lord, who speaks to His servants from behind the clouds that hide His face, and assures ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; "not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought—silk! And he's got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... correspondence, who deeply attracted him, and who might have attracted him as far as marriage had he not already received the Holy Spirit's prevenient grace of virginity. That is to say, he found "a being," to use his impersonal term, whose name and identity he is careful to veil, awkwardly enough at times with misleading pronouns, whose charm was so great as to win from him what would have been, in his normal state, a marital affection. But he was no ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... course, have been very strange and un-Riseholme-like to have gone to a friend's door, even though the errand was so impersonal a one as bearing somebody else's note, without enquiring whether the friend was in, and being instantly admitted if she was, and as a matter of fact, Georgie caught a glimpse, when the knocker was answered (Mrs Quantock ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... white-capped maid smiled a polite recognition of the newest arrival. A bit flustered by the calmly impersonal scrutiny with which her greeting was received, she addressed Miss ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... humiliations that we should mind them so? They come to everybody in turn, and they are as relentless and impersonal as the sun marching around the sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers, and the streetcar conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the Kaiser with his victorious army ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... her at that moment the sea was a great lover, like Siegmund, but more impersonal, who would receive her when Siegmund could not. She rejoiced momentarily in the fact. Siegmund looked at her and continued smiling. His happiness was budded ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... on, but whether their outlook be wide or narrow, personal or impersonal, they work in their way and something is ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... by editors or the public. The tendency to materialism would have been too strong for them. Lyceum lectures, on which Emerson depended chiefly, are not what they were; and either of them in a magazine would appear in too startling a contrast with the smooth impersonal writing of to-day. The two cardinal sins of a writer now are to have a style of his own and ideas of ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... The Pantheist will therefore have difficulty in living a perfect ethical life. There are many cases in which, by deviating from the strictly ethic code, you do not harm anyone, you only injure your own soul. The Non-Believer will in this case only hardly, for the sake of impersonal Truth, make up his mind to the step which the God-fearing man will take actuated by his passionate fear of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... unselfish love which is possible only to high natures; it passes from the dull crimson of animal love to the most exquisite shades of delicate rose, like the early flushes of the dawning, as the love becomes purified from all selfish elements, and flows out in wider and wider circles of generous impersonal tenderness and compassion to all who are in need. With a touch of the blue of devotion in it, this may express a strong realisation of the universal brotherhood of humanity. Deep orange imports pride or ambition, and the various shades of yellow denote intellect or intellectual gratification, dull ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... beauty only as one is able to detach one's self from what is immediate and practical, and by virtue of this detachment, to apprehend the spiritual significance. The sublimity of the shipwreck lies in what it expresses of the impersonal might of elemental forces and man's impotence in the struggle against nature. That sublimity, which is one manifestation of beauty, is of the spirit, and by the spirit it must ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... Murata household. He wondered how so bright a little flower as Asako could have been reared in such gloomy surroundings. The spirits dominant in the villa were respectable economy and slavish imitation of the tastes and habits of Parisian friends. The living-rooms were as impersonal as the rooms of a boarding-house. Neutral tints abounded, ugly browns and nightmare vegetable patterns on carpets, furniture and wallpapers. There was a marked tendency towards covers, covers for the chairs and sofas, tablecloths and covers for the tablecloths, covers ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... shows, that, as time runs on, matter tends more and more to become goods, the blind forms of motion in nature to become useful labor and useful sustenance, impersonal and objectless existence to be transformed into personal property and personal culture, Schaeffle inclines to the belief that the whole mechanism of unconsciously governing nature is destined ultimately to aid in the realization of moral good, which ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... for their decisions were now beginning to be reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges became authorities for their successors. It is plain that such a state of things has the utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men's minds that impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power. But it threw a terrible obstacle in the way of the actual redress ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... room and must regard the ashes—he was a personality from an environment with which she was unfamiliar. Then, as though she were his equal in years, experience and intelligence, he spoke to her in a tone that was cool and impersonal, yet which went slash! slash! slash! like the fine, deep, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... one of those unaccountable clearings of the mental vision that nature seems to reserve for the final chapter. Her quickened brain grasped the tragedy of her life as it never had before. She saw it with impersonal eyes. Anna Moore was a stranger on whose case she could sit with unbiased judgment. Her mind swung back to the football game in the golden autumn eighteen months ago, and she heard the cheers and saw the swarms of eager, upturned faces ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... God reminds us that He is a Person. He speaks to us. He is not an impersonal God who pervades and is a part of nature. He is above nature and has created it. ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... went on, turning her face prettily around toward him, but holding it a little way off, to secure attention as impersonal as might be under the circumstances, "what pleased me more than anything else ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... heard for the first time in its originality and its infinite sensibility. Nor are these random notes; they soon make one harmonious sound and acquire a most touching significance, until by daily practice he learns how to abstract himself altogether from the most wretched surroundings. A quite impersonal ego seems then to detach itself from the particular ego that suffers and is in peril; it looks impartially upon all things, and sees its other self as a passing wave in the tide that a mysterious Intelligence controls. Strange faculty of double existence and of vision! ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... I've read 'em all. I would like to discuss with you the divine right of the soul as opposed to the freedom-destroying restrictions of a bigoted and narrow-minded society. But I will proceed to business. I would prefer to lay the matter before you in an impersonal way until you pass upon its merits. That is to describe it ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... upon Nature. I don't stand in my own light. I get very close to bird and beast. My thin skin lets the shy and delicate influences pass. I can surrender myself to Nature without effort. I am like her.... That which hinders me with men, makes me strong with impersonal Nature, and admits me to her influences.... I am lacking in moral fibre, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... company with all his teeth, and said that these flattering allusions were not so embarrassing as they might otherwise be, inasmuch as any success that he and his daughter might have had was so thoroughly impersonal: he insisted on that word. They had just heard her say, "It is not me, mother," and he and Mrs. Tarrant and the girl herself were all equally aware it was not she. It was some power outside—it seemed to flow through her; he couldn't pretend to say why his daughter should be called, more ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... bottom the claim of one sort of personality to deny that of another. Finally, it has been possible to demonstrate from among the examples given of impersonal art, in the romances and dramas called naturalistic, that in so far and to the extent that these are complete artistic works, they possess personality. This holds good even when this personality lies in a wandering or perplexity of thought regarding the value to be given to life, or ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... King's Basin Land and Irrigation Company in La Palma de la Mano de Dios were the methods of capital, impersonal, inhuman—the methods of a force governed by laws as fixed as the laws of nature, neither cruel nor kind; inconsiderate of man's misery or happiness, his life or death; using man for its own ends— profit, as men ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... she was working more intimately with him as a comrade now, not as clerk with executive. There had been no one illuminating moment of understanding; he was impersonal with her; but each day their relationship was less of a mechanical routine, more of a personal friendship. She felt that he really depended on her steady carefulness; she knew that through the wild tangle of his impulsiveness she saw a ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the refreshment counter were quite unconcerned. They didn't trouble to look on, but talked to each other about blouses like girls in a post office. The students drove out to the inn and back in open carriages. It is a mile from Heidelberg. The duels are generally as impersonal as games, but sometimes they are in settlement of quarrels. I think any student may come and fight on these occasions, but I suppose he has to be the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... intimate nature of the data reported. Belonging as dreams do to the most personal and private life of the individual it is nevertheless true that continued and careful study of this form of mentation insensibly alters one's attitude so that at length the dream appears as a fact of nature, impersonal and objective. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... entirely new experience. From the upper gallery the actors and actresses always seemed more or less impersonal and abstract, but here they were living, palpitating human beings, almost within hand reach, certainly within eye reach, as Dave presently discovered. There was a trooping of girls about the stage, with singing and rippling laughter ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... seers, idealists of the world; it is the humanistic type that sees man everywhere reflected in nature; and is radically different from the strictly scientific type which dehumanizes nature and reduces it to impersonal laws and forces, which distrusts analogy and sentiment and poetry, and clings to a ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... burgundy, indeed, had not been opened in vain. Rennes could talk well, sometimes brilliantly, often with originality, and, with the tact of all highly sensitive beings, he led the conversation into impersonal themes. He said Miss Carillon's portrait was not yet finished, but he changed that subject immediately, and the evening, which had been to Orange a trial of patience, ended rather better than it began. Lord Reckage invited Rennes to accompany them home. The artist ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... listening there seemed to come up to him, straight out of the river, strange impersonal noises that had to do with no definite sounds. He was reminded of a story that he had once read, a story concerning a nice young man who caught the disease known as the Horror of London. Peter thought that in the air, coming from nowhere, intangible, floating between the river and the ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... limits to Audrey's capacity for receiving impressions. Between her and the world where Katherine always lived, and which Ted visited at intervals now becoming rarer and rarer, there was a great gulf fixed. After all, Audrey had no grasp of the impersonal; she could only care for any object as it gave her certain emotions, raised certain associations, or drew attention to herself. She was at home in the dim borderland between art and nature, the region of vanity and vague sensation. Here ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... point of view of dramatic art this impartiality is essential, because without it the necessary impersonal element cannot be given to a play. In such a work as the prison drama It's never too Late to Mend, by Charles Reade, one seems to see all the time the hand of the perfervid, almost frantic, reformer, and the same remark applies to several of his novels. Of course, one does not ask the playwright ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... There are impersonal hours when the things of the day drop below consciousness and the spirit grows devotional and wends a pilgrimage to larger spheres, there to sit apart. Such a respite was mine to-day. There had been a call to rouse and put forth work, and I wrought with all the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... the evening his vigilance was not rewarded in the slightest degree. Madge appeared in good spirits, and talked charmingly, even brilliantly at times, but she was exceedingly impersonal, and it was now his policy to follow her slightest lead in everything. He would prove that her wish was his, as ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, INFORMS those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own. The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality. It CANNOT be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, MUST be, the temper of his Art product.* It is hard to believe, almost impossible to believe, that 'Titus Andronicus' could have been written by Shakespeare, the external testimony to the authorship, notwithstanding. Even if he had written ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... "Ghastly nuisance," but I knew it was of the integrity of his domestic accord that he was thinking. With my eyes on the dog lying curled up in sleep in the middle of the porch I suggested in a subdued impersonal tone: "Yes. Why ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... head, gazing at him intently, but with that same changeless expression of impersonal interest, as if she were listening to the discussion of a third party who was not known to her save by name. "Zara," he continued, "you will receive other cards than mine to-day, and you should know that every man or ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... present labor, their future labor they could not give. But with the dissemination of money tokens, and the credit which had its rise in them, it became possible to sell one's future toil for money. Money, with co-existent violence in the community, only represents the possibility of a new form of impersonal slavery, which has taken the place of personal slavery. The slave-owner has a right to the labor of Piotr, Ivan, and Sidor. But the owner of money, in a place where money is demanded from all, has a right to the toil of all those nameless people who are in need ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... months all these impersonal influences took dominion over me and gave me a quiet happiness never known before. The nights brought the greater light; but the days too had their glories. I would climb the rugged sides of the mountain, and emerging into a colder world sit beneath ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the chief attraction of the story are not different from the melodramatic features of countless other amatory tales, French and English. But when for a dozen pages the author seeks to discover and explain the motives of her characters both by impersonal comment and by the self-revelation of letters, she is making a noteworthy step—even if an unconscious one— toward the Richardsonian method of laying bare the inner natures of ordinary people. She has here pursued the ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... The capable, cool-eyed, impersonal, young, bald-headed man whose task it was to engage six of the contestants, was aware of a feeling of suffocation as if he were drowning in a sea of frangipanni, while white clouds, hand-embroidered, floated about him. And then a sail hove in sight. Hetty Pepper, ...
— Options • O. Henry
... clearing his throat. He sorely missed Melissa's spontaneous, even vulgar "Morning, Mist' Bingle," and the rattle of cutlery and chinaware. Melissa had acquired a fine but watchful dignity. She now said "good morning, sir" in the hushed, impersonal voice of the trained servant. She never "joked" with him, as of yore, although he was by way of knowing that she bubbled over with fun in the regions ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... eyes of cattle. He shivered. For a moment he had been thinking of them as human. And somehow the lack of that indefinable some thing called humanity robbed them of much of their glamour. They were still beautiful, but their beauty had become impersonal. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... communication of a Divine life which is manifested mainly in what we call moral likeness. Or to put it into plain words, the teaching of my text is no dreamy teaching, such as an eastern mystic might proclaim, of absorption into an impersonal Divine. There is no notion here of any partaking of these great though secondary attributes of the Divine mind which to many men are the most Godlike parts of His nature. But what my text mainly means is, you may, if you like, become 'holy as God is holy.' You may become ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... black nights in my temperament when John Barleycorn lightens the gloom; and there are other nights when he treacherously deepens it—but I'm peculiarly balanced and subject to irresistible fits of moral atrophy. All of which has nothing at all to do with the soundness of my impersonal philosophy. Wherefore," with a flash of his easy impudence, "when I preach, I mean it—for the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... had achieved. He saw why he had never grasped the inspiration for his vast, vague, IMPERSONAL Song of the West. At the time when he sought for it, his convictions had not been aroused; he had not then cared for the People. His sympathies had not been touched. Small wonder that he had missed it. ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... been an active leader in the foreign relief work during the war. Her portrait had even been published in the papers as one who was devoted to the cause of the stricken women and children abroad. But that had all been impersonal, while this—Already in her heart she was echoing the old familiar cry of the comparative few, "If only the people knew! If only they could be made to see as she had been made to see! The people are not so cruel. They simply ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... growth, of fruitage and harvest, the dispenser to man of ten thousand blessings, the sustainer of his life and health and happiness. With some the worship was purely and wholly material—the sun was viewed as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life, unintelligent, impersonal; but with others, sun-worship was something higher than this: the orb of day was regarded as informed by a good, wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through it, and was the true benefactor of mankind ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... participation? Nothing of a healthy, wholesome, vigorous, vital, individual, personal kind; but some pitiful pretence of wit or humor, having for its vague or indefinite object ideal or general, abstract, impersonal, or, so to speak, invisible intangible subjects, wanting all the vivacious pungent stimulus that belongs to real individual absurdity, and the direct ridicule of it, judiciously and dexterously applied; the only efficient—I had almost ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... politely as I could, and my mind was at once set at ease by the purely impersonal way in which ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... as out of a mist, and he was not even sufficiently conscious of himself to look around for a glimpse of his parents. When the distribution of exercises began, the whole atmosphere changed. Until then it had been collective and impersonal. Now it became intensely personal. Every one wanted to hear. Necks were craned, whispered questions asked. It was as if a sudden breeze had stirred waters which until then had been still as the mirroring ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... delivered, and its virtue was its extreme impassiveness; it seemed quite impersonal, the mere automatic action of justice, not revengeful, not seeking for death, but merely stating the case as it might be stated by some planet or remote fixed star. Then there was a short pause, while the prosecutor for the Crown laid ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... vehemently desired, and as long waited for as Lucia, would mean the sacrifice of my talent. It would mean a suppression, a thrusting aside of work, and, to a certain extent, of thought. In such a life there would be so little place for it. Between the necessity of rejecting impersonal or imaginative thought to make room for the diurnal business routine, and the irresistible temptations to reject it at other times for present personal pleasure, it would be rarely accepted or welcomed, and its impetus ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... number of girls have the will to become acquainted it does not take them long to do so. Almost immediately a buzz of animated impersonal conversation began. ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... Inquiri. Impersonalinvestigation to be made. E. suggests inquirenti, agreeing with Germanico. But T., unlike the earlier Latin authors, not unfrequently places an infin. after a verb ...
— Germania and Agricola • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... the announcement in a tone of almost impersonal discretion, like a man who expected very little from it but who spoke for his own needed relief. The tears came into her eyes: this time they obeyed the sharpness of the pang that suggested to her somehow the slipping of a fine bolt—backward, forward, she couldn't have said which. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... she presently appeared, in the wake of the impersonal and exclamatory young married woman who served as a background to her vivid outline, seemed competent to impart at short notice any information required of her. She had never struck Mrs. Peyton as more alert and efficient. A melting grace of line and colour tempered her edges with the ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... social purposes, we are to sort ourselves? But the idea, sternly emphasized by Mrs. Torrence, is that we have no social purposes. We are neither more nor less than a strictly official and absolutely impersonal body, held together, not by the ordinary affinities of men and women, but by a common devotion and a common aim. Differences, if any should exist, will be sunk in the interest of the community. Probabilities that rule all human intercourse, as we have hitherto ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke wreaths, and pretending to decide things out of his ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... a garret all his life; study women and live on their work and care as Darwin studied worms and lived upon sheep; work his nerves into rags without payment, a sublime altruist in his disregard of himself, an atrocious egotist in his disregard of others. Here Woman meets a purpose as impersonal, as irresistible as her own; and the clash is sometimes tragic. When it is complicated by the genius being a woman, then the game is one for a king of critics: your George Sand becomes a mother to gain experience for the novelist and to develop her, and gobbles ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... to on the evening of the day which saw Blanchard's final eruption, and he was amazed to find how straightforward and simple his course appeared when viewed from the impersonal standpoint of duty. His brother was due to dine with John Grimbal in half an hour, for both men were serving on a committee to meet that night upon the question of the local celebrations at Chagford, and they were going together. Time, however, remained for John ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... the semicircle of ironstone portion dishes, stood between him and the men who were still regarding him as a joke. And since Maggie's displeasure manifested itself in cold coffee and tough cuts of the beef, the long table made its most excruciating jests elaborately impersonal. ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... here might well be devoted to the study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed with a fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in the legends of their churches. You soon get on terms of impersonal intimacy with them, and you cannot come away without sharing their professional zeal, and distinguishing for the moment in favor of their respective churches above every other. It did not matter whether it was that newest church in the Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... did not understand. He saw a broad, low forehead, masses of soft and slightly curly hair, eyes that looked beautifully and wistfully, out from beneath finely arched brows and a mouth that lacked nothing in humorous suggestion. Puzzling for an instant what it was that had attracted his impersonal chief, he heard the latter saying ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... hero now than Captain March ever was," she remarked with an elaborately impersonal air. "The first thing we know, Peggy, we shall hear that Lady Di is engaged to him; don't you think? She adores heroes. She once told ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... store of Cakhetine wines, and some railroad agent, a very proud and very poor nobleman, with shirt cuffs the colour of a cabbage rose, and with an eye which had been replaced by a black circle on an elastic. Pasha, passive in everything save her impersonal sensuality, would go with anybody who might call her, but the administration of the house vigilantly guards its interests in her. A near insanity already flits over her lovely face, in her half-closed eyes, always smiling with some heady, blissful, meek, bashful ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... more one regrets the lacunae in the text. Notwithstanding numerous articles which deal with this work, some from the pens of the most profound scholars, its author is still shrouded in the mists of uncertainty and conjecture. He is as impersonal as Shakespeare, as aloof as Flaubert, in the opinion of Charles Whibley, and, it may be added, as genial as Rabelais; an enigmatic genius whose secret will never be laid bare with the resources at our present command. ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... go," said Marian in an impersonal manner, "I don't think I ever saw a more busy one than to-day has seemed to be. The Tea Club does seem to make a most awful amount of fluster ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... else there are no rights to be considered. Labor apart from a person laboring and property apart from a person owning are impersonal and no ethical or moral laws can be applied to them. They are only physical forces and material things. The wind may push against a tree and overcome its resistance and the tree falls. That is merely an abstract force against a material thing. But when my energy is exerted against ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... Plato, the idea of God or mind is both personal and impersonal. Nor in ascribing, as appears to us, both these attributes to him, and in speaking of God both in the masculine and neuter gender, did he seem to himself inconsistent. For the difference between the personal and impersonal was not marked to him as to ourselves. We make a fundamental distinction ...
— Philebus • Plato
... the business part of politics had been with tangible foes, with material things; and his weapons had been material things: coercion, bribery (more or less sugar-coated), cheating, and often in these later years the roar of his voice or the power of his name. But now, facing the formless, impersonal thing called public opinion, hitherto unknown in his scheme of things, he was ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... late and left early; often he did not come at all. She began to question seriously if she had been right to remain in the cottage. Her heart told her no, but her pride said yes, and her pride was strong; also, it was backed by reason. Her steady brain, which was capable of quite impersonal thinking, told her that Stefan would be actively discontented just now in company with his family, and that this discontent would eat into ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... again for an instant as he said it. He had spoken with his usual shrewd decision, but there was no hint of excitement about him. He might have been discussing some matter of a purely impersonal nature. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... by a giggle and by the deepening dimple in her cheek, but all the same she sighed with a sort of impersonal regret at the prospect of any unpleasantness. "It would be too bad if I got mad, wouldn't it?" she said thoughtfully. The others looked at one another in consternation. They knew so well what it meant to have Elizabeth "mad," that Nannie Maitland, the oldest of the little ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... his personality outright, are equally shocked at the Arian limitation of it to the sphere of time. Nor had Marcellus escaped the difficulties of Arius. If, for example, the idea of an eternal Son is polytheistic, nothing is gained by transferring the eternity to an impersonal Word. If the generation of the Son is materializing, so also is the coming forth of the Word. If the work of creation is unworthy of God, it may as well be delegated to a created Son as to a transitory Word. So far ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... Introspection." It helps wonderfully to be able to look at ourselves in an objective, impersonal way. We are likely to be overcome by emotion, or swept by vague longings which seem to have no meaning and which, just because they are bound up so closely with our own ego, are not looked at but are merely felt. Unknown forces are within ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... 'the Idealist,' and the name adhered to him. At two-and-twenty he published a volume of poems, obviously derived from study of Shelley, but marked with a certain freshness of impersonal aspiration which was pleasant enough. They had the note of sincerity rather than the true poetical promise. The book had no successor. Having found this utterance for his fervour, Egremont began a series of ramblings ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... was transported out of the very circumstances which caused him to be angry and depressed. He realized, with a hazy sort of perception, that a tail of small boys had attached itself to the lodestar of the policeman's uniform; but even at this indignity, his reaction was curiously impersonal. It was as though the spiritual part of him and the material part had got a divorce; and the spiritual part, which was the plaintiff, stood coldly aloof, watching the material part tramping down Main Street, with a flat-footed ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... far-reaching story. The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing stimulus to the interest of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... at his sleeve and pushing his boots in the most painful manner I could devise, a good-looking peasant woman made her tardy appearance at the side door of the adjoining izba, and seemed to enjoy the situation in an impartial, impersonal way. The horse thrust his muzzle gently into his master's face and roused him for me, and, in return, ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... have rather poor pickings for supper, my dear," he said apologetically. He called her "my dear" from the first; it seemed more non-committal and impersonal than the use of her name. He had not called a young lady by her first ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... joyously. Miss Bentley uttered an impersonal good afternoon, Virginia advanced, a silver quarter in her palm, and demanded chestnuts for the squirrel. The bag was filled and held out to her, and as she handed over the quarter in exchange she explained, gratuitously, "We'll perhaps ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... 'Impersonal monsters, namely, Immensities. Until a person has thought out the stars and their inter-spaces, he has hardly learnt that there are things much more terrible than monsters of shape, namely, monsters of magnitude without ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the "traitor to State and Church" of refuting pamphleteers, the bogey of popular theology. In vain, then, had his treatise been issued with "Hamburg" on the title-page. In vain had he tried to combine personal peace with impersonal thought, to confine his body to a garret and to diffuse his soul through the world. The forger of such a thunderbolt could not remain hid from the eyes of Europe. Perhaps the illustrious foreigners and the beautiful bluestockings ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... existed, a sort of moral laziness, together with our artificial, yet not unpraiseworthy, repugnance to offering a money gift, had brought me out rather a Levite than a Samaritan. In mere self-defence, I would have been constrained to keep up a series of general and impersonal reflections till the swagman lost his individuality—say, five or six hours—but I was rescued from this tyranny by the faint rattle of a buggy on the other side of the river. Idly turning my glass on the two occupants of the vehicle, I recognised one of them as a familiar and valued ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... payment of another dinner; or out of ambition by people who are striving to get forward in society; or by great social figures who give regularly a certain number of dinners every season. In either case it is eaten from motives at once impersonal and selfish. I do not mean to say that I have not been at many dinners where I felt nothing perfunctory either in host or guest, and where as sweet and gay a spirit ruled as at any of our own simple feasts. Still, I think our main impression of American hospitality would be that ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... cheaper. The divorce rate is much higher in the cities than in small towns or rural regions. Fortunate that couple who start their married life in a town small enough so that neighbors are interested and helpful. The city apartment house is the most impersonal form of dwelling mankind has devised. If the first home does not have all the modern improvements, it is no great tragedy. More marriages are wrecked by too much free time than by too many home tasks to perform. Our grandparents married in the days of covered ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... evenings of voyaging and of rambling in the Bermudan islands, was undeniable. It was the more aggravating since the young man patently admired them. Even, his admiration was excessive, almost reverential, at times. Yet, it was altogether impersonal. They came eventually to know that this mountaineer regarded them with warm friendliness, with a lively gratitude, with a devoted respect, with a certain veneration. But that was all. No dart from their ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... in came the roar of Regent Street, the roar of traffic, impersonal, unpitying; and sunshine grained with dirt. The Swiss waiter must see to the newcomers. Bramham lifted ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... that moment the sea was a great lover, like Siegmund, but more impersonal, who would receive her when Siegmund could not. She rejoiced momentarily in the fact. Siegmund looked at her and continued smiling. His happiness was ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... a few lucid directions in the quiet impersonal voice of a man in a trance. Razumov made ready without a word of answer. As he was leaving the room the voice on ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... faded from Raffles's face; clearly I had reminded him of some prime anxiety, forgotten in his impersonal joy over the exploit of a fellow-criminal. He looked over his shoulder ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... 49th grenadier "lost the number of his mess." Isaac directly after the fight wrote to his brothers that "Nothing could exceed the gallantry of his men in the charge." To his own wound he referred in his usual breezy and impersonal way. "I got knocked down," he said, "soon after the enemy began to retreat, but never quitted the field, and returned to my duty in less ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... stenographers. The former, I was told, by the way, make it a practice to avoid first-hand business contacts with their guests by sending them their bills through the mail, and requiring that response be made by means of the same impersonal channel. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... entirely withdrawn; she existed like an atmosphere about the babe, an impersonal emanation of love. She lay absorbed in this life of her life, this flesh of her flesh, unconscious of herself as a sponge in warm sea-water. She touched this pulp of life, and was thrilled, and once more her senses swooned ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... to him as if she was watching him curiously; her lips were parted, and her head was a little on one side; her face interested and impersonal. ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... he realized, very nearly in love with her: what he meant by that inaccurate term was that if the affair had continued a little longer he would have insisted on marrying her. Nettie was not indifferent to him. An impersonal feeling had attracted him to her—a resentment of her treatment by the larger part of Salem, particularly the oblique admiration of the men. His supersensitiveness to any form of injustice had driven him into ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... she knew, could really do it; still there would have been the possibility. But no weak-muscled "foreigner," pap-nurtured in the lowlands, could, she knew, of course, accomplish such a feat. It was fine to know things, as he did, but muscle was what counted now! In queer, impersonal reflection, born, doubtless, of a dumb hysteria, she reflected bitterly upon the healthy weight of her own ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... no book which has come down to us with grander pretensions than this, and it is so impersonal and sincere that it is never offensive nor ridiculous. Compare the modes in which modern literature is advertised with the prospectus of this book, and think what a reading public it addresses, what criticism it expects. It seems to have been uttered from ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... there is no need for me to tell you that Corydon is not happy. She never has been happy as my wife, and I fear that she never will be. She is by nature warm-hearted, craving affection and companionship. I, on the other hand, am by nature impersonal and self-absorbed—I am compelled by the exigencies of my work to be abstracted and indifferent to things about me. I perceived this before our marriage, but not clearly enough to save her; it has been her misfortune that I have loved her so dearly that ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... her hand had rested in his,—a small, warm, caressing thing in spite of the purely casual grasp of an impersonal action. Again Robert Fairchild felt a thrill that was new to him, and he stood watching her until she had reached the motor car which had brought her to the big curve, and had faded down the hill. Then he went back to assist the sweating workmen and the anxious-faced Sam Herbenfelder. The ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... Why do substantives often differ in meaning from the verbs to which they are related, adverbs from adjectives? Why do words differing in origin coalesce in the same sound though retaining their differences of meaning? Why are some verbs impersonal? Why are there only so many parts of speech, and on what principle are they divided? These are a few crucial questions which give us an insight from different points of view into the true nature ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... know." Professor Pettibone looked down his torso with an impersonal eye. "I think the greenish skin pigmentation is a result of mineral-heavy vapors that occur during certain seasons. The growth. As to my body—I really ...
— Say "Hello" for Me • Frank W. Coggins
... as if afraid she might say too much. Florian, who had rallied in his literary enthusiasm, collapsed into his chronic state of terror. Even in so impersonal a thing as Browning, the man who does not know what his habits are takes every ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... as an ox; and, once set upon a task, managed it in a way that had given him a secure position in the community. He carried mail into the remotest districts—when there was any to carry. He "toted" heavy loads and gathered gossip and spilled it liberally. He was impersonal, ignorant, and illiterate, but he did his poor best and grovelled at the feet of any one who showed him the least affection. He was horribly afraid of Lois Ann for no reason that he could have given; he was ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... to the beginning of philanthropy; had it only been the fashion, as it is at present, Pepys had perhaps been a man famous for good deeds. And it is through this quality that he rises, at times, superior to his surprising egotism; his interest in the love affairs of others is, indeed, impersonal; he is filled with concern for my Lady Castlemaine, whom he only knows by sight, shares in her very jealousies, joys with her in her successes; and it is not untrue, however strange it seems in his abrupt presentment, that he loved his maid Jane because she was in love with ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... could not achieve. The living force within could not find expression. When it could not get expressed in one way it took another. Sex spread itself out over her body. It permeated the very fibre of her being. At the last she was sex personified, sex become condensed and impersonal. Certain words, the touch of a man's hand, sometimes even the sight of a man passing in the street ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... institutions which associated men in certain limited circles of relationships. But in the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work, in the daily round, men dealt freely and directly with one another. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... of that old, secure society which we have not yet lived long enough to have known, and which we very probably never shall know. Such civilization as we have will continue to be public and impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its specific events will remain within walls. It could not manifest itself outside without being questioned, challenged, denied; and upon reflection there might appear reasons why it is ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... day, for their decisions were now beginning to be reported, and the cases decided by one bench of judges became authorities for their successors. It is plain that such a state of things has the utmost value in many ways, whether in creating in men's minds that impersonal notion of a sovereign law which exercises its imaginative force on human action, or in furnishing by the accumulation and sacredness of precedents a barrier against the invasion of arbitrary power. But it threw a terrible obstacle ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... will change," he said in a low, impersonal voice, "I will see what there is for you to eat." He left the room, and Gordon gratefully shifted into the fresh, dry clothes. The trousers were far too large; they belonged, he recognized, to the priest, but he belted them into ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... head of the state in his representative capacity is a different thing from the old feudal loyalty. It is far more impersonal; the ruler, whether an individual or a council, is reverenced as a non-human and non-moral embodiment of the national power, a sort of Platonic idea of coercive authority. This kind of loyalty may very easily be carried too ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... out, but the symbol of them remained. To explain the symbol a myth was created, which kept sufficiently near to the original idea as to retain evidence of its close connection with the descent of property; and thus was launched the dateless, impersonal, unlocalised story which Mr. Campbell has given as a specimen of vagrant traditions, which "must have been invented after agriculture and fixed habitations, after laws of property and inheritance; but it may be as old as the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, or Egyptian civilisation, or Adam, whose ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... universe had been created a few thousand years ago by a remote and external Deity? As for him, he professed, and professed candidly enough, that he could see nothing in nature but the operation of impersonal forces; there was natural law, and there was the process of evolution, but beyond these——? Now the only really telling reply that can be made to those who argue in this fashion is that which reasons from the Divine immanence as its terminus a quo—the doctrine which beholds God first ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... English, which retains many impersonal forms, LIST is mainly used as a personal verb, as in ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... his back, and listened dreamily to the cannon. Hope was gone, and he wondered at himself for feeling a remote rather than an active interest in his fate. He thought of himself as somebody else, and felt a vague impersonal pity. He criticised the random firing, and suspected the hit was merely a fluke. When his back was dry he rolled lazily over and lay gazing up at the cloudless sky. For greater comfort he placed his hands beneath his head. The sky faded, ...
— The Face And The Mask • Robert Barr
... Olympian system, however, there is a possibility of some real Providence or impersonal Governance of the world, to which here, for a moment, Hecuba makes a passionate approach. If there is any explanation, any justice, even in the form of mere punishment of the wicked, she will be content and give worship! ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... in order to get a glimpse of her eyes which puzzled me; suddenly, in spite of the darkness that became ever thicker, I saw them very distinctly; they also were smiling like the lips;—and they were not just any impersonal eyes, such, for instance, as may be found in a statue representing youth; no, on the contrary they were very particularly somebody's eyes; more and more they impressed me as belonging to someone already much beloved whom I, with transports ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... words God reminds us that He is a Person. He speaks to us. He is not an impersonal God who pervades and is a part of nature. He is above nature and ...
— An Explanation of Luther's Small Catechism • Joseph Stump
... initial play material, for dolls like these invite an entirely different type of treatment. One cannot build villages, or provide extensive railroad facilities for them, nor does one regard them in the impersonal way that the "Do-with" family, or Mr. Wells' soldiers, are regarded, as incidentals in ...
— A Catalogue of Play Equipment • Jean Lee Hunt
... with a smile of apprehension which plainly amused him. Beatrice was frankly impersonal in her attitude; he represented a new species of the genus man, and she, too, evidently regarded him in the light of a strange animal, viewed ...
— Her Prairie Knight • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B. M. Bower
... is the ultimate principle of cosmic energy. We may call it principle, but it is not, like Brahman, absolutely impersonal. Often it assumes personality, when it receives the name of Tathagata. It has neither passions nor prejudices, but works for the salvation of all sentient beings universally. Love (karunâ) and intelligence (bodhi) are equally its characteristics. It is only ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work—then I was never an artist. I have been happiest in my work when I was working for some one else. I admire those impersonal people who care for nothing outside their own ambition, yet I detest them at the same time, and I have the simplest faith that absolute devotion to another human being means the greatest happiness. That happiness ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... terrifying. He carved with appalling courtesy. "Is there another chicken, Genevieve?" he asked, as if he had only an impersonal interest in her kitchen. No, there was only the one. And plenty, too, said the guests pleasantly. Genevieve hoped there were eggs and bacon for Marie and Lottie ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... himself to profit by them, for his thoughts and aspirations are only along certain lines, and he cannot suddenly form new lines. There are many directions which the higher thought may take—some of them personal and some impersonal. Among the latter are art, music and philosophy; and a man whose interest lay along any one of these lines finds both measureless enjoyment and unlimited instruction waiting for him—that is, the amount of enjoyment and instruction is limited only by ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... express my fears; moreover, I hardly dared say anything at all regarding herself after the haughty way in which she had received my well-meant protest. Manifestly I was but to her as a sort of refuge and provider of heat, altogether impersonal, and not to be regarded in any degree as an individual. In these humiliating circumstances what could I do but sit quiet—and ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... another consideration which held me to this impersonal relation to the problem. I refer to the fact that the Great War had brought to a focus in my own soul the inward and largely unconscious spiritual development of a decade. I had discovered, through [4] much tribulation of mind and heart, the ideal which I sought to serve, and disclosed to ...
— A Statement: On the Future of This Church • John Haynes Holmes
... is a blow in the back or the face. The laughter of Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile; often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind directs it; and it might be called the humour ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she seemed to have extended over him and his troubled life some sort of sheltering influence, to which he had succumbed with an effortless, an almost fatalistic impulse, finding there, at any rate, a refuge from the horrors of his empty days. It was all abstract and impersonal at first, this jealousy which had come so suddenly to disturb the serenity of an almost too perfect day, but as the hours passed it seemed to him that his thoughts dwelt more often upon the direct cause of his brief separation from Elizabeth. He turned in at one of the clubs ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... melody and graceful embellishments, it represents Mozart at his best, expressing in a form as clear and finely finished as a delicate ivory carving that mood of restful, sunny, impersonal optimism which is the essence of most of his musical creations. It is like some finely wrought Greek idyl, the apotheosis of the pastoral, perfect in detail, without apparent effort, gently, tenderly emotional, without ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... were chaotic. He saw before him no clear course. Whichever way he looked at it the horrible tangle grew more horrible. There was a recurring sense of unreality, a visionary feeling of detachment which enabled him to view the situation from an impersonal standpoint, as one criticises a nightmare, confident in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But in this case the confidence was based on nothing tangible and the illusion faded as quickly as it rose and left him confronted with the brutal ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... from each of them; but if it is only three lines, that answer will breathe something of the spirit of the institution. Of course the great universities will answer you very formally, or perhaps not at all. Their attitude is the impersonal one. They say to the world, and to the youth thereof: "Here we are. We are perfectly prepared. We have on hand a complete stock of education. Take it, or leave it. It is not of the slightest concern ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... simple rudeness which at times professed to be almost impersonal, and which Rosalie had usually tried to believe was the outcome of a kind of cool British humour. But this time she started ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... you will find, by many varied experiences, how strangely it foreshadowed something in Japanese character to be fully learned only after years of familiarity. You will recognize in the memory of that first impression one glimpse of the race-soul, with its impersonal lovableness and its impersonal weaknesses—one glimpse of the nature of a life in which the Occidental, dwelling alone, feels a psychic comfort comparable only to the nervous relief of suddenly emerging from some stifling atmospheric ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... anything that he actually was, but in what he suggested, in what he seemed picturesque enough to have or be and that was just anything that one chose to believe or to desire. His appeal was all the more persuasive and alluring in that it was to the imagination alone, in that it was as indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which so have their way with women. What he had was that, in his mere personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something without which—to women—life is no better than sawdust, and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... 'Soap! Soap!' when a hero comes down to breakfast. Some of our older politicians, to be sure, still wear a standard costume of Prince Albert coat, pants (for so one must call them) that bag at the knee, and an impersonal kind of black necktie, sleeping, I dare say, in what used jocularly to be called a 'nightie'; but our younger leaders go appropriately clad, to the eye, in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear clothes. So, too, does the Correspondence-School graduate, ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... child, In cool and shade His peace to find, Lice dew-fall settling on my mind. Assured that all I know is best, And humbly trusting for the rest, I turn from Fancy's cloud-built scheme, Dark creed, and mournful eastern dream Of power, impersonal and cold, Controlling all, itself controlled, Maker and slave of iron laws, Alike the subject and the cause; From vain philosophies, that try The sevenfold gates of mystery, And, baffled ever, babble still, Word-prodigal ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of the laws of beauty, while Ethics is the science of the laws of the good. But in so far as Aesthetics deals with the emotions rather than the reason it comes into contact with Ethics in the psychological field. In its narrower sense Aesthetics deals with beauty merely in an impersonal way; and its immediate object is not what is morally beautiful, but rather that which is beautiful in itself irrespective of moral considerations. Ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with personal worth as expressed ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... hands slowly together, and when he spoke his voice was sharp and quick and wholly impersonal. "Tell ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... Stock, the conductor, came out from the little side door. Behind him walked Theodore. There was a little, impersonal burst of applause. Stock mounted his conductor's platform and glanced paternally down at Theodore, who stood at the left, violin and bow in hand, bowing. The audience seemed to warm to his boyishness. They applauded again, and he bowed in a little series of jerky bobs ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... did not even seem to exist for him. The fact that she was good-looking, and with her renewed health daily becoming more so, seemed to be of no account to him whatever. He showed interest in her appearance sometimes, but it was interest of an entirely impersonal sort. He simply expressed himself as satisfied or dissatisfied, as a matter of taste. It came to her at that moment that she had never seen him really relax. Only when he sat opposite to that great map which hung ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... beginning to break. Into the old eyes had sprung a deadly terror, a look as though his immortal soul might hang on what the young man was going to say next. To answer this look, a blind impulse in Queed bade him strike out, to say or do something; and his reason, which was always detached and impersonal, was amazed to hear ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... little; he walked over and stood beside Dick, and he took a drink as unemotionally as if it had been water. He ordered another round, threw a coin upon the bar, and walked out. He had rather liked Dick, in an impersonal sort of way, but that half-sneer clung disagreeably to his memory. A man likes to be held the master—be the slave circumstance, danger, an opposing human, or his own appetite; and although Ford ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... Her mental nudeness is parallel with her low bodice, it is that and nothing more. She will make no sacrifice for her art; she will not tell the truth about herself as frankly as Jean-Jacques, nor will she observe life from the outside with the grave impersonal vision of Flaubert. In music women have done nothing, and in painting their achievement has been almost as slight. It is only in the inferior art—the art of acting—that women approach men. In that art it is not certain that they do not stand ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... for a moment had Nehemiah failed to remember the blue, never had he lost his radiant outlook. His very pessimism was merely optimism in disguise, since it was only a personal pessimism to be remedied by 'a few frivolous pounds,' by a new crumb from the hand of Providence, not that impersonal despair of the scheme of things which gave the thinker such black moments. How had Nehemiah lived during those first ten years in England? Who should say? But he had had the wild daring to uproot himself from his childhood's ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... to the darkness as a perpetual obstacle, so far as your eyes are concerned, between you and me. Make the best instead of the worst of your strange position here. It offers you a new sensation to amuse you while you are ill. You have a nurse who is an impersonal creature—a shadow among shadows; a voice to speak to you, and a hand to help you, and nothing more. Enough of myself!" she exclaimed, rising and changing her tone. "What can I do to amuse you?" She considered a little. "I have ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... give him more. At present his needs are purely personal, and therefore low and tainted with sensuality,—yet we drag him along through these emotions as near to the blameless Christ as we can. When he is impersonal enough, unselfish enough, loyal-hearted enough, to stand face to face with the glorious manifestation of the Deity unaided, we can cast away his props, such as superstitious observances, Saints and the like, and leave him,—but then ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... should prefer to think of you like that. Impersonal, nameless—I only do know one of your names. I'd like to christen you myself—let me see, what ought you to be called? I've got it. Eve! (With a gesture towards the wings.) Trumpets! (The funeral march is heard ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... her out," thought Hokosa to himself, and then in a strange half-impersonal fashion he turned his thoughts to the consideration of his own case. Would his sin find him out? he wondered. Before he could answer that question, it was necessary first to determine whether or no he ...
— The Wizard • H. Rider Haggard
... four successive Sundays Lemuel's face dawned upon the minister from the congregation, and tasked his powers of impersonal appeal and mental concentration to the utmost. It never appeared twice in the same place, and when at last Sewell had tutored the sexton carefully in Lemuel's dress, he was driven to despair one morning when he saw the boy sliding along between the seats in the gallery, and sitting down ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... her sister, just once, and then averted her eyes. Hers was the understanding which springs from love, and she realised that her simple question had struck a tender spot. Instead of waiting for an answer she switched the conversation to ordinary, impersonal topics, and kept it there until ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... peculiarity especially marked in his nose; he looked like a substantial merchant, and spoke with rather pompous geniality. Thrusting his arm through the clerk's, he walked with him over Blackfriars Bridge, talking in the friendliest strain of things impersonal. Beyond ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... he had marked down the point on Roddy's jaw where his first blow would fall, and just where to plant a coup-de-savate most surely to incapacitate the minion of the Prefecture; and all the while was looking the two over with a manner of the most calm and impersonal curiosity. ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... in the great crises of national life, but they play no part whatever in the little realities which make up the life of every day. The real directing forces of a country are the administrations, composed of impersonal elements which are never affected by the changes of government. Conservative of traditions, they are anonymous and lasting, and constitute an occult power before which all others must eventually bow. Their action has ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... "virtue" the same thing, necessarily, as to attribute vitality? Are the spear-thrower and the bull-roarer inevitably thought of as alive? Or are they, as a matter of course, endowed with soul or spirit? Or may there be also an impersonal kind of "virtue," "medicine," or whatever the wonder-working power in the wonder-working thing is to be called? Now there is evidence that the savage himself, in speaking about these matters, sometimes says power, sometimes vitality, sometimes spirit. But the ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... but rather typifies the town, standing as the visible representation of a real event, its first foundation. To our mental perceptions, as to our bodily senses, this figure seems no more than man; there is no blending of his personal nature with the impersonal nature of the colony, no transfer of attributes from the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... scarcely suspected assumptions upon which it rested. The facts were ignored that trade is a bye-product and not an essential factor in social life, that property is a plastic and fluctuating convention, that value is capable of impersonal treatment only in the case of the most generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by the standards of exchange. Society was regarded as a practically unlimited number of avaricious adult units incapable of any other subordinate groupings than business ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... impersonal to me, except as the wrongs and sorrows of a friend can hurt. But I come now to my own personal interest. And where that is concerned a ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... complexion, and his bulging eye was on the menu before his soft body had sunk into his chair. His conversation proved limited, but strictly to the point; he told Rachel what to eat, and once or twice what to avoid; lavished impersonal praise upon one dish, impartial criticisms upon another, and only spoke between the courses. It was a large dinner-party; twenty-two sat down. Rachel was at last driven to ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly, showed cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... convinces each disputant of the other's partial sanity, at least, and thus preserves harmony; (c) or, finally, the principle itself may become an object of dispute. Even then the largeness of the idea places the discussion on a high plane, and the disputants, impressed with the dignified, impersonal character of the thought, are ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... there'll hardly be a big railroad man in the country who wasn't born in sight of the Rockies." Unlike Mr. Fowler, whose mind ran in a groove leading directly to business, the judge had a natural bent toward generalization, and when dining, preferred to discuss impersonal topics. He was a tall, florid man with an immense paunch flattened by artificial devices, and a vitality so excessive that it overflowed in numberless directions—in his hearty animal appetites, in his love of sports, in his delight in the theatre ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... really supplies its own answer. It will be obvious to every one who considers that the drafting of statutes and the formulating of legal decisions is almost as impersonal a procedure as that of drawing up the rules to govern a game; and it offers hardly more opportunity for discriminating between man ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... back to the knowledge of this truth which came into the world with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried to think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this vital truth into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled with the possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of living is suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can go on taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... imposes on the advocate—deceit, falsehood, bluster, clamour, pushing,' for the quiet life of a literary man (especially as we should probably never have heard his name had he done otherwise). Not that the life was so quiet as it might have been. He could not keep his satire impersonal enough to avoid incurring enmities. He boasts in the Peregrine of the unfeeling way in which he commented on that enthusiast to his followers, and we may believe his assurance that his writings brought general dislike and danger upon him. His moralizing (of which we are ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... magnificent specimen physically," he said in his impersonal way, "and she shows none of the ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... Eliphaz opens, the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme, to which his real love will allow him. All is general, impersonal, indirect, the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the occasion which had produced them, and then passes off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... however, that he was not to be lonely, for Susan, entering with hot water, let fall in her discreet, impersonal way, another piece of gossip. 'John Gibbs says they think Mr. Francis must be bringing home a wife, Miss Caroline. He's having some of the ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... with a community in which primitive barbarism lay as a recognised basis to acquired civilisation. WE HAVE. We have no slaves to keep down by special terrors and independent legislation. But we have whole classes unable to comprehend the idea of a constitution—unable to feel the least attachment to impersonal laws. Most do indeed vaguely know that there are some other institutions besides the Queen, and some rules by which she governs. But a vast number like their minds to dwell more upon her than upon anything else, and therefore she is inestimable. A republic ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... telephone receiver down the Honorable William Linder lost himself in conjecture. He had just given an appointment to his tried and true, but quite impersonal enemy, Mr. ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... John entered, and the conversation became general and impersonal. But the influence of uncertain and unlooked-for anxiety was over all, and Harry was eager to escape it. He said the young men would be expecting him at their association hall, as he had promised to explain to them the mysteries of golf, ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... either their own comments or those of Miss ELISABETH SANXAY HOLDING, the author. Because for my part, reading these, I formed the idea (entirely wrong) that the book would be in some way pretentious and affected; whereas it is the simple truth to call it the most mercilessly impersonal piece of fiction that I think I ever read. There is far too much plot for me to give you any but a suggestion of it. The story is of the lives of two sisters, Frances and Minnie; mostly (as the title implies) of Minnie. To say that no one but a woman would have dared to imagine ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... His own power.' We have not to depend upon an impersonal Fate; nor upon a wild whirl of Chance; nor upon 'laws of averages,' 'natural laws,' 'tendencies' and 'spirit of the age'; nor even on a theistic Providence, but upon a Father who holds all things 'in His own power,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... like the common run of country ministers and country doctors. And if these accessory characters have seemed mere abstractions to some people, it depends on the fact that ordinary men are to a certain extent impersonal in the exercise of their callings. This means that they are without individuality, showing only one side of themselves while at work. And as long as the spectator does not feel the need of seeing them from other sides, ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... background." The remark contains an admirable characterization of romanticism; as distinguished from classicism, romanticism is consciousness of the background. With Gros, Gericault, Paul Huet, Michel, Delacroix, French painting ceased to be abstract and impersonal. Instead of continuing the classic detachment, it became interested, curious, and catholic. It broadened its range immensely, and created its effect by observing the relations of its objects to their ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... I'm sure," the young man murmured.—No, she didn't stare. He could not honestly call it staring. It was too calm, too impersonal, too reserved for that. She looked, with a view to arriving at conclusions regarding him. And he didn't enjoy ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... she did not know why she absented herself. She only knew two things: that the young man seemed to disapprove of the old man; and when she saw the young man in the pulpit, impersonal and holy, she suffered. Therefore she would not ...
— The Voice • Margaret Deland
... supreme power swings between the Emperor and the impersonal General Staff, all are interested, since even an Emperor is mortal, in learning something about the heir who succeeds in case of death. And we who face with the rest of the world the forces of Kaiserism desire to know ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... was now aware of the fact that he was called upon to act as President of the World Zionist Organization. It was difficult to draw a line between the movement and its leader. Herzl insisted that his leadership in the movement was impersonal and that now its direction was vested in its instruments—the Congress and the Actions Committee. But he had all the authority of ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... ivory from which creeps always a subtle shade of pink. Her hair was parted in the middle and brushed back in little waves, her eyes were full of fire, and her face was no longer passive. Beautiful she had seemed to him before, but beautiful with a sort of impersonal perfection. She was beautiful now in her own right, the beauty of a woman whom nature has claimed for her own, who acknowledges her heritage. The fear-frozen subjectivity in which he had yet found enough to fascinate him had passed away. ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... road white and dusty, the mountains of Elvira purple to the tops and there splashed with silver. When he spoke, his voice was changed. Neither now nor hereafter did he discourse of money-gold and nobility flowing from earthly kings with that impersonal exaltation with which he talked of his errand from God to link together east and west. But he drew them somehow in train from the last, hiding here I thought, an earthly weakness from himself, and the weakness so intertwined with strength ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one of them in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: "This war was not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell." This belief was due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern warfare, in which gun-fire is at so long a range that shell-fire has the quality of natural and elemental powers of death—like thunderbolts—and men killed twenty miles behind the lines while walking over sunny fields or in busy ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... all right, but they're so confounded trite and impersonal. People prefer to read anecdotes about the people rather than a listing of ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... make any alteration in her simple attire, her energies during those few minutes were chiefly devoted to cooling her flushed cheeks, and when the gong sounded she ran downstairs, letters in hand, and evinced a politely impersonal surprise at the sight of Captain Erskine and ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... murmur "Ghastly nuisance," but I knew it was of the integrity of his domestic accord that he was thinking. With my eyes on the dog lying curled up in sleep in the middle of the porch I suggested in a subdued impersonal tone: "Yes. Why not let yourself ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... child completely. Humor brings joy into the world, so does the little child, their very existence is a harmony. Humor sees contrasts, shows good sense, and feels compassion. It stimulates curiosity. Its laughter is impersonal and has a social and spiritual effect. It acts like fresh air, it clarifies the atmosphere of the mind and it enables one to see things in a sharply defined light. It reveals character; it breaks up a situation, reconstructs it, ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... you might, perhaps, be about that." Her voice was as impersonal as an oracle's. "You would be better off without her in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be half as dangerous. How blind women are—your wife would keep that about and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. What ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... while now upon so wide a field thus variously accomplished and with such liveliness of expertness in him, too; all this would seem to argue some uncommon vivacity of intelligence. But not precisely so. For nothing was this man more remarkable, than for a certain impersonal stolidity as it were; impersonal, I say; for it so shaded off into the surrounding infinite of things, that it seemed one with the general stolidity discernible in the whole visible world; which while pauselessly active in uncounted modes, still eternally holds ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... preached, not only to hear him but to see him. Many stories are told of him; some true, some more or less apocryphal, all proving the affectionate sympathy existing between him and his kind. It was said of him that as soon as he entered a pulpit he was absolutely impersonal. There was no trace of individual experience or theological conflict by which he might be labeled. He was simply a messenger of the truth as he held it, a mouthpiece of the gospel as he believed it had ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... reveals Him, is no cold or remote Being, no abstract Principle-of-All-Things, reposing aloof and impersonal in the stillness of an eternal calm. He is rather the boundless energy of an eternal Life—"no motionless eternity of perfection, but an overflowing vitality, an inexhaustible fecundity, the everlasting well-spring ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... often ask myself how you bring yourself to stick to me," said Lupin, in a reflective, quite impersonal tone. "Please pour me out ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... with Osiris Unnefer ("Hare God"). These are the lines upon which investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. iii. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... about that when they preach evolution, progress, prosperity, being constructive, the American way of doing things. It is easy to laugh, but, in fact, they are using a very great pattern of human endeavor. For one thing it adopts an impersonal criterion; for another it adopts an earthly criterion; for a third it is habituating men to think quantitatively. To be sure the ideal confuses excellence with size, happiness with speed, and human nature with contraption. Yet the same motives are at ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... regular mode of consulting the gods; but the Tities observed different birds from the Ramnian augurs. Similar relations present themselves, wherever we have opportunity of comparing them. Both stocks in common regarded the gods as abstractions of the earthly and as of an impersonal nature; they differed in expression and ritual. It was natural that these diversities should appear of importance to the worshippers of those days; we are no longer able to apprehend what was the characteristic ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... of surprise to many to find the work in sheds and quarries proceeding with its accustomed regularity; to find that to the new comers in Flamsted the affair was an impersonal one, that Champney Googe held no place among the workmen; that his absconding meant to them simply another one of the "high rollers" fleeing from his deserts. Little by little, during that first week, the truth found its way home to each man ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... solution of the difficulty; here was a new interest for Mary, a safe channel in which her emotions could run. A woman could not serve on a miners' committee, but she would be a good adviser, and her sharp tongue would be a weapon to drive others into line. Being aflame with this enterprise, Hal became impersonal, man-fashion—and so fell into another sentimental trap! He did not stop to think that Mary's interest in the check-weighman movement might be conditioned in part by a desire to see more of him; still less did it occur to him that he might be glad for a pretext ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... Claudia's heart was knowledge of the secret in his, she masked it well. Warmly cordial, coolly impersonal, frankly unconscious, she had never avoided him, and still had so managed that they were never alone together. Hands clasped loosely, he leaned forward and stared into the heart of the blazing logs. Of course she knew. All women know when they are loved. No. The log fell apart, and its burning ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... "There was something impersonal in his tone, and he looked eery there in the moonlight, I can tell you, leaning on one arm and bleeding. Awfully good-looking chap. Built like a giant. He reminded me of a statue called the Dying ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... allows us to suspect that it is not the man himself whom he presents to us but the man as he knew him, though he would not have admitted the distinction. He could not imitate the detachment of Clarendon, who is always deliberately impersonal, and writes as if he were pronouncing the impartial judgement of history from which there can be no appeal. Burnet views his men from a much nearer distance. His perspective may sometimes be at fault, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... experimenting on her own account, not merely bewildering and enthralling these estimable gentlemen of her mother's generation. But why? Joining casually in the conversation, or quite withdrawn, he watched her with increasing and now quite impersonal interest. He almost fancied she was making an effort to be something more than the polite and amiable hostess, that she was deliberately striving to see them as men who had a perfect right to fascinate a woman of her age ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... research, the conclusions we arrive at will have in them more of the magic of Nature, and will be closer to the actual palpable organic mystery of Life, than either the abstract conclusions of metaphysic or the cautious, impersonal hypotheses of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... sacrifice and military glory. Even editors and play-writers fighting at the front were able to send back impressions now and then, and these, stripped by the censorship of names and dates, became almost as impersonal as pages torn from fiction. Sitting comfortably at some cafe table, reading the papers with morning coffee, one saw the dawn coming up over the Oise and Aisne, heard the French "seventy-fives" and the heavy German ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... found, to my disappointment, that the "Guardian" exhibited more than the usual dearth of domestic intelligence, although it was singularly oracular on "The State of Europe," and "Jeffersonian Democracy." A certain cheap assurance, a copy-book dogmatism, a colloquial familiarity, even in the impersonal plural, and a series of inaccuracies and blunders here and there, struck some old chord in my memory. I was mutely wondering where and when I had become personally familiar with rhetoric like that, when the door of the office opened and ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... wondering if she should meet him in the gallery, and what he would think of the Greuse. He wouldn't care much about it. He didn't care much about the French eighteenth century, of course he admired Watteau, but it was an impersonal admiration, there was nothing of the Watteau, Greuse, Pater, or Lancret in him. He was purely English. He took no interest in the unreal charm that that head expressed. Of course, no such girl had ever existed or could exist, those ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... beauty. Madame de Sevigne's descriptions of her woods came to my mind. It is not a place which delights one by its actual sensual beauty, as Italy does; it is not as in England, where a thousand associations link one to every scene and aspect—Ireland seems to me to contain some unique and most impersonal charm, ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... affected by the contemporaneous and parallel change which has passed over her special occupations; so that the conditions under which she works today are decidedly less than ever before by purely personal relationships and more by such impersonal factors as the trade supply of labor, and interstate and international competition. This change has affected woman in an immeasurably greater degree than man. The conditions of industrial life are in our day in some degree controllable by political power so that at this point woman again finds herself ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... laughing, singing, praying, apostrophising the sun, the clouds, the distant land, and even the spirits of my drowned companions, whom I imagined to be crowding round me and trying to drag me off the floating hatch. I was aware, in a vague, impersonal fashion, of the gradual decline of the sun toward the west, of his disappearance beneath the horizon, and of the fact that just as the outlines of the land ahead were fading into the gathering darkness a small ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... investigation should run. And of late years there is a notable improvement of tone in treating of symbolism or idolatry: the Lingam and the Yoni are now described as "mystical representations, and perhaps the best possible impersonal representatives of the abstract expressions paternity and maternity" (Prof. Monier Williams in "Folk-lore Record" vol. iii. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... and having quiet talks about their lives. Sally, however, did not share this fondness for Myra. She felt that Myra was an intruder—that Myra was interposing a wall between her and Joe—and she resented the intrusion. She could not help noticing that Joe was becoming more and more impersonal with her, but then, she thought, "people are not persons to him any more; he's swallowed up in the cause." Luckily she was too busy during the day, too tired at night, to brood much on the matter. However, one evening at committee meeting, her moment of realization came. ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... contested the will. I would have got my full share either by court proceedings or by settlement out of court. You see, I had planned it all out. The school would have been founded—I, we would have founded it. What difference, I said, did thirty millions or fifty millions make to an impersonal school, a school not yet even in existence? The twenty million dollars or so difference, or even half of it, meant life and love ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... the family with impersonal efficiency, discussing the symptoms loudly with Harkness. "It's a good thing ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... craves is the outcome of one set of influences, due to one's special vision, one's traditions, one's training and environment, influences that are no doubt mainly objective and impersonal, operative on most of one's fellows. But what one personally craves is the outcome of another set of influences, due to one's peculiar and instinctive organic constitution; it is based on one's individual instinctive needs and may not be precisely ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... any one overcame her. She did not want to marry at all. It seemed to her that there was something amateurish in bringing love into touch with a perfectly straightforward friendship, such as hers was with Ralph, which, for two years now, had based itself upon common interests in impersonal topics, such as the housing of the poor, or the taxation ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... he was the author of the infamous Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the "traitor to State and Church" of refuting pamphleteers, the bogey of popular theology. In vain, then, had his treatise been issued with "Hamburg" on the title-page. In vain had he tried to combine personal peace with impersonal thought, to confine his body to a garret and to diffuse his soul through the world. The forger of such a thunderbolt could not remain hid from the eyes of Europe. Perhaps the illustrious foreigners and the beautiful bluestockings who climbed his stairs—to the detriment of his day's work in grinding ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Parts method of publication. He began his stories without seeing the end; in one of them he is humorously plaintive over the trouble of making this manner of fiction. While "Vanity Fair" is, of course, written in the impersonal third person, at least one passage is put into the mouth of a character in the book: an extraordinary slip ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... published them, and from the very first the reading public was won. He related his adventures and his own romance. The question could then be raised whether his skill and art would prove as consummate if he should deviate from his own personality to write what might be termed impersonal poems; and it is precisely in this last direction that he subsequently produced what are now considered ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... Victoria came to the throne. Now their sympathies have expanded with their knowledge and their sense of responsibility; with the degree of confidence reposed in them. They recognize their obligations to their own states and their duty to the imperial throne. The British crown is no longer an impersonal abstraction, but a concrete and inspiring force. The political system of India is neither feudalism nor federation. It is embodied in no constitution; it does not rest upon treaty, and it bears no resemblance to a league. ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... say, her emotional self does not go into her poems, what becomes of it?" enquired Trent, with a curiosity too impersonal to be vulgar. "For she, finely tempered as she is, suggests nothing so much as a beautiful ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... doing much. He was gentle, he was listening, and on his face a frown of concern. His face continually surprised her, it was so fine and alive and near, by comparison with Ninian's loose-lipped, ruddy, impersonal look and Dwight's thin, high-boned hardness. All the time Cornish gave her something, instead of drawing upon her. Above all, he was there, and ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... looked as if she were giving up every youthful illusion, and realized that Life is the enemy of man, and more particularly of woman. Possibly her own lover was in the trenches. Or perhaps this mutilated boy beside her was the first lover of her youth. One feels far too impersonal for curiosity in these hospitals and it did not occur ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... touch," though it became an office joke, also took its place as an unwritten law. Severance's calm and impersonal cynicism was transmuted into a genuine enthusiasm among the copy-readers. Headlining took on a new interest, whetted by the establishment of a weekly prize for the most attractive caption. Maximum of sensationalism was the ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of old-fashioned honesty that makes a man a grafter," he said. "It's seeing the duties and privileges of a public office in a private and personal way, instead of in a public, impersonal one; being kind to old friends who need a helping hand, and grateful to people who've held out helping hands to you. Well, and women have been trained for hundreds of years to see things in that private and personal way, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... or Sir James Brennan with the ounce of snuff round his studs. No. Perhaps Maisie's right." "I have plenty of ambition—I am burning with it, and I have an intuition that this is one of the widest and finest fields in the world—for impersonal ambition, that is, ambition ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... Malone had remained with him, clear and insistent after yesterday's impersonal vision of her at rehearsal, what was she now, when every tremulous lilt of the zither-string voice, and every little gesture of the impulsive hands, and every eager change of the glowing face, were fresh and living, in all their beautiful reality, but a matter of minutes past? He no longer ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... compliant man,—and the insinuating reptile. One speaks, the other rejoins, and the third fills up the chasm of interest. The plot thickens, the passions are displayed, and the tragedy hastens to its end. Then is heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the cool (the wind) of the garden, the impersonal presence of Jehovah is, as it were, felt in the passing breeze, and a shadow falls upon the earth,—but such a shadow as their own patient toil may dissipate, and beyond the confines of which their hope, which has now taken ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... interaction, but competition is a struggle between individuals, or groups of individuals, who are not necessarily in contact and communication; while conflict is a contest in which contact is an indispensable condition. Competition, unqualified and uncontrolled as with plants, and in the great impersonal life-struggle of man with his kind and with all animate nature, is unconscious. Conflict is always conscious, indeed, it evokes the deepest emotions and strongest passions and enlists the greatest concentration of attention and of effort. Both competition and conflict are forms of struggle. Competition, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... might, perhaps, be about that." Her voice was as impersonal as an oracle's. "You would be better off without her in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be half as dangerous. How blind women are—your wife would keep that about and yet divorce you for ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... He was now aware of the fact that he was called upon to act as President of the World Zionist Organization. It was difficult to draw a line between the movement and its leader. Herzl insisted that his leadership in the movement was impersonal and that now its direction was vested in its instruments—the Congress and the Actions Committee. But he had all the authority ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... Pride is the weakness of a thing unpraised. But he, this man.... He would be like a child Girt with the tomes of some vast library, Who reads romance after romance, and smiles When every tale ends well: impersonal As God he grows—melted in suns and stars; So would this boundless man, whom none could spy, Taunt him with virtue, censure him with vice, Rejoice in all men's joys; with golden pen Write all the live romances of the earth To a triumphant ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... The talk soon became impersonal, however, harking back to the trails of childhood. As the young stranger ate of the rude fare Malemute Kid attentively studied his face. Nor was he long in deciding that it was fair, honest, and open, and ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... kind by the radiance of her wonderful hair, her sunny eyes, her glowing skin. The joy of the night before, the morning's passionate grief, the ingenuous hope and prayer in her ride after Steering, the sweet, anxious torture of the journey to Salome Park were all giving place to a large, impersonal comprehension of the conflict in Steering's soul. She had known before that there was trouble brewing between him and her father. She knew now, past all doubting, that he loved her, knew it from his face, his voice. And ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Let's find some mild, impersonal topic, then, that won't embarrass you. What do you do under the shadow of this rock, in ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... yet she wished the man to understand how impersonal was her gladness; how impossible it was that any atonement could bring them together again in spirit; how dead was the past which he had slain. And he did understand as clearly from her few words as if she had preached him an ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... efface himself, and therein he succeeded admirably by never sleeping two following nights in the same house: so that, when Cartouche was the terror of Paris, when even the King trembled in his bed, none knew his stature nor could recognise his features. In this shifting and impersonal vizard, he broke houses, picked pockets, robbed on the pad. One night he would terrify the Faubourg St. Germain; another he would plunder the humbler suburb of St. Antoine; but on each excursion he was companioned by experts, and ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... Court in Hurtado v. California,[67] declared that, "arbitrary power, enforcing its edicts to the injury of the persons and property of its subjects, is not law, whether manifested as the decree of a personal monarch or of an impersonal multitude. And the limitations imposed by our constitutional law upon the action of the governments, both State and national, are essential to the preservation of public and private rights, notwithstanding the representative character of our political institutions. The enforcement of these ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... and his troubled life some sort of sheltering influence, to which he had succumbed with an effortless, an almost fatalistic impulse, finding there, at any rate, a refuge from the horrors of his empty days. It was all abstract and impersonal at first, this jealousy which had come so suddenly to disturb the serenity of an almost too perfect day, but as the hours passed it seemed to him that his thoughts dwelt more often upon the direct cause of his brief separation ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that the blow fell, and I had a curious, impersonal sort of feeling that on every night to come, should I live for a hundred years, each future entree of each future dinner would recall the sensation of this moment. Something inside me, that was myself yet not ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... door, which opened into the central hall. Beyond it was a crowd of figures and a buzz of talk, and at the door stood a tall person in black with white gloves, holding a silver tray, from which he presented David with a button-hole. Then, with a manner at once suave and impersonal, he held open the door, and the husband ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... represented. If he had a singing voice, she said to herself, it would be a tenor. He had allowed the conversation to wander from the convent to the concert; and they were soon talking of their musical preferences. There was an impersonal tenderness, a spiritual solicitude in his voice which enchained her; no single idea held her, but wave after wave of sensation passed, transforming and dissolving, changeable as a cloud. Human life demands hope, and the priest is a symbol of hope; there is ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... irreflective courage, which prompted him to utter what he thought without regard to anything but the common civilities of life. His opinions might excite surprise; but they did not give offence; for they seemed impersonal, the natural outcome of honest and capable observation, with never a touch of national prejudice or individual conceit. It was well, perhaps, for the young man's natural modesty, that he did not hear certain remarks afterwards exchanged ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... we should mind them so? They come to everybody in turn, and they are as relentless and impersonal as the sun marching around the sky. Kedzie had hers, and Charity hers, and the streetcar conductor Kedzie had rebuffed had his, and the Czar with his driven army had his, with more to come, and the Kaiser with his victorious army ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... and are good, and he will be rewarded and punished according to his attitude in obedience and disobedience. The character of the entire point of view is personal, human, teleological, ethical. There is no attempt made at an impersonal and objective analysis of the common aspects of all existing things, the elements underlying all nature. Nor is there any conscious effort at a critical classification of the various kinds of things existing in nature ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... the vision and the dream anew. She prayed again in those days fervently, and in full faith, as of old; for when we pray with love in our hearts our prayers are granted, and her heart was full of love—a holy, impersonal love, such as we feel for some great genius, adored at a distance, for the grace of goodness he has imparted to us. And her heart being full of love, her brain teemed with ideas; the love she lived on, the ideas she held in reserve, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a scarcely perceptible start of surprise as his eyes fell upon Diana, but he betrayed no pleasure at seeing her again. His face showed nothing beyond the polite, impersonal interest which ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... scientific restraint and balance, as against the self-assertion of a confident reliance upon intuition, we are only urging, in the sphere of knowledge, that largeness of contemplation, that impersonal disinterestedness, and that freedom from practical preoccupations which have been inculcated by all the great religions of the world. Thus our conclusion, however it may conflict with the explicit beliefs of many mystics, is, in essence, not contrary to the spirit which ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... a brute," Lindsay went on with most impersonal solicitude, "and can support her. I suppose there isn't any way one could do anything for her. I heard a story only yesterday about a girl changing her mind on the way out. By Jove, I didn't suppose it would ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... nautical literature, and approached by nothing in verity, except it may be Admiral Dupont's waltz of fire around the two forts of Hilton Head. Another, who laughs at both of these amateur statements, has a Grub-Street one; but, except to a favored few, to everybody in this country he is only an impersonal existence. In this general dearth of useful information, there are, however, one or two biographical sketches afloat,—possibly hints of those waiting their chance in the pigeon-holes of the Thunderer,—of which we are tempted to give the reader a sample, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... man of ten thousand blessings, the sustainer of his life and health and happiness. With some the worship was purely and wholly material—the sun was viewed as a huge mass of fiery matter, uninformed by any animate life, unintelligent, impersonal; but with others, sun-worship was something higher than this: the orb of day was regarded as informed by a good, wise, bright, beneficent Spirit, which lived in it, and worked through it, and was the true benefactor of mankind and sustainer of life and of the universe. Sun-worship of this ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... looked her over with an impersonal air, lending weight to the resulting judgment—"I should say about to ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... was the terror of the Italian republics in the Middle Ages. These are defects of temper which will probably prevent his name from ever shining with that serene lustre of international veneration that has surrounded the memory of a Joseph II. or a Washington with a kind of impersonal immaculateness. But his countrymen, at least, have every reason to condone these defects; for they are concomitant results of the military bent of German character, and they are offset by such transcendent military ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... her mother, it all seemed too strange and beautiful. It was God's grace working through her, and her devoutness was not without its human mixture of girlish pride and exaltation. She worshiped him in her natural moments, and in her moments of religious fervor she prayed for him with impersonal anguish as for a lost soul. She did not consider him a criminal, but she thought him Godless and rebellious toward ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... creative, a criticism of critics; perhaps it would be at once more correct and concise to call it "Robert Browning's Apology." Pacchiarotto, At the "Mermaid", House, Shop and Epilogue, are all more or less personal utterances on art and the artist, sometimes in a concrete and impersonal way, more often in a somewhat combative and contemptuous spirit. The most important part of the volume, however, is that which contains the two or three monodramatic poems and the splendid ballad of ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... modern commerce. It is not merely that the widening gap of social position between employer and employed, and the increased number of the latter, make the previous close relation impossible. Quite as important is the fact that the real employer in modern industry is growing more "impersonal." What we mean is this. The nominal employer or manager is not the real employer. The real employer of labour is capital, and it is to the owners of the capital in any business that we must chiefly look for the exercise of such responsibility as rightly subsists between employer ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... is involuntary; reflection is personal, spontaneity is impersonal; reflection is analytic, spontaneity is synthetic; reflection begins with doubt, spontaneity with affirmation; reflection belongs to certain ones, spontaneity belongs to all; reflection produces science, spontaneity ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... to the impartial, impersonal type of judge. He had no personal feelings or conviction as to the guilt or innocence of the prisoner. It was for the jury to settle that point and it was his duty to assist them to the best of his ability. ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... the poems represent the indignation with which he regarded such personal revelations, such utterance of sighs and groans, as characterized Byron (the "Last King" of "At the Mermaid"); but they overstate the impersonal nature of Browning's own work which is frequently a very direct statement of his own emotions and views, while even from his dramatic work it is not difficult to find his "hopes and fears, beliefs and doubts." In stanzas 10-12 of "At the Mermaid," for example, just after he has protested ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... in this woman beside him. He had seen her fairly, with his first appreciative glance, when he had climbed into the stage on the preceding day. He had realized there fully the charm of her face, the dark roguish eyes, the clear skin, the wealth of dark hair. Yet all this was impersonal; however pretty she might be, the fact was nothing to him and never could be. Knowing who she was, he comprehended instantly the social gulf stretching unbridged between them. An educated man himself, with family connections ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... has another origin. In Japanese religion the monotheistic tendency is markedly absent. The sun-goddess is the principal deity but remains simply prima inter pares. But in the ancient religion of China, T'ien or Heaven, also called Shang-ti, the supreme ruler, though somewhat shadowy and impersonal, does become an omnipotent Providence without even approximate rivals. Other superhuman beings are in comparison with him merely angels. Unfortunately the early history of Chinese religion is obscure and the documents scanty. In India however ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... education is very low. Most of the Chinese soldiers declare as a commonplace; "We eat the imperial food and we must therefore serve the imperial master." But now the Imperial family is gone, and for it has been substituted an impersonal republic, of which they know nothing whatsoever. These soldiers are now law-abiding because they have awe-inspiring and respectful feelings for the man at the head of the state. But as the talk of equality and ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... the municipal reformer then is to transform this excessive proximity into wholesome neighbourhood, in order that true neighbourly feelings may have room to grow and thrive, and eventually to ripen into the flower of a fair civic life. "A modern city," it has been well said, "is probably the most impersonal combination of individuals that has ever been formed in the world's history."[288] To evoke the personal human qualities of this medley of city workers so as to reach within the individual the citizen, to educate the civic feeling until it take shape in civic activities ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... her hand in protest: "Don't Harry—please don't. All the suffering has not been yours!" The impersonal tone was gone—there was a note ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... before, I felt some fear; though almost of an impersonal kind. I may explain my feeling better by saying that it was more a sensation of abhorrence; such as one might expect to feel, if brought in contact with something superhumanly foul; something unholy—belonging to some hitherto undreamt of ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... quite impersonal trend of thought is offered for consideration by Shakespeare's majestic eloquence. The dramatist bids us bear in mind that his lines do no more than suggest the things he would have the audience see and understand; the actors aid the suggestion according to their ability. But ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... particular to an ignorant one, there is an enormous difference between the personal and the impersonal. Tell a child that such a thing must be done because it is right, and the motive power is faint and vague, not unlikely to be overthrown by the first breath of temptation. But let the child understand that to do this ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... of every personal desire. It is the effacement of that radical egotism that caused the fall of Adam, in that he dragged down spirituality into corporeality. The narrow pusillanimous ego melts into nothing before the high impersonal self, symbolized by Hiram. The mythical sins of the eternal universal human Adam are thus expatiated. The architect of the temple is to the Grand Master Builder of All Worlds (G. B. a. W.) just what in Christian symbolism the Word become flesh is to the Eternal Father. In order to carry on the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... your golf bag, Miss Walbert. I forgot to give it to you when I left you." Her tone evenly impersonal, it carried a note of ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... and make Our abode with him.' Now notice how here, in the first part of this verse, our Lord subtly and significantly alters the form of the statement which He has already made. He had formerly said, 'If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments,' but now He casts it into a purely impersonal form, and says, 'If a man,' anybody, not 'you' only, but anybody—'If a man love Me, he,' anybody, 'will keep My word.' And why the change? Why, I suppose, in order to strike full and square against that complacent assumption of Judas that it was 'to us and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... one trouble to write?' In his opinion, 'le vrai honnete homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien'; and it is clear that he followed his own dictum. His attitude was eminently detached. Though what he says reveals so intensely personal a vision, he himself somehow remains impersonal. Beneath the flawless surface of his workmanship, the clever Duke eludes us. We can only see, as we peer into the recesses, an infinite ingenuity and a ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the most personal and private life of the individual it is nevertheless true that continued and careful study of this form of mentation insensibly alters one's attitude so that at length the dream appears as a fact of nature, impersonal and objective. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... last little bottle, and sitting on the edge of the bath let her eyebrows rise. How pleasant was that impersonal humor which made ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... monarchy—a principle which is both ancient and absolute, tracing the line of duty for all men, clear and indisputable, without any possibility of hesitation or compromise—against and in the face of all comers. And this principle is one which calls forth the proudest devotion, seeing it is impersonal, for the king is not the elected leader of conquerors, oppressing the conquered, but a living flag, the national rallying-point for all the defenders of the mother country against her enemies, whether within or ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... (or whatever his name was), understood that, for a fable, all the persons must be impersonal. They must be like abstractions in algebra, or like pieces in chess. The lion must always be stronger than the wolf, just as four is always double of two. The fox in a fable must move crooked, as the knight in chess must ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... seemed intolerably good to the discoverer, he brought it in and insisted on their reading parts of it together. Browning, Darwin, the Vedic Hymns, Stevenson, Taine, Buckle, Spencer, Kipling, Sir Henry Maine, on primitive law, and Emerson! The relation of the men was almost impersonal in the fervor of their explorations into life. Differences of blood and tradition were not only easily bridged but welcomed, because they assured, to the group as a whole, sharper angles ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... be too severe and should always be impersonal. It is not John and Mary who are being corrected, but the mistakes that John and Mary make. You have heard both parents and teachers say, "John, why will you persist in saying, 'I done it'? Don't you know that is wrong? You must correct yourself." Such criticism is wholly ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... to see him eat it—she was not poet enough for that; and, that impersonal, composite father, ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... sort of an answer from each of them; but if it is only three lines, that answer will breathe something of the spirit of the institution. Of course the great universities will answer you very formally, or perhaps not at all. Their attitude is the impersonal one. They say to the world, and to the youth thereof: "Here we are. We are perfectly prepared. We have on hand a complete stock of education. Take it, or leave it. It is not of the ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... in particulars as compared with men. The individual circumstance seems to them very important; and it is hard for them to get away from the concrete. On the other hand, a man's thinking is more impersonal and general; and he is more easily drawn into abstractions. It is true that woman's domestic life would naturally develop this quality but we are not now concerned with the question of origins. Most women ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... dismiss them, barely entertained, even as a sort of disloyalty, to the limbo of stillborn fancies. And so now, with his accustomed generosity, he speedily flung himself into the breach, and did his best to drive the conversation into impersonal and presumably safer channels. He touched on the prospects of the Academy, of academic art, and art in general, and by-and-by, as Oswyn rose to the discussion, he became himself interested, and was actuated less by a wish to make conversation than to draw his new ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... attract her notice, had hung upon her words. Even at school, at college, she had always commanded willing homage. As Greyson had once told her, it was herself—her personality that was her greatest asset. Was it to be utterly wasted? There were hundreds of impersonal, sexless women, equipped for nothing else, with pens as keen if not keener than hers. That was not the talent with which she had been entrusted—for which she would have to account. It was her beauty, her power to charm, to draw after her—to ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... found himself becoming irrationally irritated with Hull. He knew that the young sociologist had nothing to do with his own irritation, so he kept the remarks as impersonal as possible. "In the first place, you, as a sociologist, should know what market most fiction is ...
— Hanging by a Thread • Gordon Randall Garrett
... tiresome journey Merrit found something inexpressibly charming in the quiet, picturesque place, and in the silent young girl who sat so demurely in the shadow. He tactfully ignored her timidity by talking cheerful nonsense about impersonal things, treating her as a bashful child who wanted to ...
— Little Sister Snow • Frances Little
... quite unconcerned. They didn't trouble to look on, but talked to each other about blouses like girls in a post office. The students drove out to the inn and back in open carriages. It is a mile from Heidelberg. The duels are generally as impersonal as games, but sometimes they are in settlement of quarrels. I think any student may come and fight on these occasions, but I suppose he has to be ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... rather vacant, and dehumanized apartment, with its empty wardrobe and desert toilet-table and pictureless walls and stereotyped furnishings, a sudden blankness came upon her as though she didn't matter, and had been thrust away into this impersonal corner, she and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... groups of men who are trying to abolish slavery in America or to throw off Hapsburg oppression in Italy. At any rate, I was heartily ashamed of my meager notion of patriotism, and I came out of the room exhilarated with the consciousness that impersonal and international relations are actual facts and not mere phrases. I was filled with pride that I knew a man who held converse with great minds and who really sorrowed and rejoiced over happenings across the sea. I never recall ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... fiercely to himself as to others, but at bottom he could not have thought of himself as at ease in any intimate relation with her. He found her beautiful physically, but much too fine and delicate to be comfortable with. He could be brave, bold, insolent with her, in an impersonal way; but personally he could not have ventured the slightest familiarity, now that he really appreciated "what a refined, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... "So long as they were," not "so long as he was." The Irish is cein ropas, and ropas is the impersonal preterite passive. ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... are dumped over by the thousands to fall where they will. That little machine a mile and more aloft in the sky, busily buzzing its way across the heavens, is the true symbol of war today, not face to face except on rare occasions, but hellish in its impersonal will ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... another point of view. He took stock of himself. From the picturesque boy he had grown into the physically perfect man. As a model he was no longer sought after for subject pieces. He was in clamorous demand at Life Schools, where he drew a higher rate of pay, but where he was as impersonal to the intently working students as the cast of the Greek torso which other students were copying in the next room. The intimacy of the studio, the warmth and the colour and the meretricious luxury were gone from his life. On the other hand he was making money. He had fifty pounds ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... pumping both of Tommy's hands, his normal calmness torn from him for once. But after a bare moment he had gripped himself again. He unloaded an impressive number of parcels from about his person. Then he regarded the citizens of the Golden City with an impersonal, estimating gaze, ignoring twenty weapons ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... tranquil, indolent existence. No great legislator arose among them to teach them the use of the plough and the sickle, and when they saw the Russian peasants on their borders laboriously ploughing and reaping, they looked on them with compassion, and never thought of following their example. But an impersonal legislator came to them—a very severe and tyrannical legislator, who would not brook disobedience—I mean Economic Necessity. By the encroachments of the Ural Cossacks on the east, and by the ever-advancing wave of Russian colonisation from the north and west, their territory had been ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... bully in business has been that he is not so simple and easy to recognize. He is apt to be more or less anonymous and impersonal, and it is harder to hit him in ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... news, I want to know it, right slam-bang out," I told him. And for the first time he turned and looked at me, in a meditative and impersonal sort of way that brought the fish-hook tugging at my thorax again. He looked at me as though some inner part of him were still debating as to whether or not he was about to be confronted by a woman in tears. Then a touch of cool desperation crept ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... answer my uncle wrote down my age on the pad. I was deeply impressed. What was this ceremony? Was this personage too great to be spoken to? Again he glanced at the pad, and again gave a nod, and again that impersonal, mechanical voice was heard: ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... it up reluctantly, kissing it much as she had kissed him during their engagement; warm, lingering, but almost impersonal kisses. The ruby seemed miraculously to have restored her ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Castle, the accident of Bob Power's connection with my daughter Marion, the accidents of my social position and personal tastes, have placed me in a position to give a very full account of what actually happened. The first two chapters of this book will therefore be written in the impersonal manner of the ordinary history; I myself occupying the position of unseen spectator. The rest of the book is largely founded upon the diary which I ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... drinking, card-playing, or the rarer and less oblivious pleasure of seeing Miss Nancy Lammeter. The subtle and varied pains springing from the higher sensibility that accompanies higher culture, are perhaps less pitiable than that dreary absence of impersonal enjoyment and consolation which leaves ruder minds to the perpetual urgent companionship of their own griefs and discontents. The lives of those rural forefathers, whom we are apt to think very prosaic figures—men ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... falsehood, bluster, clamour, pushing,' for the quiet life of a literary man (especially as we should probably never have heard his name had he done otherwise). Not that the life was so quiet as it might have been. He could not keep his satire impersonal enough to avoid incurring enmities. He boasts in the Peregrine of the unfeeling way in which he commented on that enthusiast to his followers, and we may believe his assurance that his writings brought general dislike and danger upon him. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Southern note arrive informing him of the ordinary vital truths concerning a comfortable journey, and expressing a chaste hope that he would not forget her. Not even surprise, not even curiosity, tempted Stanton to wade twice through the fashionable, angular handwriting. Dully impersonal, bleak as the shadow of a brown leaf across a block of gray granite, plainly—unforgivably—written with ink and ink only, the stupid, loveless page slipped through ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... an abstract subject of impersonal interest compared with the Irish question at the present time; and the commotion which was caused by the misrepresentation of Evadne's remarks about the Reign of Terror was insignificant compared with what followed ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... you that, if you kill one spider, you merely make room in the overflowing economy of nature for another to pick up a dishonest livelihood? Have you ever reflected that the prime blame of spiderhood rests with Nature herself (if we may venture to personify that impersonal entity); and that she has provided such a constant supply or relay of spiders as will amply suffice to fill up all the possible vacancies that can ever occur in insect-eating circles? Unless you have considered all these points carefully, and have an answer to give about ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... the same impersonal way and glanced around the room with eyes that seemed to see nothing. By the side of the mantel was a framed piece of history, an itemized bill of the first generation of the firm, dated June 28, 1706, and quaint with its old spelling, its triple column of pounds, ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... history of a great statesman's career. That statesman's name, but for the dark and tragic scenes with which it was ultimately associated, might after the lapse of two centuries and a half have faded into comparative oblivion, so impersonal and shadowy his presence would have seemed upon the great European theatre where he was so long a chief actor, and where his efforts and his achievements were foremost among those productive of long enduring and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was the limitless interest and curiosity in our civilization, purely impersonal, and held by an order of mind beside which ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... bold, broad touches necessary for their effective presentation on a canvas so large and so crowded. Such figures are, indeed, but the component features of one great form, and their actions only so many modes of one collective impersonal character,—that of the Parisian Society of Imperial and Democratic France; a character everywhere present and busy throughout the story, of which it is the real hero or heroine. This society was doubtless selected for characteristic illustration ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually. This creation of self by self is the more complete, the more one reasons on what one does. For reason does not proceed in such matters as in geometry, where impersonal premisses are given once for all, and an impersonal conclusion must perforce be drawn. Here, on the contrary, the same reasons may dictate to different persons, or to the same person at different moments, acts profoundly different, although equally reasonable. The truth ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... is the same trench in the year 2018. It is three o'clock of the afternoon, of the same summer day. A newly married couple have come to see the trench. He is journeying as to a shrine; she has allowed impersonal interests, such as history, to lapse under the influence of love and a trousseau. She is, however, amenable to patriotism, and, her husband applying the match, she takes fire—she also, from ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... burdens and vexations made necessary by this imitation of the European governmental system. From this point of view the Raskol was the opposition of a half-patriarchal society to the regular, scientific, omnipresent, impersonal system of European administration. It kicks instinctively against centralization and bureaucracy—against the state's encroachments upon private life, the family and the community. It struggles to tear itself loose from the pitiless machinery of government, hemming every life ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... my shell. I'm lazy, Beryl; I'm lazy. You don't know what that is; nor do you, Mr. Craven. Even you, Seymour, you don't know. For you are a man of action, and at Court there is always movement. But I, my friends—" She gave Craven a deliciously kind yet impersonal smile. "I am a contemplative. There is nothing oriental about me, but I am just a quiet British contemplative, untouched by the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... practiced seem so much more concrete and palpable, the penalty she must pay at best so much more real and dreadful. Betty had puzzled over the rights and wrongs of the matter until it had come to be almost an abstraction—a subject for formal, impersonal debate, like those they used to discuss in the junior English classes, in high school days—"Resolved: that it is right to help plagiarists to try again." Now the reality of it all was forced upon her. In spite of her surprise at seeing Eleanor, who almost never came to her room now, and her ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... outset is all which would be dictated by the tenderest sympathy. Eliphaz opens, the oldest and most important of the three, in a soft, subdued, suggestive strain, contriving in every way to spare the feelings of the sufferer, to the extreme, to which his real love will allow him. All is general, impersonal, indirect, the rule of the world, the order of Providence. He does not accuse Job, but he describes his calamities, and leaves him to gather for himself the occasion which had produced them, and then passes off, as if further to soften the blow, to the mysterious ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Gray sensed an urgency, an impersonal haste, as though a command had been laid upon ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett
... In an impersonal way she described the life of a teacher in a great American school system: its routine, its spying supervision, its injustices, its mechanical ideals, its one preeminent ambition to teach as many years as it was necessary to obtain a ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Nature given to man,"—this interfusion of human interest with the sublimity of moor and hill,—formed a typical introduction to the manner in which Wordsworth regarded mankind to the end,—depicting him as set, as it were, amid impersonal influences, which make his passion and struggle but a little thing; as when painters give but a strip of their canvas to the fields and cities of men, and overhang the narrowed landscape with the space and serenity ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Storm's ears were as quick of hearing as they were well shaped; and if so whether he would guess what was up, and take enough impersonal interest in a pretty girl far removed from his sphere ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... "paying guests," while others are stenographers. The former, I was told, by the way, make it a practice to avoid first-hand business contacts with their guests by sending them their bills through the mail, and requiring that response be made by means of the same impersonal channel. ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... ecumenical, oecumenical^; transcendental; prevalent, prevailing, rife, epidemic, besetting; all over, covered with. Pan-American, Anglican^, Pan-Hellenic, Pan-Germanic, slavic; panharmonic^. every, all; unspecified, impersonal. customary &c (habitual) 613. Adv. whatever, whatsoever; to a man, one and all. generally &c adj.; always, for better for worse; in general, generally speaking; speaking generally; for the most part; in the long run &c (on ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... this manhood of our Church divinity with the feeble dotage of the Paleyan school, the 'natural' theology, or watchmaking scheme, that knows nothing of the maker but what can be proved out of the watch, the unknown nominative case of the verb impersonal fit—et natura est; the 'it,' in short, in 'it rains,' 'it snows,' 'it is cold,' and the like. When, after reading the biographies of Walton and his contemporaries, I reflect on the crowded congregations, on the thousands, who with intense interest came ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... something solid and enduring, something that will last long after his own name has been forgotten. The temptation was never so strong as it is to-day for the supervisor to seek the former kind of glory. The need was never more acute than it is to-day for the supervisor who is content with the impersonal ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... single strong executive, elected by the masses, would speedily turn into a tyrant. They have now a nominal president; but his election is indirect, his office is representative, not political, and his duties are like an impersonal, colorless reflection of those performed by the English crown. The constitution-makers simply could not fall back on an experience of successful free government which did not exist. Absolute monarchy had made gradual change impossible, for oppression ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... reputation; and I should deal very uncandidly with the Court, should I say he had any that was worth his attention."-I am, though from very different reasons, in Jem's happy state of indifference. Let fame follow those who have a substantial shape. A shadow-and an impersonal author is nothing better-can cast ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the socially elect bear themselves, with a set smile on her quaint face, and modulating her voice affectedly, she took Mr. Perkins's arm and went for a walk around Seward Park (the table), discussing the weather as she strolled, the scenery, and other impersonal subjects. And there was much bowing and hand shaking to it all, while Johnnie stood by, scarcely knowing whether ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... companionship continued to attract him; indeed, a few years later he openly expressed his expectation of some time marrying. That he did not was clearly due to temper and circumstance rather than to romantic fidelity or abnegation. In the end his susceptibility became purely impersonal; his satisfaction in the exercise of a gentle old-school gallantry did much to take the sting from his life-long bachelorhood. Plainly, Irving was the sort of man who finds a grace in ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... his companion in an impersonal tone, "that it was really a hard thing for Dickie to do—to ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... touches us so nearly, it is so deep a question of life and death, that we are bound to find our own way through it, and to owe our insight to ourselves. The historians of former ages, unapproachable for us in knowledge and in talent, cannot be our limit. We have the power to be more rigidly impersonal, disinterested and just than they; and to learn from undisguised and genuine records to look with remorse upon the past, and to the future with assured hope of better things; bearing this in mind, that if we lower our standard in history, we cannot ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... Arthur delivered the groceries from Pieker's. She asked him to attend the opening session of the revival the following Sunday night. Arthur blushed and stammered a little, so that, since Arthur wasn't given to embarrassment, Missy at once surmised he had a "date." Trying for an impersonal yet urbane and hospitable ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... affection would remain. The personal devotion to intimate adults would in only the smallest degree compensate for the loss of father and mother. We know nothing of such devotion arising to any large degree in orphan asylums, still less in institutions under the cold and impersonal care of the state. It has been urged that the affections of parents stand in the way of a scientific regimen and education for small children. The cold, passionless, automatic parent, then, would be the ideal—a Mr. Dombey or a Mr. Feverel. Parents ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... hearing of the various witnesses Gardiner had attempted an air of impersonal interest, but with no great success. His demeanour, studied though it was, betrayed a certain anxiety and impatience. He was dressed just as he had dismounted from his horse, having removed only his hat. But he smiled confidently when asked for ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... political party adopts the projects for which its opponents have long labored, and carries them out even more vigorously than they had been planned originally. The initial reformers are glad that their ideals have been realized, but their zeal must be uncommonly impersonal if the success brings them quite so much joy as it logically ought. It is not likely that the Toleration Act filled the soul of William Penn with great jubilation. Indeed, we know that he insisted to the end of his life that ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... to right nor left, yet fully aware of all he passed. No one accosted him. There were times when even those who knew him well would have hesitated to do so. He could surround himself with an atmosphere so suavely impersonal as to ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... sins disappear, and the fruits, in the form of joy and sorrow, arising therefrom, are destroyed, men, unattached to everything, take refuge at first on Brahma invested with personality, and then behold impersonal Brahma in their understandings.[826] Jiva in course of its downward descent under the influence of Avidya lives here (within its cell formed by acts) after the manner of a silk-worm residing within its cell made of threads woven by itself. Like ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... was a woman, she was beautiful, and he loved her! Do what he would, all ideal and impersonal considerations fell utterly away from him. Day by day he knew more of his own heart; day by day the philosopher grew weaker in him, and the man's claim fiercer. Before him perpetually were two figures of a most human and practical reality. He saw a ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wasn't different from any other of the entrances of the kind but it held his gaze. Then he walked across the street again and went in—or down. It didn't really seem now such a bad kind of entrance when you came to investigate it, in a high impersonal way; not half so bad as the subway, and people didn't ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... with impersonal astonishment that the length of my right side was covered with the dust of a floor. In my restless motions I came opposite the fireplace. Above it hung a number of tiny, jewelled frames, containing daubs of an astonishing lewdness. The riddle grew painful. What kind of a being could conceive ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... left early; often he did not come at all. She began to question seriously if she had been right to remain in the cottage. Her heart told her no, but her pride said yes, and her pride was strong; also, it was backed by reason. Her steady brain, which was capable of quite impersonal thinking, told her that Stefan would be actively discontented just now in company with his family, and that this discontent would eat into his remaining ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... was, though somewhat impersonal, wholly genuine. The tone of chivalrous respect rang true, and she could comprehend the half-instinctive straining after an ideal by one whose belief in her sex was, if slightly crude, almost reverential. ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... are Mary's own tastes; the church is Mary; and the chapels are her private rooms. She was not pleased with the arrangements made for her in her palace at Paris; they were too architectural; too regular and mathematical; too popular; too impersonal; and she rather abruptly ordered her architect at Chartres to go back to the old arrangement. The apse at Paris was hardly covered with its leading before the architect of Chartres adopted a totally new plan, which, according to Viollet-le-Duc, ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
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