"Equivocal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this somewhat equivocal form of expression, that flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling his smarting and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... unadulterated, or the infusion will be destroyed by its pernicious qualities. Nothing is more prejudicial to the health, or the intellectual faculties of mankind, than adulterated liquors. Articles which in their purest state are of an equivocal character, and never to be trusted without caution, are thus converted into decided poisons.—Another way of making wormwood ale. Take a quantity of the herb, according to the intended strength of the liquor, and ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... With this equivocal explanation, the examination ended, and the Governor now made a long speech, in which he said: If we were Japanese, and had secretly left our prison, the consequences for us would have been very serious; but as we were ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... these was Mr. Peter Van Tromp, an English-speaking, two-legged animal of the international genus, and by profession of general and more than equivocal utility. Years before he had been a painter of some standing in a colony, and portraits signed 'Van Tromp' had celebrated the greatness of colonial governors and judges. In those days he had been married, and driven his wife and infant daughter in a pony trap. What were ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which you are ruler, we might at once, and by open force, have defended the frontiers of our states, against a host commanded by so many different and discording chiefs, and advancing upon us with such equivocal intentions. If the first swarm of these locusts, under him whom they called Walter the Penniless, was thinned by the Hungarians, and totally destroyed by the Turks, as the pyramids of bones on the frontiers of the country still keep in memory, surely the united forces of the Grecian ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... afflicting mankind on earth are due to the hostility of the 'chief demon,'[949] who becomes the controller of the earth and of the atmosphere immediately above the earth. Ea's answer is not intended to be equivocal, for he further orders Parnapishtim to announce to ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... not occur to Emil that any one had ever reasoned thus before, that music had ever before given a man this equivocal revelation. ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... sovereignty." (Shouts of down! down! in the galleries.) Ibid., 208, session of July 21. M. Dumolard: "You must distinguish between the people of Paris and these subaltern intriguers... these habitual oracles of the cafes and public squares, whose equivocal existence has for a long time occupied the attention and claimed the supervision of the police." (Down with the speaker! murmurs and hooting in the galleries).-Mortimer-Ternaux, II. 398. Protests of the arsenal section, read by Lavoisier (the chemist): "The caprice of a knot of citizens (thus) ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Carbuccia by a long account of his personal dealings with Giambattista Pessina, descending into the most curious particulars; he publishes the secret alphabet of the Palladium, specimens of litanies addressed to the good god Lucifer, and hymns of equivocal tendency attributed to Albert Pike. Finally, he fully admits the Satanic character of perfect Masonic initiation, and contributes a long chapter to swell our recent knowledge upon the subject ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... feminine hypocrisies would cost them on either side much more than the usual effort. Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, perpetually fresh, must have regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as an equivocal joke; she herself so the opposite of a Rossetti, she herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more far-fetched note in her composition than a cold ladylike candour ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... Treatment of Zona or Shingles. 28, On the Remedial Effects of Camphor in Acute and Chronic Rheumatism. 29, Examination of the Question, whether the Medical Use of Phosphorus internally, is useful, injurious, or equivocal. 30, Nitrous Acid and Opium in Dysentery, Cholera and Diarrhoea. 31, Tartar Emetic in Pneumonia Biliosa. 32, Bark of the Ampelopsis in Catarrhal Consumption. 33, Obstinate Vomiting cured with Extract of Marigold. 34, Vomiting of Fat and Blood. 35, Rupture of the Spleen. 36, Chilblains ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... But this was not all; I had reason to suspect they had endeavoured to damp the exertions of the Indians, with the hope that the want of provision in the spring would put an end to our progress at once. St. Germain, in particular, had behaved in a very equivocal way, since his journey to Slave Lake. He denied the principal parts of the charge in a very dogged manner, but acknowledged he had told the leader that we had not paid him the attention which a chief like him ought to have received; and that we had put a great affront on him in sending ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... the most ticklish things. A foreigner would have understood nothing, the language was so carefully veiled. But as the slight coating of modesty with which every woman of the world is enveloped is hardly more than skin deep, they expanded under the influence of this equivocal adventure, enjoying themselves wildly at bottom, thoroughly in their element, dabbling in sensuality with the gusto of an epicurean cook preparing a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... whom he understood Harley, in a freak of generous romance had adopted, was familiar and courteous, as became a host. But he looked upon Helen as a mere child, and naturally left her to the Countess. The dim sense of her equivocal position—of her comparative humbleness of birth and fortunes, oppressed and pained her; and even her gratitude to Harley was made burthensome by a sentiment of helplessness. The grateful long to requite. And what could she ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... moment Orlando, with his eyes turned towards the door, remained silent, again sad, reflecting no doubt on all the difficult, equivocal present, so different from the glorious past. But all at once he turned to Pierre, who was still waiting. "And so, my friend," said he, "you are staying at the Palazzo Boccanera? Ah! what a grievous misfortune there has been on ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... sides by the Spanish Viceroys of Naples on the one side, and that of Milan upon the other. Venice was confined between the Austrian Tyrol and the Spanish territories in Milan. Savoy was surrounded by the latter and France. Hence the wavering and equivocal policy, which from the time of Charles V. had been pursued by the Italian States. The double character which pertained to the Popes made them perpetually vacillate between two contradictory systems of policy. If the successors ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... achieve independence—his treaty with the Indians, his sensational plan to incorporate the Cherokees into the new state, his constancy to an ideal of revolt against others in face of the reality of revolt against himself, his struggle, equivocal and half-hearted, with the North Carolina authorities under Tipton—despite all these heroic efforts, the star of Franklin swiftly declined. The vigorous measures pursued by General Joseph Martin, and his effective influence focussed upon a movement already honey-combed with ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher"—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... storms which shook the family, that one party or the other took up and patronized Dolores for a while, more, as it would appear, out of hatred for the other than any real love to her. At such times it was really affecting to see with what warmth the poor child would receive these equivocal demonstrations of good-will—the nearest approaches to affection which she had ever known—and the bitterness with which she would mourn when they were capriciously withdrawn again. With a heart full of affection, she reminded me of some delicate, ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... mysterious man you are.' 'Ay, ay!' observes Mr. Fairfax, 'Indeed!' Now Mr. Fairfax says this ay, ay, and indeed, which are slight words enough in themselves, with so very unfathomable an air, and accompanies them with such a very equivocal smile, that ma and the young ladies are more than ever convinced that he means an immensity, and so tell him he is a very dangerous man, and seems to be always thinking ill of somebody, which is precisely the sort of character the censorious young gentleman is most desirous to establish; ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... Because all Poles are counts—those that are not princes. But why a Pole? Well, perhaps from the convenience of vagueness, inasmuch as there is something international about a Pole—international, and yet neither equivocal nor vulgar; every one sympathizes with them, for they all possessed, once upon a time, vast estates whose loss is borne in cheerful resignation, and never so much as alluded to; they know everybody, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... and equipment of a factory, will be quite likely, when B., C., and D. erect factories in his immediate neighborhood, to hold his peace when sundry varieties of swill milk are offered at his door, instead of speaking out an equivocal protest against the insult thus offered to his professional ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... what justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done nothing but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so with my friend, who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting anger with which young men ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of definition is the most precise and least equivocal of any; but it is not brief enough, and is besides too technical for common discourse. The more usual mode of declaring the connotation of a name, is to predicate of it another name or names of known signification, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... my business frankly. I said I heard the house was considered to be haunted,—that I had a strong desire to examine a house with so equivocal a reputation; that I should be greatly obliged if he would allow me to hire it, though only for a night. I was willing to pay for that privilege whatever he might be inclined to ask. "Sir," said Mr. J——, with great courtesy, ...
— Haunted and the Haunters • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... shadows was the order of things. The rules were the rules of phantoms. Flesh lived there in subjection. Long miscegenation with shadow had made phantoms of them all and endowed all shadows with the menace of the real. Everything was equivocal as hell. ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... from precise correctness, the most venial trippings, the smallest inattention paid to doubtful rules and equivocal positions of criticism, inflames their anger, and calls forth their invectives. Regardless of the sage maxims of Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace, they not only disdain the sober rules which their ancient brethren have wisely laid down, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... preponderates, visual, auditory, motor and mixed types? Is not the way clear and is it not well enough to go in this direction? However natural this solution may appear, it is illusory and can lead to naught. It rests on the equivocal use of the word "imagination," which at one time means mere reproduction of images, and at another time creative activity, and which, consequently, keeps up the erroneous notion that in the creative imagination images, the raw materials, are the ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... of the ecclesiastical community. Hence we find them sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which describe how most ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... remember we fight only with foils, and the point of mine shall be covered with velvet. In your attack upon chemistry, Philalethes, you limited the use of it to the apothecary's shop and the kitchen. The first is an equivocal use; by introducing it into the kitchen you make it an art fundamental to all others. But if what you had stated had really meant to be serious, it would not have deserved a reply; as it is in mere playfulness, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... whether his wife and his sister would be found to have much in common. But he was more or less consciously building on the hope that Dalton's suit would prosper, and that Lettice would settle down quietly as the mistress of Angleford Manor, and so be weaned from the somewhat equivocal situation of a successful author. It did not so much as enter his mind, by the way, that there was anything equivocal in Mrs. Westray's authorship. Her book had failed, and her husband was very wealthy, so that she could not be suspected of having earned money by her ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... one of his tragedies, the success of which was equivocal, the abbe Pellegrin complained loudly that Voltaire had stolen some verses from him. "How can you, who are so rich," said the abbe, "thus seize upon the property of another?" "What! have I stolen from you?" replied Voltaire; "then I no longer ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... on, or by turning back, or by standing still, would have signified nothing towards proving that she had intended to put an end to her own life and to that of her child. One shudders to think that innocent women may have suffered an ignominous death, from such equivocal proofs and ...
— On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children • William Hunter
... and people of all other nations, even of France herself, to pronounce our quarrel just will be obscured and the support rendered to us in a final resort to more decisive measures will be more limited and equivocal. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... in the evening. He had just retired, after the office, to his canon's cell in the cloister of Notre-Dame. This cell, with the exception, possibly, of some glass phials, relegated to a corner, and filled with a decidedly equivocal powder, which strongly resembled the alchemist's "powder of projection," presented nothing strange or mysterious. There were, indeed, here and there, some inscriptions on the walls, but they were pure sentences of learning and piety, extracted from good authors. The ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... naturally as the inevitable setting for a picture which has to include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner of the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds—a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large, protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... orator, and did not follow the example of Mr. Seymour or Mr. Greeley in going before the people, but skillfully and quietly directed all the movements of the canvass. In spite of his personal fidelity to hard money, the equivocal position of his party was used against him with great effect. The fact that the Republicans had passed the Resumption measure, and that the Democrats had demanded the repeal of its most important feature, made ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of opinion that the Orinoco was a branch of the Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which this ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... early opportunity of questioning him concerning his intentions towards my child: he gave an equivocal answer, and I ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... in modern language) monopolized all the graces of their countrywomen. In the same cities were many of unblemished virtue and repute who possessed equal cultivation and attraction, but whom a more decorous life has concealed from the equivocal admiration of posterity; though the numerous female disciples of Pythagoras throw some light on their capacity and intellect. Among such as these had been the mother of Cleonice, not long since dead, and her daughter inherited and equalled her accomplishments, ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... heaven, is the object to whom they are addressed." Yet, at the same time, in the true spirit of a polytheist, he accuseth them of adoring Earth, Water, Fire, the Winds, and the Sun and Moon. But the Persians of every age have denied the charge, and explained the equivocal conduct, which might appear to give a color to it. The elements, and more particularly Fire, Light, and the Sun, whom they called Mithra, [1201] were the objects of their religious reverence, because they considered them as the purest symbols, the noblest productions, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... humiliation of their old rival, aimed at her absolute ruin, though she had broken no treaties. The Carthaginians, broken-hearted, sent embassy after embassy, imploring the Senate to preserve peace, to whom the senators gave equivocal answers. The situation of Carthage was hopeless and miserable—stripped by Masinissa of the rich towns of Emporia, and on the eve of another conflict with the mistress ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... for the duchess de Berri. At a dinner at Baron Rothschild's, Careme, the Delmonico of those times, surprised her with a column of ingenious confectionery architecture on which was inscribed her name spun in sugar. It was a more equivocal compliment when Walter Scott christened two pet donkeys Hannah More ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... older than any opinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand and her poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old city merchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists and hated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlands and equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went upon bewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piled up the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed the planets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... black specialists to white units was a key part of the committee's program, and despite Gray's private assurances that specialists would be integrated, Fahy was not prepared to accept the Army's "equivocal" language on this subject. There was also the issue of the quota, still very much alive between the committee and the Army. The committee was bound, furthermore, to resent being ignored in the approval process. Fahy and his associates had been charged by the President with ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... the point of madness even about a courtesan, had she once taken his fancy; his prodigality was princely, although he had no income; further, he was most sensitive to slights, as all men are who, because they are placed in an equivocal position, fancy that everyone who makes any reference to their origin ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... cones of scoriae, tuff, and lava, or with narrow streams of lava in great part scoriaceous and porous, such as were observed to have proceeded from Vesuvius and Etna, the resemblance seemed remote and equivocal. It was, in truth, like comparing the roots of a tree with its leaves and branches, which, although the belong to the same plant, differ in form, texture, colour, mode of growth, and position. The external cone, with ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... life is not at all points incompatible in tone with the innocence which it certainly fails to establish—except in minds already made up to accept any plea as valid which may plausibly or possibly be advanced on her behalf; and the arguments advanced by Vittoria are not more evasive and equivocal, in face of the patent and flagrant prepossession of her judges, than those put forward by the Queen of Scots. It is impossible not to wonder whether the poet had not in his mind the actual tragedy which had ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... could detect an air of equivocal bonhomie upon the countenance of the sergeant; but the adventure of the vault might have excited the curiosity of the man, and it was not surprising that he allowed some of the feelings which agitated his mind to appear ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to discover the philosopher's stone. Some even more envenomed scandals drove her to a ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... the like equivocal sayings, were followed by a vague buzz, which was traceable to no individual author, but seemed to rise on all sides, like a dark mist, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... held a whispered conference among themselves, evidently to determine whether this equivocal apology was to be accepted. Apparently it was, for Dr Johnson now asked loftily and with an abstracted air, as though he already knew the answer and considered it beneath notice, "What was this magic formula you caused to be put on ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... baronet of some sort, not above the professional; sundry propriety-faced people in yellow waistcoats, who say little, and whose social position you cannot well make out; half-a-dozen ladies of an uncertain age, dressed in grand style, with turbans of imposing tournure; and a young, diffident, equivocal-looking gent who sits at the bottom of the table, and whom you instinctively make out to be a family doctor, tutor, or nephew, with expectations. No young ladies, unless the young ladies of the family, appear at the dinner-parties of these gentility-mongers; because the motive ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... way to secure it was a retirement from the vexing world, a recreant forsaking of the active duties of life, as if it consisted in immunity from temptation rather than in victory over it. Others have placed it in surpliced observance or in monastic vow; an equivocal regard to patterns of things in the heavens which common men mistake for idolatry. Others again, reversing the old Pythagorean maxim, and wearing the image of God upon their ring, have expressed it by unworthy familiarity, a continual adverting ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... his exposition—strange as the proceeding appears to us—as short and as clear as the most admirable literary skill could contrive. That eccentric ambition dominates the writings of the times. In a purely literary direction it is illustrated by the famous but curiously rambling and equivocal controversy about the Ancients and Moderns begun in France by Perrault and Boileau. In England the most familiar outcome was Swift's Battle of the Books, in which he struck out the famous phrase about sweetness and light, 'the two noblest ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... pause without dissipating the cloud we have unexpectedly cast over him. The temptation to scrutinize his conduct and bearing is irresistible. Is it not better to lay bare all the facts, than to leave matters in the equivocal ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... down stairs, that Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret, 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (sic) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... service of the Union. Colonel Lee made no reply, whereupon "Old Chapultepec" came directly to the point, saying, "I suppose you will go with the rest. If your purpose is to resign, it is proper you should do so at once. Your present attitude is an equivocal one." "General," Colonel Lee then answered, "the property belonging to my children, all that they possess, lies in Virginia. They will be ruined if they do not go with their State. I cannot raise my hand against my children." General Scott then ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal terms to Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her, and Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you and says ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... faint and scattering shout of applause, in two or three places, mingled with hisses and murmurs in others, was the only response with which this address was received. But even with this equivocal testimony of public feeling towards him, this despicable functionary felt gratified. "I am safe," said he to himself, with a long-drawn breath, as he descended the steps, to watch an opportunity to mingle with the party with whom he was now ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... the translator felt free to interchange words indiscriminately. Of his treatment of the original Purvey writes: "But in translating of words equivocal, that is, that hath many significations under one letter, may lightly be peril, for Austin saith in the 2nd. book of Christian Teaching, that if equivocal words be not translated into the sense, either understanding, of the author, it is error; as in ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Dick Swinton's equivocal position as the son of a needy clergyman and the very uncertain heir to a great fortune, ruled him out of the reckoning as an eligible bachelor, compared with Jack Lorrimer, Ned Carnaby, Harry Bent, and Vivian Ormsby, all rich men. The miser so frequently advertised the ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... Yao bridge, Hsiao Hung makes known sentimental matters in equivocal language. In the Hsiao Hsiang lodge, Tai-y gives, while under the effects of the spring lassitude, expression ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... plausible excuse for the commission of this egregious folly. These men over whose sad deeds the bibliophile sighs with mournful regret, were those who carried out the Reformation, so glorious in its results; but the righteousness of the means by which those results were effected are very equivocal indeed. When men form themselves into a faction and strive for the accomplishment of one purpose, criminal deeds are perpetrated with impunity, which, individually they would blush and scorn to do; they feel no direct responsibility, no personal ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... Measures,—which in structure it greatly resembles,—or than the pines or cedars of our own times (see Fig. 3). In the Middle Old Red Sandstone there occurs, with plants representative apparently of the ferns and their allies, a somewhat equivocal and doubtful organism, which may have been the panicle or compound fruit of some aquatic rush; while in the Upper Old Red, just ere the gorgeous flora of the Coal Measures began to be, there existed in considerable abundance a stately fern, the Cyclopteris Hibernicus (see Fig. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... translation signally, and the others to some extent, not dead "versions," but as it were reincarnations of the original, the spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great translator of FitzGerald's own type[39] used that term. It shows in his scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in his letters. Everyone who has studied the history of the English Universities in connection with ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... time of which I speak, Tom Hopkins was of an age somewhat equivocal; public fame called him fifty, whilst he himself stuck obstinately at thirty-five; of a stout active figure, rather manly than gentlemanly, and a bold, jovial visage, in excellent keeping with his person, distinguished by round, bright, stupid black eyes, an aquiline nose, a knowing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... alone—all the exaltation gone. For the moment I hated the two down-stairs. I felt the situation equivocal and untenable, and it had amused me so ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... belief that Raleigh had given information against him, to accuse Sir Walter himself of being privy to a conspiracy against the government. This charge Cobham retracted, confirmed, and retracted again, behaving in so equivocal a manner, that no reliance whatever can be placed on any of his assertions. But as the King was afraid of Raleigh as much as the secretary hated him, this vague charge, unsupported by other evidence, was made sufficient ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... pulpit methods in your classes. You take a chemical text, and then turn and twist it into any sort of a metaphysical conclusion that appeals to you at the minute. No; wait! I am talking. Science is not equivocal, Brenton. It's as downright and determinate as AB. It's what we know; not what we think we ought to think about the things we know. And it's science you are there to teach, not glittering abstractions having to do ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... between Mr. Townshend and Lord Shelburne on the Irish questions—is minute and voluminous; and only a few letters have been selected from the mass to show the course of ministerial diplomacy in reference to the equivocal relations subsisting at that period between the two countries. They form a running commentary upon a curious passage in Irish history; and although the circumstances to which they relate have long been completely ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... king's disputes with the ecclesiastics, Mr. Lingard in any other instance would have readily traced,) he states it as not altogether incredible that both Ethelgiva, the mother, and her daughter, whom he does not name, had sacrificed their honour to the equivocal ambition of one of them becoming queen. The nobles, he adds, accompanied their demand for the king's return with an injunction in the name of the whole assembly, for Ethelgiva to leave the court. The rest of his account does not ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... specific, he added: "If the people felt as I feel, there is never a Grant or Glenelg who crossed the Tay and Tweed to exchange high-born Highland poverty for substantial Lowland wealth, who would dare to insult Upper Canada with the official presence, as its ruler, of such an equivocal character as this Mr. What-do-they-call-him—Francis Bond Head." Ever and anon the Tory press retorted on him in a spirit by no means calculated to soften the asperity of his heart. The most contemptuous epithets were freely bestowed upon him, and he was ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... Mississippi, a river that forms the sole passage from the western States to the ocean. This navigation, although of general benefit, has been always valued and desired, as of peculiar advantage to the Western States, whose demands to obtain it were neither equivocal nor unreasonable. But with the river Mississippi, by a sort of coercion, we acquired, by good or ill fortune, as our future measures shall determine, the whole province of Louisiana. As this acquisition was made at the common expense, it is ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... turned to Anaitis: now that the candles were behind him, she was standing in his shadow. "Well, well! but you are a little old-fashioned, with all these equivocal mummeries. And I did not know that civilized persons any longer retained sufficient credulity to wring a thrill from god-baiting. Still, women must be humored, bless them! and at last, I take it, we have quite fairly fulfilled the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... repeat—that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who, not content with (an equivocal[1]) success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... property of the male representative. But this idea had never entered into the conceptions of either mother or son. Mrs, Tyrrel conceived that she performed an act of the most exalted benevolence in admitting Miss Emily into a sort of equivocal situation, which was neither precisely that of a domestic, nor yet marked with the treatment that might seem due to one of ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... life of Law, and the equivocal means by which he appeared to live, playing high, and always with great success, threw a cloud of suspicion over him wherever he went, and caused him to be expelled by the magistracy from the semi-commercial, semi-aristocratical cities ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... the same in both cases: but the office, the powers and preeminences annexed to it, differ very widely; and so doth the constitution of the courts where the offices are executed. The identity of the name may have confounded our ideas, as equivocal words often do, if the nature of things is not attended to; but the nature of the offices, properly stated, will, I hope, remove ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... not have acknowledged it if he had, smiled the indulgent smile of a self-satisfied superior and uttered a few equivocal sentences. This was gall and wormwood to Sweetwater, but he kept his temper admirably and, with an air of bravado entirely assumed for the ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... friendship for Keats, I think the points you mention look equivocal; but Hunt was a many-laboured and much belaboured man, and as much allowance as may be made on this score is perhaps due to him—no more than that much. His own powers stand high in various ways—poetically ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... excuse for convoking a general meeting of the associates which consequently took place at the town of St. Trond, in the district of Liege. Full two thousand of the members appeared on the summons. The language held in this assembly was much stronger and less equivocal than that formerly used. The delay in the arrival of the king's answer presaged ill as to his intentions; while the rapid growth of the public power seemed to mark the present as the time for successfully demanding all that the people required. Several of the ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... material progress. Here the prize was within every man's reach: patient industry need never doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four Gospels, assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free; socially she suffered from that subtle and searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members who compose it. As a whole, she grew upon the gaze of the world, a signal example of expansive energy; but she has not ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... proposed to us by the British then it would not have been necessary for the people to come together at Vereeniging. But in matter of fact we have come here with a proposal, which, rightly understood, is nearly equivocal to the Middelburg proposal, and which meets the wishes of the English Government as ...
— Three Years' War • Christiaan Rudolf de Wet
... character. The action of a man pulling his hat over his forehead is indifferent enough in itself, and generally speaking, may mean anything or nothing; but in the circumstances in which Macduff is placed, it is neither insignificant nor equivocal. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... alone—according to this system—we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motion in our own brains. (3) That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation nor precludes the necessity of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which, at the more than magic touch of the impulse from without, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... emerges from matter, it is still quite material. It is cold, hunger, fear, transformed into something that as yet has no shape. It crawls vaguely around great dangers, around the long nights, the approach of winter, of an equivocal sleep which almost ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... believe, no prospect whatever of your father being able to get the money to pay off Cossey and Son, and if he did, it would not help him, because he could not pay the interest on it. Under these circumstances you have to choose between putting yourself in an equivocal position and letting events take their course. It would be useless for anybody else to undertake the task, and of course I cannot guarantee that even you will succeed, but I will not mince matters—as you doubtless know, any man would find it hard to ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... was to give support of any kind to the revolted subjects of the other." It is nevertheless true that James did not withdraw his troops from the service of the states; but he authorized the Spaniards to levy soldiers in England. The United Provinces were at once afflicted and indignant at this equivocal conduct. Their first impulse was to deprive the English of the liberty of navigating the Scheldt. They even arrested the progress of several of their merchant-ships. But soon after, gratified at finding that James received their deputy with the title of ambassador, they ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... confuted the Gnostic or the Manichean heresies in colourful allegory, but instead he sang fervid hosannahs on his canvases to the greater glory of Christ and His saints. Perhaps if he had lived in our times he might have painted heads of fashionable courtesans or equivocal statesmen. But whether primitive or modern, realist or symbolist, he would always have been a painter of dramatic genius. He is the ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the last ten minutes, forgot the depressing certainty that he would have a great deal more that he wanted to say in the immediate future, over and above the thirty-five minutes or so of discourse that she would contract to listen to next Sunday. And Cicely listened with the wistful equivocal triumph of one whose goose has turned out to be a swan and who realises with secret concern that she has only planned the role of goosegirl ...
— When William Came • Saki
... the Belgians, nor the meerschaum so largely as their German neighbors on the Rhine frontier. A notable bit of sharp practice is on record in connexion with the pipe-smokers of Holland—a dodge only to be justified on the equivocal maxim that all is fair in trade provided it just keeps within the margin we need not speak. A pipe manufactory was established in Flanders about the middle of the ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... have been like the best of them in manners. Its existence shows, of course, Diderot's worst side, that is to say, the combination of want of breeding with readiness to get money anyhow. If it is worth reading at all, which may be doubted, it is to show the real, if equivocal, value of Crebillon himself. For it is vulgar, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... forfeiture stimulated their natural and irregular vivacity to enforce laws which had become obsolete, and they pounced upon American property as they would have gone to war in quest of prize-money. Even at first their acts were equivocal, and they soon came to be as illegal as they were oppressive. There was no redress. An appeal to the Privy Council was costly and difficult; and besides, when it so happened, before the end of the year, that an officer had to defend himself on an appeal, the suffering ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... political economy, with all its contradictory hypotheses and equivocal conclusions, is nothing but an organization of privilege and misery, I shall have proved thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an organization of labor and equality, since, as has been said, every systematic contradiction is the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the night before Wyvis' return. The whole household seemed somewhat disorganized by the prospect. There was an air of subdued excitement visible in the oldest and staidest of the servants, for in spite of Wyvis' many shortcomings and his equivocal position, he was universally liked by his inferiors, if not by those who esteemed themselves his superiors, in social station. Mrs. Brand had gone to bed early, and Janetta hoped that she was asleep; Mrs. Wyvis had kept Janetta at her bedside until after ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... alleged results of observation may be set aside; first, because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested in denying and disbelieving the ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a descendant of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who was governor of the place, received his noble visiter with every mark of attention. The Count, however, no sooner beheld Sophia, than he became deeply enamoured of her; and on learning the equivocal situation in which she stood, being neither a slave nor a mistress, but, as it were, a piece of merchandize purchased for 1,500 piastres, he wound up his declaration of love by an offer of marriage. The Count was a handsome man, scarcely thirty years of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... was perfectly isolated, and very little intruded upon by acts of neighbourhood; for the rank of its occupants was of that equivocal kind which precludes all familiar association with those of a decidedly inferior rank, while it is not sufficient to entitle its possessors to the society of established gentility, among whom the nearest residents were the O'Maras of Carrigvarah, whose ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... description of the fatal lock of hair, though why it should be depicted in that form especially, it is difficult to guess. The change of Scylla into a lark, or partridge, and of her father into a sea eagle, are poetical fictions based on the equivocal meanings of their names, the one Greek and the other Hebrew; for the name 'Ciris' resembles the Greek verb keiro, which signifies 'to clip,' or 'cut short.' 'Nisus,' too, resembles the Hebrew word 'Netz,' which means a bird resembling the osprey, or ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... we are not deceived even though he outdo nature. We know where we stand and where he stands; we know that this is the power of art. If he is writing an animal romance like Kipling's story of the "White Seal," or like his "Jungle Book," there will be nothing equivocal about it, no mixture of fact and fiction, nothing to confuse or ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... head contemptuously. "Agostino would gather up all such equivocal objects before he showed ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... property so detained the declaration of war is said to have a retroactive effect, and to render it liable to be considered as the property of enemies taken in time of war. The property is seized provisionally—an act hostile enough in the mere execution, but equivocal as to its effects, and liable to be varied by subsequent events, and by the conduct of the government, the property of whose subjects is so detained. Where the first seizure is equivocal, if the matter in dispute terminates in reconciliation, ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... ambitious novel, "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" (1751). The productions known to be hers do not certainly represent the entire output of her industry during this period, for since "The Dunciad" her writing had been almost invariably anonymous. One or two equivocal bits of secret history and scandal-mongering may probably be attributed to her at the very time when in "Epistles for the Ladies" (1749-50) she was advocating sobriety, religion, and morality. These suspected lapses into her old habits should serve as seasoning to ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... infused so much of her own special tact, That it now claims to be one of the most FAMED OF THE METROPOLITAN THEATRES. Indeed, It is a fact that will always remain on record, That amid the vicissitudes of all other theatrical Establishments, with Madame at its head, success has Never been equivocal for a moment, and the Receipts have for years past averaged nearly As much as the patent theatres. The boxes are In such high repute, that double the present low Rental is available by this means alone. Madame Vestris has a lease for three more seasons at ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... necessary to insist on, nor reiterate, the decadence of the Palais Royal. It is no longer the "capitol of Paris," and whatever its charms may be they are mostly equivocal. It is more a desert than an oasis or a temple de la volupte, and it was each of these things in other days. Its priestesses and its gambling houses are gone, and who shall say this of itself is not a good thing in spite of the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... history, and it resulted in cumbrous ineffectiveness. Interminable inquiry and discussion ended frequently only in suspension of judgment or a divided report. Points of policy of imminent importance had to await a dilatory investigation and equivocal conclusions. This impotence of the central organs of government did not come in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and their immediate successors, and the growing inefficiency of the councils was long overcome by the resolution ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... She was an impassioned, vivacious woman, fond of adoration, exasperated by five years of marital rudeness; and the sense of release was so strong upon her that it stilled anxiety for more than she actually enjoyed. An equivocal position was of no importance to her then; she had no envy for the honors of a dull, disregarded wife: the one spot which spoiled her vision of her new pleasant world, was the sense that she left her three-year-old boy, who died two ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... Evelyn's definition of a very old friend?" said he with with another smile, as that lady moved off to take a more particular view of what she had come to see. "To judge by the specimen before me I should consider it very equivocal." ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... upon her trial for murder, the police reporters would have discovered traces of great beauty in her countenance. An ordinary spectator, having no occasion to spice a paragraph, would have made the equivocal remark that ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... a better name for me," she said, casting Crossman a look whose intimacy made his blood run hot within him. "'The Black Dawn'—n'est-ce-pas? Though I have heard him call me in the night—by another name," with which equivocal statement she swung the axe into the curve of her arm, turned on her heel, and softly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... equivocal situation, Edith seemed fully to have regained her spirits. Even the prospect of spending the night in this place ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... has resulted a character equivocal and ambiguous, but peculiarly Porto Rican. The heat of the climate has made them lazy, to which end also the fertility of the soil has conduced; the solitary life of the country residents has ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... at a distance, admiring him, learning from him, and trying to imitate him. For this reason Chopin has not found a critic, although his works are already known everywhere. They have either excited equivocal smiles and have been disparaged, or have provoked astonishment and an overflow of unlimited praise; but nobody has as yet come forward to say in what their peculiar character and merit consists, by what they are distinguished ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... where a literary man (in spite of all we can say against it) ranks below that class of gentry composed of the apothecary, the attorney, the wine-merchant, whose positions, in country towns at least, are so equivocal. As, for instance, my friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has an undeniable pedigree, a paternal estate, and a living to boot, once dined in Warwickshire, in company with several squires and parsons of that enlightened county. Asterisk, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... manner, and your clothes were fashionably made, you would far excel the city girls," he said, a compliment which to Maude seemed rather equivocal. ...
— Cousin Maude • Mary J. Holmes
... was apt to be debauched. Her ladyship's poet-laureate, in whose behalf she was teazing each new-comer for subscriptions, got sufficiently independent to sing in her ladyship's presence, at supper, a song of rather equivocal meaning; and her chief painter, who was employed upon an illustrated copy of the Loves of the Plants, was, at another time, seduced into such a state of pot-valour, that, upon her ladyship's administering her usual dose of criticism upon his works, he not only bluntly disputed her judgment, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... the ports of entry so that a ship cannot discharge her cargo there, or get papers for another voyage, then ships will cease to trade; or, if he undertakes to blockade her, and thus collect it, she has not gained her independence by secession. What must she do? If she is contented to live in this equivocal state, all would be well perhaps; but she could not live there. No people in the world could live in that condition. What will they do? They must take the initiative and declare war upon the United States; and the moment that they ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... about other children, one by one, as though calling the roll. At first he evaded her questioning, giving such vague and equivocal replies that presently she clearly ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott
... felt that, having been induced to undertake the defense by representations not justified in fact, and by an impression of the nature of the case which developments in the court-room had not confirmed, he had the right to step aside out of an equivocal position. He wished to do this without injury to the prisoner and while there was yet an opportunity for him to obtain other counsel. The whole tenor of the speech was the right to be relieved from the obligation of an error; an error that had involved him unwittingly ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... generally quicker to see and better able to estimate distances correctly, proves that the fault is not in our eyes, but in our use of them. Their occupations give them the training we lack, and they check the equivocal results of the angle of vision by its accompanying experiences, which determine the relations of the two causes of this ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... renounce those timid and restrictive definitions and to free our mind of them. A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... Counsel is a Rightness of deliberation, and so the first question must regard the nature and objects of deliberation. Now remember Rightness is an equivocal term; we plainly do not mean Rightness of any kind whatever; the [Greek: akrataes], for instance, or the bad man, will obtain by his calculation what he sets before him as an object, and so he may be said to have deliberated rightly in one sense, but ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... his equivocal footing in the house of Ruthven, obtained another no less precarious in the house of Fane—all in the beginning on a purely gaming basis. However, Gerald had already proposed him for the Stuyvesant and Proscenium ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... the things which balk, Retard, divert, draw into sluices small, But who beholds the stream turned back to mock, Not just itself, but make equivocal A Universal Reason, Vision? No. You find no proof of this, but prodigal Proof of ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... for it are as follow:—"Scene—An ale-house room.—Several shabby fellows with punch and tobacco; Tony at the head of the table, &c., discovered." Never perhaps, in any previous representation, was the mise en scene so perfect. It drew three rounds of applause. A very equivocal compliment to ourselves it may be; but such jolly-looking "shabby fellows" as sat round the table at which our Tony presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent-garden. They were as classical, in their way, as Macready's Roman mob. Then there was no make-believe ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... have lost its nationality, its language, its locality, its independence, its name—any one or any number of its characteristics. Perhaps, the name alone, with a vague notice of its locality, may remain; a name famous from the glory of its new country, but obscure, and even equivocal in its fatherland. ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... will as it does will, is determined to determine as it does determine, and hence that its apparent freedom is illusory. Hobbes' definition, it may be urged, when applied to the case of the Will, is equivocal. No doubt a man is free as to his action, if there be an 'absence of all impediments' to his action—or, in other words, if he is able to act as he wills to act. But it does not follow that he is free as to his will, even though there be an absence of all impediments to his willing as he ...
— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes
... enemies awakes his self-reproach. His invective turns into panegyric, and he warms for a time into hearty admiration, which proves that his irritation arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the qualities ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... mentioned, however, my translation may fairly claim to be true to the spirit of the original. Even the strictest moralist will not cavil at seeing equivocal situations painted in Bilse's book when his purpose in doing so has been the radical exposure of ills existing in a body around which cluster so many traditions of honor and duty well done as is the case with the German army. ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... Atheist. He did not admit a God in any rational sense. True, he professed to believe in gods, but evidently in a very equivocal manner, and solely to escape the popular condemnation. "They are not pure spirits, for there is no spirit in the atomic theory; they are not bodies, for where are the bodies that we may call gods? In this embarrassment, Epicurus, compelled ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... sex, who are weak-minded enough to trust their lives to the rash artifices of an ignorant pretender who affects to discover an occult quality in the constitution of the patient denoting the existence of some internal complaint beyond that which less equivocal symptoms sufficiently present to the eye and knowledge of the regular practitioner—we can only say that we conceive them to be justly punished in the loss of their money, and the consequent ruin of ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... these in many instances equivocal cases, I have," says he, "since the month of July past, made application for the discharge from British men-of-war of two hundred and seventy-one seamen, who, stating themselves to be Americans, have claimed my interference. Of this number, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... equivocal smile spread itself over Henry's features on hearing this question, which, however, he did not understand; and he immediately began to run down the ...
— Rollo in Switzerland • Jacob Abbott
... the American workingman is a 'moving picture' in two senses of this equivocal phrase. It is kinetoscopic, first of all, in its lifelikeness and the convincing reality of the actions it pictures. Then, again, it is emotionally moving; for the character of Anton, the big, honest, alert and energetic Chicago laborer, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... back to Paris by an insolent and ferocious crowd, and looked back with gratitude to the equivocal civilities of Sauce. The journey occupied four days, during which the queen's hair turned grey. Three deputies, sent by the Assembly, met the dolorous procession half way, and took charge of the royal family. The king at once assured them ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... a good girl," said the deacon, "not overburdened with fat, but a good girl!" and with this rather equivocal compliment to the donor, with his boot in one hand and the cap in the other, he rushed impulsively to the ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... are direct and positive. They admit of no equivocal construction. That the Almighty hath here entered his protest against monarchical government is true, or the Scripture is false. And a man hath good reason to believe that there is as much of kingcraft as priestcraft in withholding ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... Among the manuscripts of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Captain Larimore in 1704 played an equivocal part in the case of Quelch and his pirate crew (see no. 104, post), assisting their attempts to escape, but his testimony as to prize-money is to be valued, as that of an experienced shipmaster and privateer. ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... more curiously a weak spot in Hooker's character than the odd pride he took in Mr. Lincoln's somewhat equivocal letter to him at the time ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... shrink from seeking admission to the presence of the Queen. She was not afraid even of that royal lady's penetrating eye. Shiftiness, poverty, debts, modes of getting money that were, perhaps, equivocal, help too lightly accepted, all these are bad enough; but they are not in a woman the unpardonable sin. And a caprice in English society was always possible. The young beauty of Bice might attract the eye of some one whose notice would throw down all obstacles; or it ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... Francis, less easily cozened than the countess, should find his suspicions aroused? What if the princess, who had immediately dismissed the fool's denouncement of the free baron as an ebullition of blind jealousy—after informing her betrothed of the mad accusation—should see in his request equivocal circumstances? Or, was the countess—like many of her sisters—given to second thoughts, and would this after-reverie dampen the ardor ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... of twenty. Such a fresh, strawberry and cream complexion under a plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America with anyone very serious. There she would have been thought arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness daily worked growing ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... was personally known to her," he repeated. "Now I should like to remind you of young Charles Rambert's equivocal behaviour in the course of the evening that preceded the crime. It struck President Bonnet and shocked the priest. I also recall his hereditary antecedents, his mothers insanity, and finally——" Juve broke off abruptly and unceremoniously dragged the magistrate ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of that word—I had ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... at Lutzen; the beneficent part of his career Gustavus Adolphus had already terminated; and now the greatest service which he could render to the liberties of Germany was—to die. The all-engrossing power of an individual was at an end; the equivocal assistance of an over-powerful protector gave place to a more noble self-exertion on the part of the estates; and those who formerly were the mere instruments of his aggrandizement, now began to work for themselves. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... but I really have little hope otherwise.' It was hard to weigh the value of this statement. It was decidedly an equivocal one. ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... present connexion must be at once apparent; but it may perhaps be rendered more so if we try to imagine how the case would have stood supposing geological investigation to have yielded in this matter an opposite result, or even so much as an equivocal result. If it had yielded an opposite result, if the lower geological formations were found to contain as many, as diverse, and as highly organized types as the later geological formations, clearly there would have been no room at all for any theory of progressive evolution. And, by ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... another, shall," &c., and the word "legally" was struck out, and the words "under the laws thereof" inserted after the word "State," in compliance with the wish of some, who thought the term legal equivocal, and favoring the idea that slavery was legal "in a moral view." A conclusive proof that, although future generations might apply that clause to other kinds of "service or labor," when slavery should have died out, or been killed off by the young spirit of liberty, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society |
