"Expressiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tradition which had strictly limited portraiture to the representation of the head only, or at most to the bust. The hand is here introduced, though Giorgione feels still compelled to account for its presence by introducing a rosary of large beads. In later years, as we shall see, the expressiveness of the human hand per se will be recognised; but Giorgione already feels its significance in portraiture, and there is not one of his portraits which ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... assiduous in maintaining friendly relations with the Walworths. Christian, too, had got into the habit of calling there; it was significant of the noticeable change which was come upon him—a change his sister was at no loss to understand from the moment that he informed her (gravely, but without expressiveness) of Mr. Palmer's death. Instead of shunning ordinary society, he seemed bent on extending the circle of his acquaintance. He urged Marcella to invite friendly calls, to have guests at dinner. There seemed to be a general ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... felicities of rhythm would be inappropriate. He will not let himself go in the way of easy floridity, as writers may whose themes are more "ideal." And where many writers would attempt merely to simplify and sweeten verse, he endeavours to give it fuller expressiveness, to give it strength and newness. It follows that Browning's verse is not so uniformly melodious as that of many other poets. Where it seems to him necessary to sacrifice one of the two, sense or sound, he has never hesitated which to ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... from my opera, which Hans accompanied with an expressiveness which delighted me very much. On an occasion like this I also read aloud extracts from my manuscripts. For instance, during a series of successive evenings I read the whole of my longer work, Oper und Drama, written in the course ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... epithets as above superlatived. Read it by all means, and see it, too, if you will, but if the honest English play-goer's verdict is worth a "big, big, D" (I thank thee, W. S. G., for teaching me that abbreviated form of dashed expressiveness!) he will give IBSEN'S Master Builder the benefit of the "D," and "D" it once and for ever. And that, at your service, my masters, is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 11, 1893 • Various
... Baron broke out, with a sudden expressiveness which made his voice, as it fell upon his ear, strike him as the voice of another. She gave a vague exclamation and, nodding slightly but not unsociably, passed back into the house. She had made an impression which remained till the other party to the conversation reached ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... with even the small works of the composer's mature period, which commences with his Opus 47. Its character, however, is altogether strong and virile, containing many passages of pure tonal beauty and eloquent expressiveness. The orchestra is written for with skill and imagination and is on equal terms with the solo instrument. The only fault of the work is that its pianoforte part is far too ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... right thing in Weber's music, disappointment is impossible, though I admit that the man who professes to find there the great qualities he finds in Mozart, Beethoven, or any of the giants, must be in a very sad case. Grandeur, pure beauty, and high expressiveness are alike wanting. Weber's claim to a place amongst the composers is supported in a lesser degree by the gifts which he shared, even if his share was small, with the greater masters of music, than by his miraculous power of vividly drawing and painting ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... door of the tents, cutting and whittling away, they occasionally sweeten their toil by raising their voices and singing the Gypsy stanza in which the art is mentioned, and which for terseness and expressiveness is quite equal to anything in the whole circle of ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... sonatas and symphonies are of this wonderfully varied form of writing. How full it can be of expressiveness you know from the Songs without Words by Mendelssohn, and the Nocturnes of Chopin; how full of flickering humor you hear in the Scherzo of a Beethoven symphony; how full of deep solemnity and grief one ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... thing which is generally composed of brass or iron. It has frequently a violent resemblance to the "human face divine," or the ravenous expressiveness of a beast of prey. It assumes a variety of phases under peculiar vinous influences. A gentleman, in whose veracity and experience we have the most unlimited confidence, for a series of years kept an account of the phenomena ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... up under the recognition she could not fail to give him. And I was right; in another instant it did, and with a brightness there was no mistaking. But one feeling common to the human heart lends such warmth, such expressiveness to the features. How handsome it made him look, how distinguished, how everything I was ...
— The Woman in the Alcove • Anna Katharine Green
... pretty narrow compass; as is true, also, of the field sparrow, with whom, as I soon came to feel, he has not a little in common. It is in musical form only that he suggests the swamp sparrow. In tone and spirit, in the qualities of sweetness and expressiveness, he is nearly akin to Spizella pusilla. One does for the Southern pine barren what the other does for the Northern berry pasture. And this is high praise; for though in New England we have many ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... events, she found it not at all objectionable that Prince Koltsoff was apparently enamoured of her. Of this she was quite certain. He had a way of looking his devotion. His luminous blue eyes were wonderful in their expressiveness. They could convey almost any impression in the gamut of human emotions, save perhaps kindliness, and among other things they had told her he ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Cambray. He had previously been appointed by Louis XIV. tutor to the Dauphin, and his wit and grace made him a great favourite at the Court, and even Madame de Maintenon for a time smiled upon the noble churchman, whose face was so remarkable for its expressiveness that, according to the Court chronicler Saint Simon, "it required an effort to cease looking at him." His Fables and Dialogues of the Dead were written for his royal pupil. It is well known that the Archbishop sympathised ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... portraits. But Mr. Kerr Bain's pen-and-ink portrait of Sincere in his People of the Pilgrimage is even better than Bennett's excellent drawing. 'Sincere is softer in outline and feature than Watchful. His eye is full-open and lucid, with a face of mingled expressiveness and strength—a lovable, lowly, pure-spirited man—candid, considerate, willing, cheerful—not speaking many words, and never any but true words.' Happy sheep that have such a shepherd! Happy people! ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... piloting. He would never become a German scholar, but his vocabulary and use of picturesque phrases, particularly those that combined English and German words, were often really startling, not only for their humor, but for their expressiveness. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... me. Not that he had much of the gift of song in his voice; but then he was not altogether tuneless, and one could get a fair idea of the intended melody.[36] When with eyes closed he raised his rich deep voice, its expressiveness made up for what it lacked in execution. I still seem to hear some of his songs as he sang them. I would also sometimes set his words to music and sing ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... few minutes of a speech full of Socialism, Mrs. Fox-Moore (stirred to unheard-of expressiveness) kept up a ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... announced his arrival, and presently a broken-down, prematurely aged man appeared, with sunken cheeks, pale withered lips, and staring eyes starting from their sockets, and with but the ghost of their former brilliance and expressiveness. ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... parenthetically, the habit of dealing in parentheses being one I especially dislike, only necessity compelling me thereto, and before I proceed further, that the word "confugium," which, both on account of its terse expressiveness, as well as its curiosa felicitas in the present application, I have chosen in order to define my den, has not, I hope, escaped the notice of the discriminating scholar. Moreover, I trust that I shall not incur the imputation of vanity if I take to myself some little credit ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... of diction led him to immoderate expressiveness, to immodest sweetness, to a jugglery, and prestidigitation, and conjuring of words, to transformations and transmutations of sound—if, I say, his extraordinary gift of diction brought him to this exaggeration of the manner, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... of them lay staring at the swell which was steadily growing heavier. Both men had covered themselves with rugs, after dutifully bundling up Miss Julia. As I walked back and forth on the deck, I was struck by their various degrees of in-expressiveness. Opaque brown eyes, almond-shaped and only half open; wolfish green eyes, close-set and always doing something, with a crooked gleam boring in this direction or in that; watery grey eyes, like the thick edges of broken skylight glass: I would have given a great deal to know what was going ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... its tone, and on occasion some fine poetic expression is vulgarized by being thrown into very common company. It is vandalism to muster a sonnet of Shakespeare's into such a service and it in no way enhances the expressiveness of the passage to say, "A flashy pamphlet has been run to a five-and-thirtieth edition, and thus ensured the writer a 'deathless date' among political charlatans."[113] The fact is that quotations were a part of Hazlitt's vocabulary, which he used with the same freedom ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Duesseldorf, Antwerp and Munich, he joined in 1859 the staff of Fliegende Blaetter, the leading German comic paper, and was, together with Oberlaender, the founder of modern German caricature. His humorous drawings and caricatures are remarkable for the extreme simplicity and expressiveness of his pen-and-ink line, which record with a few rapid scrawls the most complicated contortions of the body and the most transitory movement. His humorous illustrated poems, such as Max und Moritz, Der heilige Antonius von Padua, Die Fromme Helene, Hans Huckebein and Die ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... of keeping the right medium between the dignified, almost prancing hexameter, and the shorter metres of the lyrics. Its feet are nimble and fleet, but yet full of vigor and expressiveness. In addition, the Kalevala uses alliteration, and thus varies the rhythm of time with the rhythm of sound. This metre is especially fit for the numerous expressions of endearment in which the Finnish epic abounds. ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... direct its exercise. He has fancy, and he frequently stutters into imagination; but the imp that controls his heart corrupts his taste and taints his sense of beauty, and the result is that he has a malicious satisfaction in deliberately choosing words whose uncouthness finds no extenuation in their expressiveness, and in forging elaborate metaphors which disgust rather than delight. His description of a storm at sea is among the least unfavorable specimens of this perversion of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... inadequate, or ill-composed, now that the paintings are advanced. I cannot tell myself often enough that it means an immense deal of labour to bring a work to the highest pitch of impressiveness of which it is capable. The oftener I revise it, the more it will gain in expressiveness.... Though the touch disappear, though the fire of execution be no longer the chief merit of the painting, there is no doubt about this; and again how often does it happen that after this intense labour, which has turned one's thought back on itself in every direction, the hand obeys ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... there were, in August last, thirty gentlemen resident who were in some way brought thither by the traffic in herring—among the number a young Russian, who, with his wife, sat at a little table apart, and kept jabbering their language with glib expressiveness. His name was Walk-off, and his object was the annexation of fish for Muscovite consumption. He had a flabby face and long, dark hair, which he publicly combed. She was small and pretty—doll-like, indeed—with jewels in her ears, which glittered and flashed in the gas-light. ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... his brilliant smile, an oriental expressiveness of the dark eyes beneath their drooping lids, hinted a Semitic strain; but it was otherwise not marked in his appearance, which was free from vulgarity, whilst essentially that of a successful man ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Aristotle; and Duccio and Cimabue and Giotto must go the same way as soon as St. Francis of Assisi or Luther or Calvin puts into words what they meant. It is its own success that is fatal to Art; for just in proportion as the expressiveness it insists upon is shown to be pervading, universal, and not the property of this or that shape, the particular manifestation is degraded. Color and form are due to partial opacity; the light must penetrate to a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... two such causes, impressed his imagination with such a stamp, and spirit of passion, he ever obeyed the impulse by a kind of natural dependency, and relaxed, or braced successively into all that fine expressiveness with which he painted what he spoke, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber |
