"Inexact" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... visited London, and saw, as one of the most interesting sights of the city, a dramatic performance at the Swan. Later he communicated a description of the building to his friend Arend van Buchell,[248] who recorded the description in his commonplace-book, along with a crude and inexact drawing of the interior (see page 169), showing the stage, the three galleries, and the pit.[249] The description is headed: "Ex Observationibus Londinensibus Johannis de Witt." After a brief notice of St. Paul's, and a briefer reference to Westminster ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three, ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not nervous. But we were happy. He had not ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... closely related to the old Judaic dispensation. It is commonly assumed that the rejecters of the popular religion stand in face of it, as the Christians stood in face of the pagan belief and pagan rites in the Empire. The analogy is inexact. The modern denier, if he is anything better than that, or entertains hopes of a creed to come, is nearer to the position of the Christianising Jew.[20] Science, when she has accomplished all her triumphs in her own order, will still have to go back, when the time ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... a treasury of knowledge, preparing himself against all possible contingencies. Scarce anything fell under his notice but he perceived in it some relation to his work, and chronicled it in the pages of his journal in his always lucid, but sometimes inexact and wordy, style. The Travelling Diary (so he called it) was kept in fascicles of ruled paper, which were at last bound up, rudely indexed, and put by for future reference. Such volumes as have reached me contain a surprising medley: ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... how inexact Vasari is here once more. But it may be objected, supposing that he is inaccurate in statements which refer back, can he not be in the right in a case where he comes back, so to speak, straight from visiting Titian and writes down his observation about the master's actual age? To ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... external circumstances. In a series of identical equidistant stresses, those which coincide with the pulse of attention seem the stronger: this is what is called subjective rhythm. Since this coincidence is nearly always somewhat inexact, there results an easy accommodation of the pulse of attention, although even in the subjective rhythm there has already occurred an objective influence capable of affecting ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... milkmaids had said to one another of the newcomer, "How pretty she is!" with something of real generosity and admiration, though with a half hope that the auditors would qualify the assertion—which, strictly speaking, they might have done, prettiness being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in Tess. When the milking was finished for the evening they straggled indoors, where Mrs Crick, the dairyman's wife—who was too respectable to go out milking herself, ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... clear—in which little girls and boys set the tune; and there was that about it all that might well have cast a shadow on the path of even the most successful little girl. Yet also—let me not be rudely inexact—it was in honour of youth and freshness that we had all been convened. The fiancailles of the last—unless it were the last but one—unmarried daughter of the house had just been brought to a proper climax; the contract had been signed, the betrothal rounded off—I'm not ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... to mention Saint Catherine and Saint Margaret. The four or five quarto pages which he devotes to Jeanne d'Arc in his "Abrege de l'Histoire de France pour l'instruction du Dauphin"[116] are very interesting, not for his statement of facts, which is confused and inexact,[117] but for the care the author takes to represent the miraculous deeds attributed to Jeanne in an incidental and dubious manner. In Bossuet's opinion, as in Gerson's, these things are matters of edification, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and travels, only to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... even when grammatical accuracy has been attained, in the way of English persons attempting to write and speak correctly. First, there is the cramping restriction of an insufficient vocabulary; not merely a loose and inexact apprehension of many words that are commonly used, and a consequent difficulty in using them accurately, but also a total ignorance of many other words, and an inability to use them at all; and these last are, as a rule, the very words ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... our fond dreams are on that account shattered is inexact, and is the sort of language which ought to be addressed to the promoters of intelligence through public meetings and a commendable interest in politics, when they fail in their designs, and not to us. For we are fond stickers ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... of hobbies instead of going to his office with his little black bag and behaving generally as a "weel tappit" husband and king would do. Rudolph's hobbies were alchemy and astronomy. The chief object of the former extremely inexact science seems to have been to make gold by the synthetic process. Any charlatan who came along with a declared conviction that he could produce gold was welcomed by the King. It was for these his guests that Rudolph prepared ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... Gothic form is usually called either "Gothic" or "Blackletter" indiscriminately, but this use is inexact [128] and confusing. The term "Blackletter" should, strictly, be applied only to letters in which the amount of black in the line overbalances the white; and the proper application of the title should be determined rather by this balance or weight ...
— Letters and Lettering - A Treatise With 200 Examples • Frank Chouteau Brown
... of the more manly, had drawn knowledge at the wells of Cambridge—he was wooden spoon in the year 1850; and the flag upon the houseboat streamed on the afternoon air with the colours of that seat of Toryism, that cradle of Puseyism, that home of the inexact and the effete Oxford. Still it ...
— The Wrong Box • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... represented, but in a very rude manner. Marquette's route, in going and returning, is marked by lines; but the return route is incorrect. The whole map is so crude and careless, and based on information so inexact, that it is ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... in a dream life, and his idealism elevated him above all other agitators. He founded a sect, and his disciples became intoxicated with his own dreams. But he did not sanction all their excesses: for instance, he did not believe the inexact and contradictory genealogies which we find in ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... group of men, and from that time dates the definite foundation of the Impressionist school. For thirty years it continued to produce without interruption an enormous quantity of works under an accidental and inexact denomination; to obey the creative instinct, without any other dogma than the passionate observation of nature, without any other assistance than individual sympathies, in the face of the disciplinary ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... lost his head at the crest of his fortunes, but if one may tell so much truth of a man one has in a manner loved, he never had very much head to lose. He was always imaginative, erratic, inconsistent, recklessly inexact, and his inundation of wealth merely gave him scope for these qualities. It is true, indeed, that towards the climax he became intensely irritable at times and impatient of contradiction, but that, I think, was rather the gnawing uneasiness of sanity than any mental disturbance. ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... permitted without a total forgetfulness of self-respect. In the sentence quoted from M. Serurier's letter no exception is taken to the assertion that the complaints of this Government are founded upon allegations entirely inexact, nor upon that which declares the explanations given here or in Paris appeared, not to have left even the possibility of a misunderstanding on such delicate points. The correctness of these assertions we shall ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... phenomenon is not new but is as old as the world; and it is not supernatural but is subject to the eternal laws that govern all that exists. This phenomenon has been usually defined as "intercourse with the spirit world." That definition is inexact. Under such a definition the spirit world is contrasted with the material world. But this is erroneous; there is no such contrast! Both worlds are so closely connected that it is impossible to draw a line of demarcation, separating the one from the other. We say matter ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... yet without space to insert an atom;—in graceful succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unravelled, nor shown.... The great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard skin to signify the beautiful variety of things and the firmament, his coat of stars,—was but the representative of thee, O rich and various man! thou palace of sight and ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... "Inexact in small things as well as great," said Lady Margaret, who had returned to her accounts. "Your poet, you mean, for your quotation is from Longfellow, and he lived nearer your ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... that, in the neighbourhood of the great railway centres, certain early taverns inaugurate the business of the day. It was into one of these that Challoner, coming round the corner of the block, beheld his charming companion disappear. To say he was surprised were inexact, for he had long since left that sentiment behind him. Acute disgust and disappointment seized upon his soul; and with silent oaths, he damned this commonplace enchantress. She had scarce been gone a second, ere the swing-doors ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... be acknowledged, however, that the idea of Lavoisier and Laplace was rather vague and even inexact on one important point. They admitted it to be evident that "all variations of heat, whether real or apparent, undergone by a bodily system when changing its state, are produced in inverse order when the system passes back to its original state." This phrase is the ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... one hundred and fifteen to one hundred and forty words count one minute for delivery. This is so inexact, depending as it does on the number of laughs and the monologist's speed of delivery, that it is like a rubber ruler. At one performance it may be too long, ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page
... appeals for information to colleagues in all parts of the country, Susan, as the contributions began to come in, struggled to decipher the often almost illegible, handwritten manuscripts, many of them careless and inexact about dates and facts. To their request for data about her, Lucy Stone curtly replied, "I have never kept a diary or any record of my work, and so am unable to furnish you the required dates.... You say 'I' must ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... to identify these various regions by the inexact accounts of the direction of their sailing, by the very general descriptions of the country, by the number of days occupied in going from one point to another, with the uncertainty if the ship sailed at night, and by the length of the shortest day in Vinland—the last a statement ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... Monism, under which it has of late obtained a considerable vogue in this country, it must be understood that we do not mean what Dr. Ballard calls Theomonism, but a far less carefully thought-out and tested theory of life, which at the present time is making a successful appeal to multitudes of inexact thinkers. The fundamental idea common to this school is that the universe, including our individualities or what we think such, constitutes only one being, and manifests only one will, which all its phenomena express. Separateness of existence, according to such a view—which, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... banquet, the story of Jason was enacted. Time there certainly was for the play. La Marche estimated forty-eight dishes to every course, though he qualifies his statement by the admission that his memory might be inexact. These dishes were wheeled over the tables in little chariots before ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... idea of the past become inexact by the mere decay and disappearance of essential features, it becomes positively incorrect through the gradual incorporation of elements that do not properly belong to it. Sometimes it is easy to see how these extraneous ideas get imported into our mental representation ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... II., 116. (Order of Paganel, Castres, Pluviose 6 and 7, year II. "The steps taken to obtain returns of food have not fulfilled the object.... The statements made are either false or inexact.") Cf., for details, the correspondence of the other representatives on mission.—Dauban," Paris en 1794." 190. (Speech by Fouquier-Tinville in the Convention, Ventose 19.) "The mayor of Pont St. Maxence has dared to say ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... kindness of the Editor and Proprietors, whom I wish to thank. Four years have passed since I wrote this account, and in reading it over today one or two little things, as the use of particular words in what I quote from him, etc., have made me pause, as possibly inexact. I have not altered these things, because, when I wrote this account, my memory of the events and words was sharper than it is today. Memory is a bad witness, and inexact in very little things, such as the precise words used in talk some years before. The reader must however believe that the ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... laws of that trade; but he worked in his own shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. But the word "employer" marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern use of the word "master" quite inexact. A master meant something quite other and greater than a "boss." It meant a master of the work, where it now means only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of Capitalism that a shipowner need not know the right ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... more lovely by expressing in poetry his acute and subtle sense of its beauties—by lavishing on it (as we say) 'the colours of his imagination,' He was then an 'individual mind'—according to the current, but (as Shelley held) inexact terminology. He has now, by death, wholly passed out of the class of individual minds; and he forms a portion of the Universal Mind (the 'One Spirit') which is the animation ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... a way, yes! And yet perhaps Prince Bismarck has let himself be led away by the seduction of a good phrase into the use of an inexact form. The form of his judgment had to be pithy, striking, engraved within a ring. If he erred, then, no doubt, he erred deliberately. The saying was near enough the truth to serve, and perhaps he did ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... which responds to a special sense, peculiar to the human race. This is ordinarily called the esthetic sense, but that is an inexact term, for esthetic sense signifies a sense of the beautiful and what is esthetic is not necessarily beautiful. Sense ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... the matter of Mis' Cow's past history, and it was the only time I ever knew W. C. Westbury to be inexact as to the age and habits of any animal in Brook Ridge. He said he had always known her as a good milker, but that she had been unfortunate of late years in her owners. He couldn't remember her age, but he didn't think it was enough to hurt her. My opinion is that he could ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... ever on the watch for new ideas, ever ready to give a helping hand to those who were trying to advance our knowledge, ever willing to own to a mistake and give up even his most cherished ideas if truth required them at his hands. No conception can be more wantonly inexact. I grant that if a writer was sufficiently at once incompetent and obsequious Mr. Darwin was "ever ready," &c. So the Emperors of Austria wash a few poor people's feet on some one of the festivals of the Church, but it would not be safe to generalise from this yearly ceremony, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... has been deceived. Many bishops and abbots were present to bless and hallow the marriage-bed. When the time came to retire, the emperor, as was his right, lay beside his wife that night. "As was his right;" but the statement is inexact, for he neither kissed nor fondled her, yet they lay together in one bed. At first the maiden trembled with fear and anxiety lest the potion should not act. But it has so mastered him that he will never desire her or any other woman except in his sleep. But when asleep he will ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... month it was a honeymoon jest to beg prettily, to confess, "I haven't a cent in the house, dear," and to be told, "You're an extravagant little rabbit." But the budget book made her realize how inexact were her finances. She became self-conscious; occasionally she was indignant that she should always have to petition him for the money with which to buy his food. She caught herself criticizing his belief ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to attain her end without study. She employed every possible art to adorn herself, but so carefully that one could only suspect their use. The other had no idea that there was anything to be gained by these innocent artifices. One was always a little inexact; her first idea was to deny everything: the other never dissimulated, and hated everything roundabout. My first wife never asked for anything, but she ran up debts right and left; my second always asked for ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... the German scholar's criticisms show that he has not a right idea of the simplicity of life and equipment that evidently characterized the jailer's house and the prison. The details which he blames as inexact and inconsistent are sometimes most instructive about the circumstances of this provincial town and ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... Nose"; Neha-hau means "Stinking-members"; Set-qesu means "Breaker of bones," etc. The early Egyptologists called the second part of the CXXVth Chapter the "Negative Confession," and it is generally known by this somewhat inexact ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge
... like many another bird and beast, furnishes much doubtful weather lore for credulous and inexact observers. "When the woodpecker pecks low on the trees, expect warm weather" is a common saying, but when different individuals are seen pecking at the same time, one but a few feet from the ground, and another among the high branches, one may make the prophecy that ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... rising, modes of dressing, and so forth, are to be found in Pollnitz; [Pollnitz, Memoiren zur Lebens-und Regierungs-Geschichte der Vier letzten Regenten des Preussischen Staats (Berlin, 1791). A vague, inexact, but not quite uninstructive or uninteresting Book: Printed also in FRENCH, which was the Original, same place and time.] but we charitably omit them all. Even from foolish Pollnitz a good eye will gather, what was above intimated, that this feeble-backed, heavy-laden ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... frozen with a new and splendid wonder, for their descriptive phrase was now inexact. Merton was no longer in a runaway. But only for a moment did they hesitate before taking up ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... She was very calm. She was interrogated in German, a language she did not understand, but the questions and responses were translated into French. Her mind was very alert, and she was entirely self-possessed, and frequently rectified any inexact details and statements that were put to her. When, in her interrogatory, she was asked if she had not aided English soldiers left behind after the early battles of the preceding Autumn about Mons and Charleroi, she said yes; they were English and she was English, and she would ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... appearance of Schwarz's broad, fat hand, which crossed his range of vision to turn a leaf; he meditated absently on a sharp uplifting of this hand that occurred, as though the master were dissatisfied with the rhythm—the 'cellist's fault, no doubt: he had been inexact at rehearsal, and, this evening, was too much taken up with his own witticisms beforehand, to think about what he had to do. And thus the four divisions of the trio slipped past, separated by a disturbing noise of hands, which continued to seem as unreal to Maurice as everything ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... 3, part i; vol. ii, p. 384. The quotations as given by the author are inexact. The editor has substituted correct extracts from Matthews's text. Matthews spells the name of the prophet's widow ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... that, in accepting this doctrine as a truth, we may be led into an inexact conception of the so-called physical laws, unless we closely examine the sense in which we use the expression. The forces which act according to these laws, and the various forms of the so-called matter, or concrete forces, are often spoken of as if they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait of Gordon, is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseley inexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon, indeed, is the least successful of the four monographs. Dexterous as he is, Mr. Strachey has not had the material to work upon which now exists to elucidate ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... If our affirmation were inexact, if ferment cells did require for their growth or for their increase in number or weight, as all other vegetable cells do, the presence of oxygen, whether gaseous or held in solution in liquids, this new theory would lose all value, ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... throughout the treatise concerning the relations between Cato and Africanus the elder, particularly in Sec. 77 where Cato calls his enemy amicissimus, are audaciously inexact. ...
— Cato Maior de Senectute • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... regulations without coming into collision with the law. The fat of milk is its most valuable and most important constituent. The exact determination of the percentage of fat is therefore the chief problem of the milk-analyst. All analyses made prior to the year 1885 are more or less inexact, because a complete separation of the fat from the other milk constituents had not been obtained. In that year M. A. Adams, by the simple and ingenious expedient of spreading a known volume of the milk to be analysed upon a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... least be said that he had an open mind, and a modest estimate of the discoveries of modern medical science. He had perceived while still a young man (he was now about forty) that all medical practice—as distinct from surgical—is inexact and empirical, that, like English common law, it is based merely on custom, and a narrow range of experience; and he had therefore argued that a wider experience and research, especially among decaying nations, might lead to the discovery of a guiding ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... is said—and I take this point first, because the imputation is too frequently admitted by Physiologists themselves—that Biology differs from the Physico-chemical and Mathematical sciences in being "inexact." ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... hydrogen, among other elements, in the sun's atmosphere in 1862, and in 1868 published his great map of the normal solar spectrum which long remained authoritative in questions of wave-length, although his measurements were inexact to the extent of one part in 7000 or 8000 owing to the metre which he used as his standard having been slightly too short. He was the first, in 1867, to examine the spectrum of the aurora borealis, and detected and measured ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... ritual due to European contact. Modern Pueblo life resembles the ancient, but is not a facsimile of it, and until we have rightly measured the effects of incorporated elements, we are more or less inexact in our estimation of the character of prehistoric culture. The vein of similarity in the old and the new can be used in an interpretation of ancient paleography, but we overstep natural limitations ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... recited the traditions of his countrymen. The nautical and geographical proofs, by which portions of the North Atlantic shores have been identified by the bold spirit of northern research, are certainly inexact and to some extent hypothetical. In extending the heretofore admitted points of discovery and temporary settlement, south to Massachusetts and Rhode Island, they carry with them sufficient general plausibility, as ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... universal conception, is named Life in the widest acceptation; a conception that expresses all material existence and all that is immediately present in the senses. The object of the formal instinct, expressed in a universal conception, is called shape or form, as well in an exact as in an inexact acceptation; a conception that embraces all formal qualities of things and all relations of the same to the thinking powers. The object of the play instinct, represented in a general statement, may therefore bear the name of living ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... for her husband's passions, and who demand that she shall be mistress of her own body, will not be ungrateful for any guidance that physiology can afford them. It will be seen presently, moreover, that the study of the weekly rhythm does afford us some less inexact ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... will be accurately contrasted with the theories of occult powers which are at present cherished by the Universities and Royal Associations throughout Europe".—220. Churchyard: St. Giles churchyard where Capt. Borrow was buried on the 4th of March previous.—220. A New Mayor: Inexact. Robert Hawkes was mayor of Norwich in 1822. Therefore he was now ex-mayor—220. Man with a Hump: Thomas Osborn Springfield, was not a watchmaker so far as is known in Norwich, but "carried on the wholesale silk business, having almost ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... inexact en avanc, ant que l'Aboudjed se compose de vingt-quatre lettres seulement, d'abord parce que les six mots qu'il enumere ne renferment que vingt-deux lettres, et en second lieu, parce qu'il oublie de citer les deux derniers mots techniques, et , lesquels completent ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... grudge all labour in style; a morning is cheerfully devoted to verifying a quotation, by one who will not spare ten minutes to reconstruct a clumsy sentence; a reference is sought with ardour, an appropriate expression in lleu of the inexact phrase which first suggests itself does not seem worth seeking. What are we to say to a man who spends a quarter's income on a diamond pin which he sticks in a greasy cravat? A man who calls public ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... (inexact quotation).—The story told in this section was a favourite of St. Charles Borromeo (Alban Butler, Lives of ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... Scheibner, with the request that he correct them and return them to me at Berlin, signing his name to them if they correctly represented his opinions. In answer he enclosed me the copy which I had sent him, corrected where he thought the notes inexact, and an accompanying letter, stating that he did not forbid me to use the material which he had given me, but that he did not wish to set his name to any publication, if only for the reason that he was not sufficiently familiar with the English to judge accurately ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... p. 57. The quotation is from a despatch by Lyons of Dec. 6, 1861; but this is inexact language. It is true that Seward had refused to receive officially this despatch, but he had read and considered it in private. Hence he knew privately the facts of Russell's proposal and that Lyons had no instructions to negotiate. The incident ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... Gladiator, near the other end of the walk, as though with the object of seeing whether Marius would pursue them thither. Marius did not understand, and committed this error. "The father" began to grow inexact, and no longer brought "his daughter" every day. Sometimes, he came alone. Then Marius did ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... the man with two heads should see or overhear. The man with two heads had become his play, and so was perhaps bringing about his sleep by gentler means than the nurse had intended. The man was employing the vacant minutes of the little creature's flight from sleep, called "going to sleep" in the inexact language of ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... anonymous document, rather than from the three Gospels, seeing he does not name them? If, on the other hand, Justin has cited them accurately in this instance, why has he failed to do so in the others? For no other reason than that traditionary sayings are generally thus irregularly exact or inexact, and Justin, citing from them, has been as irregularly exact as they were" (Ibid, p. 85). "The result to which a perusal of his works will lead is of the gravest character. He will be found to quote nearly two hundred sentiments ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... some readers, but, as a matter of fact, the marked proclivity of the average schoolmaster for mere book-work has put such a stamp on study, that, in nine cases out of ten, a student, unless he is expressly instructed to the contrary, will go to the tortuous, and possibly inexact, descriptions of a book for a knowledge of things that lie at his very finger-tips. We have not written, this chapter to give a complete knowledge of the skeleton, but simply as an aid in the actual examination of ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... Cotton's toady. He was a sharp, selfish individual, good-looking in an aimless kind of way, with a slack, feeble mouth, and a wandering, indecisive glance. He had a quick, shallow cleverness, which could get up pretty easily enough of inexact knowledge to pass muster in the schools. Old Corker knew his capabilities to a hair, and would now and then, when Gus offered up some hazy, specious guess-work, blister him with a little biting sarcasm. Todd feared the Doctor as he feared no one else. Todd's chief ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... to the care or neglect of civilized humanity they may be transformed for good or evil, progress or recede. Unfortunately, owing to religious and other prejudices, the question of evolution is not discussed in schools. Hence, the majority of men only hear of these things by hearsay in a rough and inexact manner; so that a series of phenomena familiar to naturalists and medical men, are still dead letters for the rest of the public. This obliges me to speak further on some points ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... had judged Dunwoodie old, back-number, living in the past. Instead of which the fossil was what he always had been—just one too many. Though not perhaps for him. Not for Randolph F. Jeroloman. Not yet, at any rate. The points advanced were new, undigested, perhaps inexact, filled with discoverable flaws. Though, even so, how M. P. would view them was another kettle of fish. But that was as might be. He put on ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... herself; the word is inexact. She rather stood bathing in the light, motionless but for the lifting of her face into it that she might dip, or for the bending of her head that the warmth behind her might strike upon the nape of her neck. Those were all her movements, ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... Plato nor Cicero, least of all Bacon, has risen to so noble and profound a conception of this most strangely commingled of all human affections. There is no modern thinker, again, who makes Beauty—all that is gracious, seemly, and becoming—so conspicuous and essential a part of life. It would be inexact to say that Emerson blended the beautiful with the precepts of duty or of prudence into one complex sentiment, as the Greeks did, but his theory of excellence might be better described than any other of modern times by the [Greek: kalokagathia], the virtue of the true ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... reduce the Gospels to consistency, according to his view of consistency, the Gospels would scarcely be recognizable. If he were to reject from St. Paul's writings every instance of what he thinks fanciful exposition, illogical reasoning, inexact quotation, and mistaken inference; the result would be altogether unmanageable. For any one who attends to the matter will perceive that such things run into the very staple of the Apostle's argument; and therefore cannot be detached without destroying ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... marked—suffices to show how near the plant is to the point of exhaustion. In many types of automatic apparatus the amount of carbide remaining undecomposed at any moment is quite unknown, or at best can only be deduced by a tedious and inexact calculation; although in some generators, where the store of carbide is subdivided into small quantities, or placed in several different receptacles, an inspection of certain levers or indicators gives an approximate idea as to the capacity of the apparatus for further gas production. ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... Europe when they christened with the name "nihilism" this active negation of civilization and of bourgeois customs, so characteristic of the Russian "intellectuals." Taken in its literal sense, this word is inexact, since those to whom it was applied were inspired by a very high ideal. In a loose use of the word, nihilism has, on the contrary, a real significance, especially if one connects it with most of the Russian "intellectuals." The liberal tendencies ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... we have deliberately used the old-fashioned terms for the two races, fully aware that they are both inexact, and that today we would, for instance, use the term Inuit instead of Eskimo. However, this book was written in 1893, and things ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... restrained him, "herein it is one thing to demand and another to comply, for among the Platitudes is the admission made: 'No needle has two sharp points.' The conditions which the subtlety of Ming-shu imposed ceased to bind, for their corollary was inexact. In no romance composed by poet or sage are the unassuming hopes of virtuous love brought to a barren end or the one who holds them delivered to an ignominious doom. That which was called for does not therefore exist, but ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... credence to Wilkes's claims of land in that vicinity. His expedition did not once set foot on Antarctic shores, and, possibly on account of the absence of the scientific staff, his descriptions tend to be inexact and obscure. The soundings made by Wilkes were sufficient to show that he was probably in some places at no great distance from the coast, and, considering that his work was carried out in the days of sailing-ships, in unsuitable craft, under the most adverse weather ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... opportunity which led many a man to step over the line between right and wrong. Their excuse lies in the fact that the line was newly drawn and that it was often vague and inexact. It was easy, from killing or rebranding an occasional cow, to see the profits of larger operation. The faithful cowboys who cared for these herds and protected them even with their lives in the interest of absent owners began in time ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... condition, were continually moving, singly or in bodies, from one land to another, and through them a considerable acquaintance with mundane affairs generally was spread abroad. The knowledge was, of course, very inexact. No surveys were made, no plans of cities or fortresses, no maps; the military force that could be brought into the field by the several nations was very roughly estimated; but still, ancient conquerors did not start off ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... follows that the difference of nine or ten minutes in the estimated inclination of the entrance passage corresponds to a very considerable interval in time, certainly to not less than fifty years. (Exact calculation would be easy, but it would be time wasted where the data are inexact.) ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... people—for an ephemeral popularity does not appear to me to be worth trying for—it will not be because I have shrunk from the amount of labour, where labour could do anything. I have worked at poetry; it has not been with me reverie, but art.' That her rhymes were inexact, especially in such poems as 'The Dead Pan,' she did not deny; but her defence was that the inexactness was due to a deliberate attempt to widen the artistic capabilities of the English language. Partly, perhaps, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... I venture as a Scot to observe that for this one slight misquotation by Scott, on which so large a conclusion is built, the quotations by Wordsworth from others would furnish twenty-fold. He was singularly inexact in quotation, as even these Notes and Illustrations will satisfy in the places—scarcely in a single instance being verbally accurate. 'Sweet' certainly was a perfectly fitting word for the sequestered lake of St. Mary in its serene summer beauty. Moreover, swans are not usually found singly, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... It is inexact enough, if we are entirely honest, to force us to hold our conclusions with an open mind ready to admit new evidence. It is entirely the fault of the teacher if the pupil gets a dogmatic, too-sure habit of mind as the result of his biological studies. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... respecting the nature of light. Light is not a material substance, but a "mode of motion." It consists of very small undulations propagated with inconceivable velocity. Hence of it, and of it alone, it could not be correctly said that it was created. To say that God made light would be inexact. The words which are used exactly suit the circumstances of the case. But the discovery of the correlation of forces has given to these words a much more extended significance, while at the same time it furnishes a satisfactory reason ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... be framed of the value of the property destroyed during this fearful conflict of races must necessarily be very inexact. We are not however absolutely without materials for such an estimate. The Quakers were neither a very numerous nor a very opulent class. We can hardly suppose that they were more than a fiftieth part of the Protestant population of Ireland, or that they possessed more than a fiftieth part of ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... compare The Nights with the Fables of Pilpay for upwards of a century. At last the Pehlevi or old Iranian origin of the work found an able and strenuous advocate in Baron von Hammer-Purgstall [FN128] who worthily continued what Galland had begun: although a most inexact writer, he was extensively read in Oriental history and poetry. His contention was that the book is an Arabisation of the Persian Hazar Afsanah or Thousand Tales and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... sont les trois marchés principaux du pays des Noirs. Les voyageurs du Nord ne parlent pas du Niger; c'est une limite qu'ils ne franchissent pas; ils paraissent n'avoir aucunes relations avec les populations Mandingues de la rive droite:" (p. 26). This is inexact. The merchants do speak of the Niger frequently to me, calling it the Wady Neel, thinking, and which is a very ancient opinion, that it is a continuation of the Nile of Egypt. They also visit the opposite shores or banks of the Mandingoes. Some of them go to Noufi, as M. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... equipment. The group were so absorbed in him that they did not perceive the approach of their chief and his orderly; and Brant, with a sign to the latter, halted only a few paces from this central figure. His speech was a singular mingling of high-flown and exalted epithets, with inexact pronunciation and occasional lapses of ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... no matter, lad; it was merely that I noticed the discrepancy. It is several days, and you cannot be expected to remember precisely. One is apt to be inexact when there is no particular circumstance to impress the count upon ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... their works, which, to our shame, we have to use, because we have none written expressly for us, are filled (especially the last edition edited by Gmelin) with gross mistakes, omissions of double and triple occurrence, and errors in synonymy, and present many generic characters which are inexact or imperceptible and many series badly divided, or genera too numerous in species, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... French novel of 1825 to 1850 wholly—it would be somewhat absurd to rest them mainly—on its performances in this single kind. It found out, continued, or improved many others; and perhaps most of its greatest achievements were in these others. In fact "others" is an incorrect or at least an inexact term; for the historic novel itself is only a subdivision or offshoot of the great literary revolution which we call Romanticism. Indeed the entire novel of the nineteenth century, misapprehend the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... Aubrey's, presents very few variations, the chief being 'sleete' for 'fleet' in 1.3 (see below). This would seem to point to the fact that Scott obtained his version from a manuscript, and confused the antique '[s]' ( s) with 'f.' A collation, incomplete and inexact, of the two texts is given by T. F. Henderson in his edition of the Minstrelsy (1902), vol. iii. ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... employed even for the most convivial occasions. This is proved by the position which the variety of frottola, called "carnival song," occupied in the joyous festivities of the Italians. Note the narrative (not wholly inexact) of Burney: ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... old hole on earth—(I wonder why one uses slang like this, I had written those words as an exact reflection of my thoughts—and nothing could be more inexact as a description of Versailles! It is as far from being "jolly" as a place can be—nor is it a "hole!") It is the greatest monument which the vanity of one man ever erected, and like all other superlatives it holds and interests. ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... It was like owning the disjointed bits of a puzzle, and suddenly discovering that properly put together they make a pattern. Mrs. Ashe, who had never been much of a reader, considered her young friend a prodigy of intelligence; but Katy herself realized how inadequate and inexact her knowledge was, and how many bits were missing from the pattern of her puzzle. She wished with all her heart, as every one wishes under such circumstances, that she had studied harder and more wisely while the chance ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... these may be added La Hontan, Tonty, Nicolas Perrot, La Potherie, and the Senecas examined before the authorities of Albany, whose statements are printed in the Colonial Documents, III. These are the original sources. Charlevoix drew his account from a portion of them. It is inexact, and needs the correction of his learned annotator, Mr. Shea. Colden, Smith, and other ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... there were no inexact statements made by the communicator during all these sittings? There are some, but very few. I shall speak of them in the following chapter. In any case, there is no trace of a single intentional untruth in the whole ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... crucibles, and he carefully went over the proportions of the ingredients in the one from which he had just taken his specimen. He made a strong effort of memory, trying to recall whether he had been careless and inexact in weighing any of the materials, but he knew that he had been most precise. He had also noted the hour at which he had put the mixture into the crucible on Saturday, and he now glanced at the sand-glass and made another note. But he did not lay the paper upon the table, where it ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... masters had nothing more to teach me, and did not know what to do with me. I might have gone to a public school, or to a private tutor for three or four years; but there were reasons against either plan, and at the unusual age I speak of, with some inexact acquaintance with Homer, Sophocles, Herodotus, and Xenophon, Horace, Virgil, and Cicero, I was matriculated at the University. I had from a child been very fond of composition, verse and prose, English and Latin, and took especial interest in the subject of style; and one of the wishes nearest ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... tribe, the Bakalai, in which the women worship a particular divinity named Njambai.[26] This writer is even more inexact than Stanley, hence, we get very little scientific data from his voluminous works. From what he says of Njambai,[F] I am inclined to believe that he is a negro Priapus; this, however, is a conjectural belief and has no ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... enfeeblement of his faculties, and the poverty he was reduced to, rendered him accessible to the pecuniary offers made to him. He consented to give the authority of his name to Memoirs in whose composition he had only co-operated by incomplete, confused, and often inexact notes, materials which an editor was employed to put in order." And Meneval (iii. 29-30) goes on to quote what he himself had written in the Spectateur Militaire, in which he makes much the same assertions, and especially objects to the account of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... to Mr. S. Herbert Ross at Pemberton's, telling him what a wise, good, noble, efficient man he was, and how much of a privilege it would be to become his secretary. She felt that Walter Babson must have been inexact in ever referring to Mr. Ross ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... the statistics will probably be against me—I have often felt an enmity in statistics—and I offer my observations as possibly inexact. One can only be sure of one's own experience (even if one can be sure of that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two further in behalf of my observations. After we returned to London, in September, I used ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Catholic Emancipation opened Trinity College to him, and that establishment, "the intellectual eye of Ireland" as Sir William Harcourt has justly called it, received him a year later. The "silent sister" has fostered an always genial, if sometimes inexact, fashion of scholarship, in which Moore's talents were well suited to shine, and a pleasant social atmosphere wherein he was also not misplaced. But the time drew near to '98, and Moore, although he had always ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... is supposed to have used Livy mostly. How far he used other authorities is unknown. His history is sometimes inexact. In ii. 478 sqq. the character of L. Domitius Ahenobarbus is falsely portrayed. So the journey of Cato to the shrine of Hammon, ix. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... things in life have given me greater relief. When we got back to my house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he had been taking a nap on my lounge; be appeared refreshed and even gay; but if I am inexact in these details he ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is legible record, with something really of portraiture in it, valuable so far as it goes; record unique on this subject;—and substantially true, though inexact enough in details. Thus, even in regard to that of Anhalt's HEAD, which is so impossible in this First Dialogue, Friedrich did most probably say something of the kind, in a Second which there is, of date 1780; of which latter De Ligne is here giving account ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and a knitting up of loose ends, with the inevitable consequent irritation. This was especially true in the case of Tony Perrotte, to whom discipline was ever an external force and never an inward compulsion. Inexact in everything he did, irregular in his habits, irresponsible in his undertakings, he met at every turn the pressure of the firm, resolute hand of the new manager. Deep down in his heart there was an abiding admiration and affection for Jack Maitland, but he loathed ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... rendered indispensable, therefore, which should display uniformity in its character, and a sufficiently rigorous mode of Scientific proof. To fulfil this end, the Inexact Sciences were accorded a position of certainty in reference to their Principles which does not in reality belong to them; while the Exact or Infallible Sciences were degraded from their peculiarly high state, and brought ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... With inexact pronunciation Raises within my breast as oft As formerly much agitation. Repentance wields not now her spell And gallicisms I love as well As the sins of my youthful days Or Bogdanovitch's sweet lays.(41) But I must now employ my Muse With the epistle of my fair; I promised!—Did ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... with that which it had helped to make popular. Some of the material—Huon of Bordeaux, the Four Sons of Aymon, and others—retained a certain vogue in forms quite different, and gave later ages the inexact and bastard notion of "Charlemagne Romance" which has been referred to. But the chanson de geste itself was never, so to speak, "half-known"—except to a very few antiquaries. After its three centuries of flourishing, first alone, then ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... theatrical in the delivery of Fitzpiers's effusion; yet it would have been inexact to say that it was intrinsically theatrical. It often happens that in situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... indescribably absurd use of Law-Latin in records, writs, and written pleadings, was finally put an end to by statute 4 George II. c. 26; but this bill, which discarded for legal processes a cumbrous and harsh language, that was alike unmusical and inexact, and would have been utterly unintelligible to a Roman gentleman of the Augustan period, did not become law without much opposition from some of the authorities of Westminster Hall. Lord Raymond, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... our knowledge of them the gulf remains the same: no microscope has ever seen into thought; no reflection on ourselves has supplied the missing link between mind and matter...These are the conditions of this very inexact science, and we shall only know less of it by pretending to know more, or by assigning to it a form or style to which it has not yet attained and ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... little eyes upon the scrawling characters. The methods of writing in the Far East, being pictorial and inexact, require scrutiny of the context before a given sentence can ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... unchanging or invisible, and the visible or changing. But now a third kind is required, which I shall call the receptacle or nurse of generation. There is a difficulty in arriving at an exact notion of this third kind, because the four elements themselves are of inexact natures and easily pass into one another, and are too transient to be detained by any one name; wherefore we are compelled to speak of water or fire, not as substances, but as qualities. They may be compared to images made of gold, which are continually assuming new forms. Somebody asks ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... then, that Madame Colette Willy never had short hair, that she does not wear masculine attire; that her cat does not accompany her when she goes to a concert, that her friend's dog does not drink from a tumbler. It is inexact to say that Mme. Colette Willy works in a squirrel's cage, or performs upon trapeze and flying rings, and can reach with her toe the nape of her neck. Madame Colette Willy has never ceased to be the plain woman par excellence, who rises at dawn to give oats to the horse, maize ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... fact that it is only since Karl Marx that Socialism has taken its stand upon the class war. The Utopian Socialists had no notion—even an inexact one—of it. And in this they lagged behind their contemporary theorists of the bourgeoisie, who understood very well the historical significance at any rate of the struggle of the third estate ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... political economy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, is succeeding in explaining many things; but history must always remain, from the standpoint of the astronomer, physicist, or chemist, a highly inexact and fragmentary body of knowledge.... History can no doubt be pursued in a strictly scientific spirit, but the data we possess in regard to the past of mankind are not of a nature to lend themselves to organization into an exact science, although, as we shall see, they may yield ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... needless to say that there are born rhymers, who think in rhyme and whose fecundity of imagery is multiplied by the excitement of matching sound with sound. They are often careless in their prodigality, inexact in their swift catching at any rhyme-word that will serve. At the other extreme are the self-conscious artists in verse who abhor imperfect concordances, and polish their rhymes until the life and freshness ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... here, then, that the artist sees beauty in nature, the phrase may be understood as a convenient but inexact formula, as when one says the sun rises or the sun sets. Beauty is in the landscape only in the sense that these material forms express for the artist an idea he has conceived of some ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... always be in the sense that, if God is what we have inferred from His manifestations, He must be this or that. In other words, having to some degree worked my own way out of fear I must tell how I came to feel that I know the Unknowable, doing it with the inexact phraseology which is all I ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... something above the tops of the trees on the level horizon. It was then descending; and, after rising and declining a little, it sunk slowly behind the trees, I should think about or beyond Sunbury, at five minutes after one. But you know I am a very inexact guesser at measures and distances, and may be mistaken in many miles; and you know how little I have attended to these airgonauts: only t'other night I diverted myself with a sort of meditation on future airgonation, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... loss in killed and wounded, twelve, must have been largely by grapeshot or musketry. The British had twenty-one men hurt. It has been said that this difference in loss is nearly proportionate to the difference in force. This is obviously inexact; for the "Enterprise" was superior in gun power by twelve per cent, while the "Boxer's" loss was greater by seventy-five per cent. Moreover, if the statement of crews be accurate, that the "Enterprise" had one hundred ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... stated, you feel sure that here for once he is inaccurate, reckon that he is profounder than you, and do you begin to seek for a hidden path as one lost in a wilderness, when, in all probability, you will discover that what you deemed inexact was in reality a profounder truth than had come under your observation. Nor would a discussion of Shakespeare's truthfulness be rounded out should his value as historian be omitted. He is profoundest of philosophical historians, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... with fleet tactics under sail. The usual version of the attack at Trafalgar has of late been elaborately disputed by capable critics. I myself have no doubt that they are quite mistaken; but it would be curious to investigate how far their argument derives from inexact phraseology—as, for example, the definition of "column" and ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... "it" appears to be as good a description as any, since there is no consciousness of sex in the thought patterns. I wonder what sort of ... and to my surprise I swore! I do not ordinarily curse or use obscenities—not because they are obscene but because they are a poor and inexact means of conveying ideas or impressions. But in this case they were particularly appropriate. No other words could so precisely describe my feelings. Me, a rational intelligence, succumbing to such low-level emotional ...
— The Issahar Artifacts • Jesse Franklin Bone
... Doctor was everywhere in Harvey is inexact. He was everywhere except on Quality Hill in Elm Street. There, from the big, bulging house with its towers and minarets and bow windows and lean-tos, ells and additions, the Doctor was barred. There was chaos, and the spirit that breathed on the face of the waters ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... conversation. She did not freely express admiration, even in the form of assent to what was said by others. To interpret her reticence as shyness was a misunderstanding, or a misuse of words, natural in the case of an inexact observer like Mrs. Rossall. Four years ago, when Beatrice met her in Dunfield, her want of self-confidence was pronounced enough; she had at that time never quitted her provincial home, and was in the anomalous position of one who is intellectually ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... forms of athletics, on the contrary, place the stress mainly upon groups of fundamental muscles to the neglect of finer motor possibilities. Some who excel in heavy athletics no doubt coarsen their motor reactions, become not only inexact and heavy but unresponsive to finer stimuli, as if the large muscles were hypertrophied and the small ones arrested. On the other hand, many young men, and probably more young women, expend too little of their available active energy upon basal and massive muscle work, and cultivate ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... obscure and meagrely recorded. Of Milton, however, we know more personal details than of any man of letters of that age. Edward Phillips, the poet's nephew, who was brought up by his uncle, and lived in habits of intercourse with him to the last, wrote a life, brief, inexact, superficial, but valuable from the nearness of the writer to the subject of his memoir. A cotemporary of Milton, John Aubrey (b.1625), "a very honest man, and accurate in his accounts of matters of fact," as Toland says of him, made it ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... It would, perhaps, be inexact to call Mr. Martyn a misogynist, but he has that attitude toward women of some priests his countrymen, as of many priests of all creeds, that there is something belittling if not degrading in absorbing association with women. His feeling is not at all the ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... map of the moon was executed in the seventeenth century by Dominique Cassini; superior to that of Riccioli in the execution, it is inexact in the measurements. Several smaller copies were published, but the plate long kept in the Imprimerie Nationale was sold by weight as ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... entertained hitherto of the measure of value, then, is inexact; the object of our inquiry is not the standard of value, as has been said so often and so foolishly, but the law which regulates the proportions of the various products to the social wealth; for upon the knowledge of this law depends the rise and fall of prices in ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... say, in reply, first of all, that the proposed system tends to prevent those abuses which have been hitherto regarded as incapable of prevention; but, the calculations of our statistics, inexact as they are, have invariably pointed out a widely prevailing social sore, and our moralists may, therefore, be accused of preferring the greater to the lesser evil, the violation of the principle on which society is constituted, to the granting of a certain liberty to girls; and dissoluteness ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... supposed that one who employed geometry, and proceeded by way of axioms and definitions, must be on the track of truth. They did not see that these axioms were nothing better than very vague and very uncertain propositions; that the definitions were inexact, defective, and bizarre. ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... wise old Greek: "O Great Apollo, send down the reviving rain upon our fields; preserve our flocks; ward off our enemies; and—build up our speech!" "It is irrational," he said, "absurd, almost criminal, to expect a young man, whose knowledge of English words and construction is scant and inexact, to put into English a difficult thought of Plato or an involved period of Cicero." Above all, it will be observed, Price's intellectual enthusiasm was the ancient tongue. A present-day argument for learning Greek and Latin is ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... of the inexact sciences!" interrupted Denoisel, who delighted in muddling M. Bourjot's brain with paradoxes. "But I grant that," he went on. "I grant that the lives of the people have been prolonged, and that they eat more meat ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... against two idols in particular, 'Unity' and 'Being,' which had grown up in the pre-Socratic philosophy, and were still standing in the way of all progress and development of thought. He does not say with Bacon, 'Let us make truth by experiment,' or 'From these vague and inexact notions let us turn to facts.' The time has not yet arrived for a purely inductive philosophy. The instruments of thought must first be forged, that they may be used hereafter by modern inquirers. How, while mankind were disputing about universals, could ...
— Parmenides • Plato
... indispensable law. "The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction," he declared. "They do not pin their reader to a dogma, which he must afterward discover to be inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he must afterward unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintances of others, and they show us the web of experience not as we can ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... be possible to suppose this with the inexact heathen definition of good; but with the clear Christian definition of good and evil, it ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... and in the criticisms of pacifism, a great deal of confusion arises because of the inexact use of terms. We have already seen that pacifists of many shades of opinion are united in their refusal to participate in war. In this objection there is a negative quality. The very word "non-violence" used in the title of this study suggests ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... fatal contagion of the newspaper and the modern novel communicates to them an intellectual irritation which might almost stand for a mental process. If they have not ideas, they have notions of things, and however inexact and absurd these may be, they are better ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... a good deal of harm, because it induces high-minded persons of inexact ideas to think ambition a noble infirmity, or at least to believe that they need not try to get rid of their personal ambitions until they have conquered all their other evil dispositions. I suppose that what Milton meant was that it ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson |
