"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did first-class work. I saw some of it. Miss Strange, if I could get you into that house for ten minutes—not to see her but to pick up the loose intangible thread which I am sure is floating around in it somewhere—wouldn't ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... all these pretences of content lay a hollow sense of desolation. It was not the want of butter nor the diminished meat; it was the total removal from life of that intangible splendour of hope produced by the lottery ticket. Ah! every day was drawn blank now. This gloom, this gnawing emptiness at the heart, was worse than either had foreseen or now confessed. Malicious Fate, too, they felt, would even crown with the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, papa—oh, ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... smear, father." Maggie spoke slightingly, but with a tone of doubt. It was not the sort of picture that eighteen has been taught to like—yet the picture did possess an intangible something that provoked doubt as to its quality. "You sure do ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... could be swept away, would her coming bring joy to him. Firmly though his feet were planted upon the ladder, it seemed to him then in that gloomy mood that every step must take him further away from any chance of that wonderful happiness, so intangible, yet so sweet an adjunct to life. For he was following like a doomed creature in the wake of Drexley, and Rice, and those others. Too late had come his warning. The woman of whom he never dared to think was surely a sorceress. She was only a woman—scarcely even beautiful, yet ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... of Basques mingled with the cast-iron faces of Americans and sturdy self-possessed Negroes under broad "Texas" hats. An hour beyond the hills, in a thick-wooded land, I dropped off at the town of Tehuantepec, an intangible place that I had some difficulty in definitely locating ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... hill. There was no one now between the squadron and the enemy except a few scattered skirmishers. An empty space of some seven hundred yards was all that separated them. The enemy ceased firing, and that stern, threatening, inaccessible, and intangible line which separates two hostile armies was all the more ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... one has advanced all tangible reasons and causes for the depopulation of the Marquesas, there remains another, mysterious, intangible, but it may be, more potent than the others. The coming of the white has been deadly to all copper-colored races everywhere in the world. The black, the yellow, the Malay, the Asiatic and the negro flourish beside the white; the Polynesian and the ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... being afar off, inaccessible, almost intangible,—like the millionaire employer to his humble workman, covered with sweat and grime, at the bottom of ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island and its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by which all these great material and still greater intangible possessions had been first won, and then kept, against every hostile comer whether domestic or foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, like that which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves in the great poet of France, or ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... with the Staff, and something, an intangible something, seemed to have gone out of the life. The officers were all older, and the Staff uniforms were more sombre. I missed the white stripe of the infantry, and the yellow of the cavalry. The shoulder-straps all had gold eagles or leaves on them, instead ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... aschematistos, anaphes. E-text editor's translation: "the colorless, utterly formless, intangible essence." Plato, Phaedrus 247c. See also Appreciations, "Coleridge," where ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... little intangible, sir," Thomson confessed, "but exceedingly important. Without any direct evidence, I have come to the conclusion that Captain Granet is a mysterious person and needs watching. As usual, we are in trouble with the civil authorities, and, to be frank with you, I am ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God." The higher class Egyptians, however, fearing that their existence would continue to be of the same shadowy and intangible character after the second judgment, as they believed it would be in the Amenti, if worms were allowed to destroy their bodies, hoped to preserve them until that time by the process ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... the race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... stricken down during the taking of a scene and on the very stage, had served to bring the tragedy home to the people. More, it was a second murder in four days, apparently by the same hand as the first. A sense of dread, a nameless, intangible fear, had taken form and found its way under the big blackened glass roofs and around and through the corridors, into the dressing rooms, and back even to the manufacturing and purely technical departments. The gateman eyed us with undisguised uneasiness as we drove through the archway ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... that the defectives and delinquents of the community be properly cared for. The financial burden is becoming a heavy one; it will become a crushing one unless steps are taken to make the feeble-minded productive (as described in the next chapter) and an intangible "sinking fund" at the same time created to reduce the burden gradually by preventing the production of those who make it up. The burden can never be wholly obliterated, but it can be largely reduced by a restriction of the reproduction of those ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... that opened on the general staircase—left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young companion's agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr. Jarvis ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... responsibility, was made in 1864 by the court of appeals in Kentucky, and again in 1869 under the same presiding Judge Robertson. But Chief Justice Williams rebukes this strange ruling in most emphatic language. He says: "In all the vague, uncertain, intangible, and undefined theories of the most impractical metaphysician in psychology or moral insanity, no court of last resort in England or America, so far as has been brought to our knowledge, ever before announced such a startling, irresponsible, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... of the irruption for avoiding those who guarded the frontiers of the countries they invaded; and before a force could be brought against them they were on their return. Their chief strength lay in their being intangible. If pursued they made marches of extraordinary length, sometimes upwards of sixty miles, by roads almost impracticable for regular troops. If overtaken they dispersed and reassembled at an appointed ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... feeling extremely triumphant and as strong as a lion. He was rather sorry no one had seen the affair, but that of course was sub-conscious. And he was more cheerful than he had been for some days. He had been up against so many purely intangible obstacles lately that it was a relief to find one he could use his ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... tall mirror. Oh, this was Miss Nan Underhill, and she had never seen her before. There was a mystery about her,—a sudden sense of a strange, beautiful, unseen world, a new country she was going into, an old world left behind, an intangible recreation that no words could explain, but that touched her with a kind of exalted sacredness, as if a new life was unfolding all about her. She ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... claws—monstrous and menacing; those leaves no longer bright remind me of a hearse's plumes; their rustling—of the rustling and switching of a pall or winding-sheet. The trunk, black, sinuous, towering, is assuredly no piece of timber, but something pulpy, something intangible, something antagonistic, mystic, devilish. I turn from it and shudder. Then my mind reverts to the elm—the elm on which Sir Algernon hanged himself. I remember it is not more than twenty yards from where I stand. I stare down at the soil, at the clumps of crested dog's-tail ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Tahkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshipper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect or despise others, but the great object of all their worship, whatever its chosen ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place. It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smooth-pulsing life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action, of repose that was quick with existence ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... with the Sassafras, he went home discomforted and even flustered. That hand was too much like the hand of possession. The girl was stealing over him like a light, intangible vapor. He struck ahead with a quicker gait, as if trying to outwalk a creeping fog. One consolation, however: Hortense had come like a puff of wind. Even a second squall from the same quarter ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... consistently, but something warm within her gave the lie to this cold disposition of their friendship. She did not want to let him go his way. She had no intention of letting him go. She could not express it, but in some intangible way he belonged to her. As a brother might, she told herself; not because Blister Haines had married them when they had gone to him in their hurry to solve a difficulty. Not for that reason at all, but because from the first ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... the business problem with which he came daily in contact as closely as he could with the little experience which had as yet come to him. What man of affairs does not recall how intangible was that turning-point, in his own early business career, before which he felt hopelessly submerged in that sea of infinite detail, vainly struggling to gauge its currents and to escape its undertow; after which he found himself advancing with steady strides, short at first, ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... that these creatures (and certain queer skeletons have been found in the "Asiatic Bowl") with a mental superdevelopment, but a vacuum in place of that intangible something we call a soul, mated forcibly with the Tibetans, thereby strengthening their physical structure to almost the human normal, adapting themselves to earthly speech and habits, and in some strange manner intensifying even further ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan
... discovery of all—the daguerreotype. If any man had come to Napoleon to tell him that a building or a figure is at all times and in all places represented by an image in the atmosphere, that every existing object has a spectral intangible double which may become visible, the Emperor would have sent his informant to Charenton for a lunatic, just as Richelieu before his day sent that Norman martyr, Salomon de Caux, to the Bicetre for announcing his immense triumph, the idea of navigation by steam. Yet ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... did not end with Kingsley's time, and these garments, well made, and sold at a rate inconceivably low, are saturated with horrible emanations of every sort, and to the buyer who stops to think must carry an atmosphere that ends any satisfaction in the cheapness. Setting aside this phase as an intangible and, in part, sentimental ground for complaint, the fact that the cheapness depends also upon the number of hours given by the worker—whose day is never less than fourteen, and often eighteen, hours—should be sufficient to ban the whole trade. Even for this longest day there is no uniformity ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... which I think I shall be able, hereafter, to explain; but it is not to be reduced to line and rule—not to be measured by angles or described by compasses—not to be chipped out by the geologist, or equated by the mathematician. It is intangible, incalculable—a thing to be felt, not understood—to be loved, not comprehended—a music of the eyes, a melody of the heart, whose truth is known only ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... and often a shade. In these words, the breath and the shadow are the sensuous perceptions transferred to represent the immaterial object of our thought. Why the former was chosen, I have already explained; and for the latter, that it is man's intangible image, his constant companion, and is of a nature akin to darkness, earth, and night, are sufficiently ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... English: the idioms and errors were dropping away; they had not utterly departed, however, but came crowding back in moments of excitement. At other times she clothed Miss Smith's clear-cut, correct speech in softer Southern accents. She was drifting away from him in some intangible way to an upper world of dress and language and deportment, and the new thought ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... young lady in; but Constance declared that though he sat beside her and took care of her at breakfast he had on one of his intangible fits which drove her to the last ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... have work—lots of it," said Jack, ruefully. He shifted his weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky. The Eternal Painter was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... gathered from nations as old as Phoenicia and Egypt and as modern as Switzerland, held the Romanys of the world in awe, for his fame had travelled where he could not follow. To Fleda in her earliest days he had been like one inspired, and as she now stood facing the intangible Thing, she recalled an exorcism which the Sage had recited to her, when he had sufficiently startled her senses by tales of the Between World. This exorcism was, as he had told her, more powerful than that which the Christian exorcists ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... all is! And when shall I be able to put my hand on this intangible person, who is now blockaded in Paris and now chased ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... History, churches, factories on it, slipping out of its cocoon at last—its little, old, faded, tied-down cocoon, and sailing upon the air—sailing with him, sailing with the churches, with the factories, and with the schools, with History, through the Invisible, through the Intangible—out to the Sun.... ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... said on the subject, and as they rode along in silence, each was thinking of the curious web of emotions that was moulding their lives and making definite objects grow from intangible impulses. He was hardly conscious yet what a motive force in his plans Liddy was destined to be; and she was filled with a new and sweet consciousness of a woman's power to shape a man's plans in life. When her home was reached, and after he had ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... indoors and write, while there was yet so much to see and hear and feel in the sun-steeped ways of the wonderful Japanese city. Still, even could I revive all the lost sensations of those first experiences, I doubt if I could express and fix them in words. The first charm of Japan is intangible and volatile ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... detected a change of tone, and thereafter took flight whenever she heard his step at the kitchen door. So Monday forenoon passed; Caleb brought water for her tubs and put out her clothes-line, but they had hardly spoken. The intangible monster of a misunderstanding had crept between them. But when at noon he asked as usual, though without looking at her, "Goin' to Sudleigh with the butter to-day?" Amanda had reached the limit of her endurance. It seemed to her that she could no longer bear ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... of her face. He wondered whimsically if he had locked it in with the ruby, and once more he was conscious that something intangible floated between them. But she looked at him squarely with ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... and trembled. He was not outside; he was stifling in the dark room. The light had gone entirely, and he was struggling to free himself from an intangible enemy or friend; a thing that had, unknown to himself, evolved during those isolated years among the pines, and was ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below himself, and is, more ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... An illusion creating illusions, a mockery, a dream, a shadow, a vanity, a vexation of spirit! The fault, the sin, was in himself, in his rebellious thought, in his untamed memory. Though mobile as water, intangible as vapor, Thought, nevertheless, may be tamed by the Will, may be harnessed to the chariot of Wisdom—must be!—that happiness be found. And he recited the blessed verses of the "Book of the Way of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... one another mistrustfully, like two creatures taken in a snare. They both felt as if they had been trapped by something vast and intangible. Reddin was dazed. For the first time in his life he had felt passion instead of mere lust. The same ideas that had striven within him on his way here ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... moment that no one had ever seen or handled—his self-consciousness, his intelligence, his will, his affections, his moral sense: with these he was a person; without them, he is a corpse. If, then, it is these unseen, intangible qualities, and not flesh and bones, muscle and "nerve structure," that constitute human personality, is it not rather childish to argue that, unless God possesses a body of some sort, the Divine Personality is a contradiction in terms? If we can ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... immense nosegay of living flowers, above which gleamed bare white shoulders, hair studded with diamonds, drops of water on the brunettes, glistening reflections on the blondes, and the same intoxicating perfume, the same confused, pleasant buzzing, made by waves of heat and intangible wings, that caresses all the flowers in the garden in summer. At times a little laugh, ascending in that luminous atmosphere, a quicker breath, made plumes and curls tremble, and attracted attention to a lovely profile. Such was the ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... legislation assigned to it. The only semblance of responsibility attaching to the committee is found in the party affiliation of the majority of its members with the majority in the House. But ineffectual and intangible as this is, it is rendered even more so by the fact that the opposition party is also represented on each committee. This allows the dominant party to escape responsibility, since it can claim that its failure to satisfy the popular ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith
... crammed nor blocked About by body: there's in things a void— Which to have known will serve thee many a turn, Nor will not leave thee wandering in doubt, Forever searching in the sum of all, And losing faith in these pronouncements mine. There's place intangible, a void and room. For were it not, things could in nowise move; Since body's property to block and check Would work on all and at an times the same. Thus naught could evermore push forth and go, Since naught elsewhere would yield a starting place. But now through oceans, lands, and ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... dream into a history of fact. But it came so home to me—I saw it all so clear in a moment, as it were; and, besides, who shall say what proportion of fact, past, present, or to come, may lie in the imagination? What is imagination? Perhaps it is the shadow of the intangible truth, perhaps it is ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... south and southwestward of Mount Edgecumbe. Impenetrable woods lined the mountains to the very shore. Great trunks of uprooted trees swept past the ship continually. Even as the clouds cleared, leaving vast forests and mountain torrents and snowy peaks visible, a hazy film of intangible gloom seemed to settle over ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... overwhelming rush, will call into being memories the tenderest, the deepest, the saddest? It may be a worthless little book, a withered flower ghastly in its brown grave clothes, a cheap, tawdry trinket; it may be something as intangible as a few bars of a hackneyed song ground out on a wheezy, asthmatic hand organ. But just so surely as one has lived—and therefore loved—one knows the inherent power to sting and wound in things the most pitiably commonplace. De Musset speaks ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... to learn that Barbara had left town. Her meetings with Blizzard had been horribly on his mind and conscience. He had dreaded some vague calamity—some intangible ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... of heaven she had never realised Agatha Verrall. She used to say that she had never seen anything in Agatha, which amounted, as he once told her, to not seeing Agatha at all. Still less could she have compassed any vision of the tie—the extraordinary, intangible, immaterial tie that ...
— The Flaw in the Crystal • May Sinclair
... she had to admit it—she did not want to go. The attraction that held her was as yet too intangible to be definitely analyzed, but she could not deny its existence. She did not love the man—oh, surely she did not love him—for she did not want to marry him. She brought her feelings to that touchstone ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... a theatrical man, has drawn the long bow in his effort to impress us," said Patsy. "I've been thinking over some of the pictures I've seen recently and I can't imagine a moral, however intangible or illusive, in connection with any of them. But perhaps I wasn't observant enough. The next time I go to a picture show I shall study ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Out West • Edith Van Dyne
... everything. Differing from many tribes, who adore material things, the Pawnees simply regarded certain localities as sacred—they became so only because they were blessed by the Divine presence. Ti-ra-wa was not personified; he was as intangible as the God of the Christian. The sacred nature of the Pawnee deity extended to all animal nature —the fish that swim in the rivers, the birds that fly in the air, and all the beasts which roam over the prairie were believed by the Pawnee to possess intelligence, knowledge, and power ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... one vast cafe. Conversation in France was at its zenith. There were less eloquence and rhetoric than in '89. With the exception of Rousseau, there was no orator to cite. The intangible flow of wit was as spontaneous as possible. For this sparkling outburst there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part to the auspicious revolution of the times, to the great event which created new customs, and even modified human ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... impregnated with iodine. It emits a most disagreeable odour and exhales a gas which affects the mucous membrane, causing in some individuals sneezing and inflammation of the eyes. One amateur fisherman of considerable experience and by no means susceptible to intangible irritations, and not to be diverted from his sport by trifles, has frequently been compelled to move from a favourite ground by a stream of the scum drifting to his anchored boat. The fumes gave intense smartness to the eyes, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... if he should say that the intangible part is the priceless part—the life, the beauty, the very essence of the whole matter—isn't it strange that we women are slower than men to see that— tell him I saw it, saw it and confessed it when for his sake I was slipping away from him by stealth ...
— Strong Hearts • George W. Cable
... of the night called to me, although as I stepped out upon the terrace I realized with a sort of shock that the gathering dusk held a menace, so that I found myself questioning the shadows and doubting the rustle of every leaf. Something invisible, intangible yet potent, brooded over Cray's Folly. I began to think more kindly of the disappearance of Val Beverley during the afternoon. Doubtless she, too, had been touched by this spirit of unrest and in solitude had ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... creatures inhabiting it. But from the moment he had invented the first musical instrument, the drum, he had created something outside of nature, a voice that to himself and to all other living creatures was intangible, an idol that spoke when it was touched, something that he could call into life, something that shared the supernatural in common with the elements. A God had come to live with man, and thus was unfolded the first leaf in that noble tree of life which we ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... link were wanting to connect the two kinds of expulsion, it would be furnished by such a practice as that of sending the evils away in a litter or a boat. For here, on the one hand, the evils are invisible and intangible; and, on the other hand, there is a visible and tangible vehicle to convey them away. And a scapegoat is nothing more than ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... countryman; not fit to be read, far less complimented, by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. You will happily never have cause to understand the despair with which a writer like myself considers (say) the park scene in Lady Barberina. Every touch surprises me by its intangible precision; and the effect when done, as light as syllabub, as distinct as a picture, fills me with envy. Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine; but when we come to speak of performance, I recognise myself, compared with you, to ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... he asked the question, and Ladue received the question as stolidly as an Indian. Yet for a swift instant they looked into each other's eyes, and in that instant an intangible something seemed to flash out from all the body and spirit of Joe Ladue. And it seemed to Daylight that he had caught this flash, sensed a secret something in the knowledge and plans behind ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... stream sings to him of Mount Abora and of the old heroes of the elder days. If the Egyptologist or the archaeologist could revive within him one-hundredth part of the elusive romance, the delicate gaiety, the subtle humour, the intangible tenderness, the unspeakable goodness, of much that is to be found in his province, one would ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... motion for Independence passed by the Continental Congress on the second day of July, 1776, when the people of the rebelling British colonies in America, by action of their representatives, assumed a free and independent position. But a motion is intangible. It is an act, of which the announcement is the visible result. "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind" prompted the Congress on July 4, 1776, to "declare the causes" which impelled it to separation. This date is accepted in the popular ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... Puritans because they wished to purify the Church of England from what seemed to them great abuses; and the purpose of these men in emigrating to America was to lay the foundations of a state built upon their religious principles. These people came for an intangible something—liberty of conscience, a fuller life of the spirit—which has never commanded a price on any stock exchange in the world. ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... a great peace and kindliness pervaded her spirit and softened her manner toward them both. Her marriage had been a great disappointment, composed of a thousand small disappointments, but she was surprised to find that some intangible and elementary emotion was about to make this ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... enough to pay its hard money for is that which can be seen or eaten or worn. But there never was a greater mistake. While men will haggle to the penny over the price of hay, or fight for a cent more to the bushel of oats, they will turn out their very pockets for strange, intangible joys, hopes, thoughts, or for a moment of peace in a feverish world the ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... genuinely shocked. What a tangle he had fallen upon! Once again there seemed to confront him a colossal Juggernaut, a moving, crushing, intangible thing, beyond ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... instinct of preservation? For if it be said that the former creations are only the creations of our imagination, without objective value, may it not equally be said of the latter that they are only the creations of our senses? Who can assert that there is not an invisible and intangible world, perceived by the inward sense that lives in the service ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... beast, is of so weird a character as to produce a sensation of awe, akin to fear. The shadows that enwrapped them as they came beneath the buildings, and the fitful gleams of moonlight that fell upon them when streets were crossed, seemed not lights and shadows at all, but strange, intangible things. And when at length they reached the outer limit of the village, and the distant woods were seen by the moon's rays, our travellers felt as if they had been wandering in a graveyard, where the tombs were houses, and they wished they were in the swamp again, where such uncanny fancies ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... separated with my rival from the party in the feminine refectory, even for the short space of a meal-time; for the all-day suffering of presence with an unconscious trampler on my heart-strings; and in circumstances where all the triumphs were his own, were more than my intangible hold upon hope could well enable me to bear. I was happiest, therefore, when I was out of the presence of her to be near whom was all for which my life was worth having; and when we sat down at the long and bare table, with the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... in intelligence and efficiency, but in an intangible something referred to as "personality". If your acquaintance is applying for a certain position, and has named you as one of his references, you will be asked by the appointing officer to tell what ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... unnamed, untouched by either of them; they passed it by, she in her shame and he in his delicacy, with eyes averted from it and from each other. It was as if the horror had crept out through some invisible, intangible doorway of confession; unseen, unapproached, it remained their secret and the source of their mutual pity. Meanwhile she no longer avoided him; on the contrary, she showed an unmistakable liking for his society. She would come while he was sketching and sit beside ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... There was no one. The land, the beauty, the horror had faded. No longer on the heights, she was in a trivial room in Harlem. She was awake. She was absolutely alone. None the less something that was nothing, something invisible, inaudible, intangible, imperceptible, something emanating from the depths where events crouch, prepared to pounce, had touched her. She knew it, she felt it. Her impulse was to scream, to rush away. But from what? It was all imaginary. Common-sense, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... appeal was then made to him because of recent foolish statements by members of Mr. Seymour's family, which Dickens thus contradicted: "It is with great unwillingness that I notice some intangible and incoherent assertions which have been made, professedly on behalf of Mr. Seymour, to the effect that he had some share in the invention of this book, or of anything in it, not faithfully described in the foregoing paragraph. With the moderation that is due equally to my respect ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... away, and other delicate experiments undertaken—all of these marvels we have grown more or less accustomed to, by reason of the ease and certainty with which they are performed. But the human mind; that is a different matter. Here is something which, intangible in itself, seems incapable of dissection or of objective experimentation, in the ordinary sense of the word. Yet that is what present-day normal and abnormal psychology has been enabled to do! Shakespeare's adage: "Who can minister to a mind diseased?" can now be answered by saying: ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... capacity for carrying to practical success the ideal which he preached. But to assume that he must accordingly be adjudged a failure is to ignore the significance of the ideals to which he awakened the world. Much there was that was unattainable and intangible, but its value to mankind in the development of international ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... He looked at Jan from his cot, and watched the boy silently as he undressed and went to bed; and in the morning the whole incident passed from his mind. The intangible holds but little fascination for the simple folk who live under the Arctic Circle. Their struggle is with life, their joys are in its achievement, in their constant struggle to keep life running strong and red within them. Such an existence ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... command, he told how he had thought of the unknown tribes beyond the Alleghanies, living in the gloom of paganism and perishing in darkness, till an intangible sympathy inclined him toward them,—till, as it seemed to him, their great desire for light had entered into and possessed him, drawing him toward them by a mysterious and irresistible attraction. ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... woman has this element of mystery to puzzle the ordinary observer, that the difference between frankness and duplicity, the genius for intrigue and the genius of the heart, is there inscrutable. A man gifted with the penetrating eye can read the intangible shade of difference produced by a more or less curved line, a more or less deep dimple, a more or less prominent feature. The appreciation of these indications lies entirely in the domain of intuition; this alone can lead to the discovery of what everyone is interested ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... domestic architecture from ducal palace to humble fisherman's dwelling on an obscure "back street" canal, in Basra there abounds a great deal of rickety rubbish that never had any interest in itself and which depends for its effect on the flattering gilding of the sun and the intangible glamour of Eastern twilight. In fact Basra might be described from an architectural point of view as a great heap of insanitary and ill-built rubbish which can look collectively extraordinarily picturesque. I have seen bits on Ashar Creek (as for instance ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... intellectualized form of tender feeling. It demands a certain equality and a certain similarity in tastes, though some friendships are noted for the dissimilarity of the friends. Friendship lives on reciprocal benefits, tangible or intangible, though sentimentalists may take exception to this. Primary in it is the good opinion of the friends and interest in one another; we cannot be friends with those who think we are foolish or mean or bad. We ALLOW a friend to say that ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... this self-centred spirit was, at least in early life, impressionable and open to the influence of others. His friendship with Hurrell Froude and Keble affected his opinions considerably: and still more potent was the pervading intangible influence of Oxford—the academic atmosphere. It cannot indeed be said that the University was at this time in a healthy condition. Mark Pattison has described with caustic contempt the intellectual lethargy of the place, and the miserable quality of the lectures. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... invincible prowess, despite the vast joy of old Bannister at the chances of the Championship, some intangible shadow hovered over the campus. It brooded over the training-table, the shower-rooms after scrimmage, on Bannister Field during practice; as yet, no one had dared to give it form, by voicing his thought, but though no youth dared admit it, something was ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries, but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object, and which have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly seen and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and aesthetic charm which surrounds woman, that living ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... For what a man has, he may be dependent on others; what he is, rests with him alone. What he obtains in life is but acquisition; what he attains, is growth. Happiness is the soul's joy in the possession of the intangible. Absolute, perfect, continuous happiness in life, is impossible for the human. It would mean the consummation of attainments, the individual consciousness of a perfectly fulfilled destiny. Happiness is paradoxic because it may coexist with trial, sorrow and poverty. It is the gladness of ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... many knotty suits at law, had solved many hard problems dealing with human nature—and had found human nature for the most part rarely glad or grateful—but I have never owned or even fed a dog. A strange new feeling came in my throat now. Suddenly I swallowed some invisible intangible thing. ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... one of his worst attacks of the "Horrors"—the "Screaming Horrors." He raged like a madman, a prey to some indefinable, intangible fear; clinging to his "little horse as if for safety and protection." {64a} He had not recovered from the prostrating effects of that night of tragedy when he was called upon to fight Anselo Herne, "the Flaming Tinman," who somehow or other seemed to be part of the bargain he had made ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... not changed in the slightest detail. The crystal sphere still softly glowed, with intangible shadows flitting across its surface; the adept still sat cross-legged staring into its depths; opposite him, the cobra, its hood distended, swayed ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... This idea of some intangible force being exerted, may seem reasonless. Yet, my instinct warns me, that it is not so. In these things, reason seems to me less ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... her lashes. What could she do with this man? Nothing affected him. He seemed to have crossed some intangible barrier and to stand closer to her than any other man had ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... hysterical, or possibly a love-sick girl. They told him that because a thing is a mystery it is not necessarily a folly, though mysteries are for the most part dealt in by fools. They suggested that there may be many things and forces above us and around us, invisible as an electric current, intangible as light, yet existent and capable of manifestation under ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... are passed those beloved existences which are lost to us here. And then came the happy thought that, though they seem so remote and inaccessible, the Saviour is near at once to them and to those who are left below, and that in communion with Him there may be a point of contact, intangible, it is true, but none the less real. Edwin, as he languidly wondered what his quiet cousin was thinking about, did not know that there was a distance immeasurable between ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... coming to see that education must enable the individual to meet the real problems of actual experience as they are confronted in the day's life. Nor can the help rendered be indefinite, intangible, or in any degree uncertain. It must definitely adjust one to his place, and cause him to grow in it, accomplishing the most for himself and for society; it must add to the largeness of his personal life, and at the same time increase his ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... symbol unless there were some real bond, some existent principle possessed in common. Art is communicative, but not surely a communication of nothing. It communicates something which is not the less real because it is intangible and mysterious. If it inexplicably affords us—as it does—an experience which some persons describe as transcendent, then that quality in it, which we call the "sublime" or the "beautiful," has at least to this extent a definite ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... accord the travelers gazed curiously at Zane's silent companion. In the dim background of the glow cast by the fire, he stood a gigantic figure, dark, quiet, and yet with something intangible ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... the crystalline March morning, the memory of the Winter sorrow still lay. The bare, brown earth was not wholly hidden by the mantle of sleet and snow, yet there was some intangible Easter close at hand. Miss Evelina felt it, ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... of some wordless, intangible reason, that only lovers know, which made Diana seem more beautiful, more pure, her touch more sacred, and Enoch stronger, finer, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... was passing the chapel where such a meeting was being held. I had been there with my mother, as a boy, and while the meetings were "slow," they were pervaded with a true devotional spirit and a something real, though to me intangible ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... fingers broke the only match he had, as he attempted to strike it on the step, and, holding his pipe before him, he sat staring into space. He had a hunted sense of wanting to avoid forever all human contact; an intangible shame burned within him, drying up the tender emotions which so recently had ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... arose. It was something that pervaded the room, not a pulsing but a presence, a sort of snapping intangible intelligence that reached beyond the audible and sheared ...
— We're Friends, Now • Henry Hasse
... finally, she knows that I have had a mistress.—In heaven's name why should she be anything but what she is in her manner to me!—Of course she despises me. So that the only thing I could possibly allure her by would be that intangible something which Nina and Suzette and even Coralie—have inferred that I possess—"It"!!—. And how would that translate itself to a mind like Alathea's?—It might mean nothing to her—It probably would not. The only times I have ever seen any feeling at all in her for me were ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... in any unusual expenditures, and as for speculation—nothing could induce me to buy a share of stock—or even a bond (gilt-edged or otherwise), for I owned a prejudice, my father's prejudice, against all forms of intangible wealth. Evidences of wealth did not appeal to me. I wanted the real thing, I wanted the earth. Nothing but land gave me the needed sense ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... and spiritually, and therefore it is to be accounted supernatural, even as two Lovers, their persons are visible, but their Love one to the other is invisible: Humane Bodies are tangible and natural, but Love is invisible, spiritual, intangible and supernatural, comparable to a Magnetick Attraction only; for the invisible Love which is attracted unto it spiritually by the Imagination is, accomplish'd by the desires and fruition. In like manner when the Heaven hath a love ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... some time later. Denny Bolton's long, tanned face was entirely grave—even graver than usual. Just a hint of wistfulness that would never quite leave them showed in his eyes and lurked in the line of his lips—an intangible, fleeting suggestion of expectation that had waited patiently for something that had been very long in the coming. And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore finished the picture and made the illusion complete. ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... this. Light and air and labor—these are the medicines not of the body only, but of the soul. It is not ponderable things alone that are found in gardens, but the great wonder of life, the peace of nature, the influences of sunsets and seasons and of all the intangible things to which we can give no name, not because they are small, but because they are outside the compass of our speech. The God that dwells in gardens is sufficient for all our needs—let the theologians ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... painted, with barns and hay-stacks and wood-piles drawn up in goodly array, stands in its old orchard, and offers the front of a fortress against want and misery. Idle aspect! fortress of vain front! there are intangible foes that no man may conquer! In such a stronghold was born Roger Pierce, the Man with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... sixth hiding-place! This one was intangible. Not one of them dared touch it. It was the very last resource, the nest-egg, the something put by for a rainy day. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... passed quietly; and then, on the fourth, all those curious signs and hints culminated suddenly in something extraordinarily grim. Yet, everything had been so subtle and intangible, and, indeed, so was the affair itself, that only those who had actually come in touch with the invading fear, seemed really capable of comprehending the terror of the thing. The men, for the most part, began to say the ship was unlucky, and, of course, ...
— The Ghost Pirates • William Hope Hodgson
... the adversary, Rapid Dominance will apply a variety of approaches and techniques to achieve the necessary level of Shock and Awe at the appropriate strategic and military leverage points. This means that psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure, will have to be achieved. It is in this broader and deeper strategic application that ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... were, for all their gray and savage glint, for their owner was struggling with an intangible suggestion of the familiarity of the face and figure of the ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... upon her guardian, and Richard Lambert's upon her. Both these young people who had carved their own Fate in the very rock which now had shattered their lives, seemed to be searching for something vague, unavowed and mysterious which instinct told them was there, but which was so elusive, so intangible that the soul of each recoiled, even whilst it tried ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science has pushed back the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... agreements for delivery of unsown harvests changed hands ten times in the hour, and bills on Rome, scrawled over with endorsements, outsped currency as well as outwitted the revenue men. No tax-farmer's slave could keep track of the flow of intangible wealth when the bills for a million sesterces passed to and fro like cards in an Egyptian game. Men richer than the fabled Croesus carried all their wealth in leather wallets in the form of mortgages on gangs of slaves, certificates of ownership of cargoes, ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... isolated episodes now and then. Mastery of chess will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life is cooeperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I suppose business is more often like a game than is life—your gain is often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... been broken in upon so frequently by his attempts to write poetry. His poems were love poems, inspired by Ruth, but they were never completed. Not in a day could he learn to chant in noble verse. Rhyme and metre and structure were serious enough in themselves, but there was, over and beyond them, an intangible and evasive something that he caught in all great poetry, but which he could not catch and imprison in his own. It was the elusive spirit of poetry itself that he sensed and sought after but could not capture. It seemed a glow to him, a warm ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... which they have undertaken. When they have destroyed the Press, they have yet to destroy Paris. When Paris is fallen, there remains France. Let France be annihilated, there still remains the human spirit—a thing intangible as the light, inaccessible ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... you is on a quest fur a father or a mother, only you have got to be worthy of that there quest, she says. The first time you meet the right one you are drawed jest like the witch hazel. That is the Intangible Something working on you, she says. Martha had learnt a lot about that. The book that had fell in the crick was like that. She ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... this book there will often be mention of wisdom and destiny, of happiness, justice, and love. There may seem to be some measure of irony in thus calling forth an intangible happiness where so much real sorrow prevails; a justice that may well be ideal in the bosom of an injustice, alas! only too material; a love that eludes the grasp in the midst of palpable hatred and callousness. The moment may seem but ill-chosen for leisurely search, in ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... gleam of bare shoulders, of hair sown with diamonds that looked like drops of water on the dark women, glittering reflections on the fair, and the same heady perfume, the same confused and gentle hum, compact of vibrant warmth and intangible wings, which, in summer, caresses a garden-bed through all its flowering time. Now and then a little laugh, rising into this luminous atmosphere, a quicker inspiration in the air, which would cause aigrettes and curls to tremble, a handsome profile to stand out suddenly. Such ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... variety in struggles with storms. After the hurricane, the shoal; after the wind, the rock. First the intangible, then the immovable, to ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... could find not one. The only thing was to let her talk freely, to encourage her by a gentle friendly interest, such as a girl friend might have shown, and to give her the relief of expression for these vague troubles and perplexities which, when uttered, seemed intangible and entirely inexplicable to her. Not once did she so much as imply any reproach to her husband, and it was plain that she felt unconscious of any ground for complaint. She alluded to him frequently and always most kindly, ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... full time and patience to pick out all her difficulties, removing scruples at troubling him, by declaring that it was good for his own purpose to unwind every tangle even if he did not use every thread. It was wonderful how many puzzles were absolutely intangible, not even tangled threads, but a sort of nebulous matter that dispersed itself on investigation. And after all, unwilling as she would have been to own it, a woman's tone of thought is commonly moulded by the masculine intellect, which, under one form or another, becomes the master of her soul. ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Enthusiasm alone will undertake to grapple with them, but enthusiasm will be rewarded. In place of the truthful summary of the earlier editions, we have now the truth itself—the truth in all its subtle gradations, all its long-drawn-out suspensions, all its intangible and irremediable obscurities: it is the difference between a clear-cut drawing in black-and-white and a finished painting in oils. Probably Miss Berry's edition will still be preferred by the ordinary ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... advocate of the Single Tax a candidate whose private character was generally respected, even by those who most hated his economic teachings. The mere thought that such a Radical should be proposed for Mayor scared, not merely the Big Interests, but the owners of real estate and intangible property. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... vaguely realizing it. Intangible, but rational enemies were stealing white girls of Bermuda. Invaders from another planet? We had thought it might be that. Certainly it was nothing ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... centuries of awful nightmare struggling—in which he was bound hand-and-foot and doomed to failure and torture from the outset, the sport, plaything, and victim of a fearful, intangible Horror—this would be sheer amusement and recreation. What could mere man do to him, much less mere boy! Why, the most awful torture-chamber of the Holy Inquisition of old was a pleasant recreation-room compared with any place where the ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... intangible, the second too narrow. The rude savage does not philosophize on phenomena; the enlightened student sees in them but interacting forces: yet both may be profoundly religious. Nor can morality be accepted as a criterion of religions. The bloody scenes in the Mexican ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... the breezes, and to lift A perfume as a pearl before his eyes— Intangible delight! A time drew on When from these twilight musings on his hopes He woke, and found the morning of his love Blasted, and all its rays shorn suddenly. For Reuben, too, had turned his eye on Grace, And she with favoring face the suit had met, Known in the village; ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... he is one of the most pleasant visionaries in existence; his spirit soars aloft from every-day matters, and delights in shadowy mysteries; a matter-of-fact is a gorgon to him; he abhors the palpable, and doats upon the occult and intangible; he loves to speculate on the doings of those in the dogstar, to discuss on immortal essences, to dispute with the disbeliever on gnomes—a paradox will be the darling of his bosom for a month, and a good chimera be his bedfellow by night and theme by day for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... will suffer in its connection with politics. In the midst of grossest pro-slavery action, they are full of anti-slavery sentiment. They love the cause, but, on the whole, think it too good for this world. They would keep it sublimated, aloft, out of vulgar reach or use altogether, intangible as Magellan's clouds. Everybody will join us in denouncing slavery, in the abstract; not a faithless priest nor politician will oppose us; abandon action, and forsooth we can have an abolition millennium; the wolf shall lie down ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... subjects who have been to several other hypnotists without success, and I have had some of my unsuccessful subjects hypnotized by other hypnotists. How and why does it happen? I believe that some of the reasons are so intangible that it would be impossible to explain all of them with ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... the spiritual appearance rather than the material aspect of a book, however, that draws the book-lover to it. To the true bibliophile there is an intangible something about an old book which it is impossible to describe. That this feeling is closely akin to the impressive influence of antiquity there can be no doubt; for you may prove it by taking your book-lover ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... poet, and shaking hands with feline amiability. "I cannot think of another example of such rapid success," continued Finot, looking from des Lupeaulx to Lucien. "There are two sorts of success in Paris: there is a fortune in solid cash, which any one can amass, and there is the intangible fortune of connections, position, or a footing in certain circles inaccessible for certain persons, however rich they may be. ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... in a dream, sometimes imagining the meeting of husband and wife, sometimes trying to fancy Isabelle with her lover. As was inevitable, the older woman seemed to lose something charming and intangible in this confession of definite weakness. To be adored by any man merely adds to her glory, but the instant she concedes him an inch, the Beauty throws down her halo, the whole affair becomes mundane and ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... bearing on all the relations and conditions of life. The connexion between religious faith and political practice is, in truth, far closer than is generally thought. Public opinion has not yet ripened into a knowledge that religious error is the intangible but real substratum of all political injustice. Though the 'Schoolmaster' has done much, there still remain among us, many honest and energetic assertors of 'the rights of man,' who have to learn that a people in the fetters of superstition cannot, secure political freedom. These reformers ...
— Superstition Unveiled • Charles Southwell
... "It's intangible, Julie. It has been weighed and measured by nearly all the great philosophers, but I don't think any two of them have ever agreed ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... long as the evidence against him was vague and intangible, it was very hard to disprove. But, in his anxiety, the criminal has drawn the net so closely that one cut will ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... efficient when it comes to tending hotbeds, giving the exact quantity of water necessary to quench the thirst of seedlings without producing dropsy, and the consequent "damping off" which, when it suddenly appears, seems as intangible and makes one feel as helpless as trying to check a backing horse by helpless force of bit. A frame for Margaret carnations, early asters, and experiments in seedling Dahlias and chrysanthemums ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... whether objects themselves are intended, or the forms, positions, qualities, and motions of other objects which are suggested, and signs for moral and intellectual ideas, founded on analogies, are common all over the world as well as among deaf-mutes. Concepts of the intangible and invisible are only learned through percepts of tangible and visible objects, whether finally expressed to the eye or to the ear, in terms of ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... this now. There was a craftier brain and a stronger hand at work than the Wolf's had ever been! Who was it? He shook his head. He did not know. He had gone far into the innermost circles of the underworld—and he did not know. He sensed a power there; and in a dozen different, intangible ways, still an intuition more than anything else, he had sensed this "some one," this power, creeping, fumbling, feeling its implacable way through the dark, as ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... have not proceeded so far without starting objections. To meet that which is most grave, what shall I say when it is alleged that there is no order such as I have assumed in life; or, if there be, that it is insufficiently known, too intangible and complex, too various in different races and ages, to be made the subject of such an exposition as obtains of natural order? Were this assertion true, yet there would be good reason to retain our illusion; for the mind delights in order, and will invent it. The mind ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... M. Blanc does not doubt that production will go on exactly as one would wish; he does not conceive it possible that any one can raise even a single difficulty in the way of what he calls his SYSTEM. And, in fact, what objection can be offered to a conception so radically null, so intangible as that of M. Blanc? The most curious part of his book is in the select collection which he has made of objections proposed by certain incredulous persons, which he answers, as may be imagined, triumphantly. These critics had not seen that, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile. Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation—with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag. Anthony ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald |
