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Narrowness   Listen
noun
Narrowness  n.  The condition or quality of being narrow.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Narrowness" Quotes from Famous Books



... until the following year, having visited in the meantime Germany, Switzerland, and France, and spent the winter in Paris. This year among new scenes and surroundings seems to have brought home to Fredrika, upon the resumption of her old life in the country, its narrowness and its isolation. She was entirely shut off from all desired activity; her illusions vanished one by one. "I was conscious," she says in her short autobiography, "of being born with powerful wings, but I was conscious of their being clipped;" and she fancied that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... "barbarian terminologies," at the "jargon" of those "who see the world only through the wrong end of the glass"; at the exaggerated importance which they attribute to insignificant details, the narrowness of classifications, and the chaos of systems; all that incoherent, remote, and inaccessible science, which he, on the contrary, strives ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... a half paddling we reached the Fura, which I should call a creek; it is not out of the mangrove-region. The bed is set in high, steep banks submerged during the rains; and the narrowness of the mouth, compared with the upper part, made it run, after the late showers, into the Ancobra like a mill-race. In fact, the paddlers were compelled to track in order to make headway. After ten minutes (200 yards) we reached a landing-place, ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron

... sacrificed his personal pride for money. He would have done almost anything to get that money for Imogene Chandler. But it was useless to try to persuade the widow that she was wrong. Back of her own narrowness was Reedy Jenkins. This was Reedy's move; he was using the widow's vanity and personal greed for his own ends; and his ends were the destruction of Rogeen and the ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby

... required of him. The devoted son was the heir; the father did not disparage his worth, nor deny his deserts. His displeasure over the rejoicing incident to the return of his wayward brother was an exhibition of illiberality and narrowness; but of the two brothers the elder was the more faithful, whatever his minor defects may have been. The particular point emphasized in the Lord's lesson, however, had to do with ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... and one of functional character. Under deep general anesthesia, however, it is impossible to differentiate between the normal reflex and a spasmodic condition, since both are abolished. Many cases of intermittent esophageal stenosis supposed to be spasmodic are due to organic narrowness of lumen plus lodgement of food, obstructive in itself and in the esophagitis resulting from its presence. The organic narrowing, congenital or pathologic, is readily ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson

... Octavian Methodism was spared extravagances of this sort, it is true, but it paid a price for the immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their official and ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... hostilities, but that another had preceded him in the attack. He, in the first place, disapproved of the whole course of the government, for forty years, in regard to its disposition of the public lands; and then, turning northward and eastward, and fancying he had found a cause for alleged narrowness and niggardliness in the "accursed policy of the tariff", to which he represented the people of New England as wedded, he went on for a full hour with remarks, the whole scope of which was to exhibit the results of this policy, in feelings and ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster

... L. anserifera, I have made some remarks on the diagnostic characters of this species. In the thinness of the valves,—form of the carina, with the rim connecting the prongs being not, or scarcely, reflexed,—and in the shortness and narrowness of the peduncle, there is some approach to L. australis, and thence to L. fascicularis. In the form of the maxillae,—in one specimen having the mandible on one side bearing only four teeth,—and in the frequent absence of filamentary appendages, there ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... Naked nuda. Name nomi. Name, Christian baptonomo. Namely nome. Namesake samnomulo. Nankeen nankeno. Nap (doze) dormeti. Nape nuko. Napkin busxtuko. Narcissus narciso. Narcotic narkotiko. Narrate rakonti. Narrative rakonto. Narrow mallargxa. Narrowly mallargxe. Narrowness mallargxeco. Nasal naza. Nasty malagrabla. Natation nagxarto. Nation nacio. National nacia. Nationality nacieco. Native landano, enlandulo. Native enlanda. Native-land patrujo. Nativity naskigxo. Natural (music) naturo. Natural natura. Naturalism naturalismo. Naturalist ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... mile wide, and lies five or six miles, nearly E. N. E., from the largest of Murray's Islands; it would consequently be more direct to pass through it than to follow the Investigator's track round the north-eastern reefs; but from the narrowness of the opening and the many green spots where the depth is unknown to me, I dare not recommend it to a ship, though very practicable for small vessels in fine weather. The dry bank on the south side of the opening will probably be ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... Nazarenes nor during my days have ever journeyed to a Christian country, nor did it ever come into my mind to kill thee. But this dyer was my comrade and neighbour in the city of Alexandria where life was straitened upon us; therefore we departed thence, to seek our fortunes, by reason of the narrowness of our means at home, after we had recited the Opening Chapter of the Koran together, pledging ourselves that he who got work should feed him who lacked work; and there befel me with him such and such things." Then he went on to relate to the King all that had betided ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton

... briskly as they could, but on the rough moorland path it was impossible to keep the pace at four miles an hour. They were going uphill, and, unless they went in single file, one of them, owing to the narrowness of the track, was obliged to keep stepping into the heather. At the top of the crest they dipped down again into a high, narrow valley between two fells. It was swampy here, and in places there were quite wide pieces of water to jump across. The path, which ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... Besides her narrowness of vision, Mrs. Inchbald possesses another quality, no less characteristic of her French predecessors, and no less rare among the novelists of England. She is essentially a stylist—a writer whose whole conception of her art is dominated by stylistic ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... the great forest had disappeared. What other figures in our history are quite so remarkable as the itinerant frontier priests, the circuit-riders as they are now called, who lived as Elijah did, whose temper was very much the temper of Elijah, in whose exalted narrowness of devotion, all that was stern, dark, foreboding—the very brood of the forest's innermost heart—had found a voice. Their religion was ecstasy in homespun, a glory of violent singing, the release of a frantic emotion, formless but immeasurable, which at all other times, in ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson

... attack, but they made no impression. Their superior numbers gave them no advantage, on account of the narrowness of the defile. The Greeks stood, each corps at its own assigned station on the line, forming a mass so firm and immovable that the charge of the Persians was arrested on encountering it as by a wall. In fact, ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... which seem rather to charge him with a defect or narrowness of genius, than an excess of it, those seeming defects will be found upon examination to proceed wholly from the nature of the times he lived in. Such are his grosser representations of the gods; and the vicious and imperfect manners of his heroes; but I must here ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... the Carlton without one if she wanted to. Indeed, she had been seen there more than once, making one of a party of six, five of whom were men. She did not care for women as a sex, and said so in the plainest language, denouncing their mentality as still afflicted by a narrowness that smacked of the harem. But for certain women she had a cult, and among these women Lady Sellingworth held a prominent, perhaps the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... his terms; and grew wise by dint of knife and fork. I was always prone to follow the fashions of the company into which I fell; so I threw by my books, and became a man of spirit. As my father made me a tolerable allowance, notwithstanding the narrowness of his income, having an eye always to my great expectations, I was enabled to appear to advantage among my fellow-students. I cultivated all kinds of sports and exercises. I was one of the most expert oarsmen that rowed on the Isis. I boxed and ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... housewife unconsciously tells the story: "Loving all that were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." The godly were the sharers of her own faith, the "wicked and profane" were all those without its pale. Here lay the weakness of Puritanism: its narrowness, its lack of sympathy with the world at large, its indifference to the sufferings of those who had no place in ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... which will, however, be no impediment to the good; for they shall pass with wonderful ease and swiftness, like lightning, or the wind, Mahomet, and his Moslems leading the way; whereas the wicked, what with the slipperiness and extreme narrowness of the path, the entangling of the thorns, and the extinction of the light which directed the former to paradise, will soon miss their footing, and fall down headlong into hell, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... landed with some difficulty, with the intention of marching along the shore (which was a very close and narrow stretch) to the fort, in order to plant the artillery, with which to bombard it. As the governor thought that mischief would ensue because of the narrowness and closeness of the pass, he landed a number of pioneers on the high ground, to open another road, so that the remainder of the army might pass, and the enemy be diverted in several directions. By ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga

... not at all know," continued Goethe, "all that we owe to Luther and the Reformation generally. We are emancipated from the fetters of spiritual narrowness. In consequence of our increasing culture, we have become capable of reverting to the fountain-head, and of comprehending Christianity in its purity. We have again the courage to stand with firm feet upon God's earth, and to realise ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... tell me of, Sir, are indeed curious, both those of Atterbury and the rest; but I cannot flatter myself that I shall be able to contribute to publication. My press, from the narrowness of its extent, and having but one man and a boy, goes very slow; nor have I room or fortune to carry it farther. What I have already in hand, or promised, will take me up a long time. The London Booksellers play me all manner of tricks. If I do not allow them ridiculous profit,(518) ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... be said that there was narrowness and provincialism in this; But when young men are thrown into the world, with all its temptations and snares, it is well that the recollections of home and kindred should survive to hold them in the path of rectitude, and cheer them in their onward and upward course in life. And there ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... other. These may be antiquarians, annalists, naturalists; they may be learned in the law; they may be versed in statistics; they are most useful in their own place; I should shrink from speaking disrespectfully of them; still, there is nothing in such attainments to guarantee the absence of narrowness of mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, or men of information, they have not what specially deserves the name of culture of mind, or fulfils the type of ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... O R be imagined drawn upon the retina. The motion communicated to the point R will then be the sum of all the motions emanating in this direction from the ether particles in the slit. Considering the extreme narrowness of the aperture, we may, without sensible error, regard all points of the wave A P as equally distant from R. No one of the partial waves lags sensibly behind the others: hence, at R, and in its immediate neighbourhood, we have no sensible reduction of the ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... silk which came, Heaven knows where from; but, unfortunately, the silk was not large enough by one-third. After long reflection we thought the library might be turned to some account: the quarto volumes of Shakspeare, thrown with cunning negligence on the pallet, hid the narrowness of the silk, and concealed the sheets from every eye. We managed in this way to contrive a sofa. I may add, that the keeper of the restaurant dedicated to the 'Guardian Angel,' who had no customers except hack-drivers and bricklayers, was caught by our innocent intrigues. On this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... i ham) gives to art that which it needs above all else, time, contemplativeness, freedom. Nowhere can one so unrestrainedly cultivate one's own style of life as there. And withal, artistic freedom of life accommodates itself remarkably well with the political narrowness of the country under Clerical rule. The Bavarian phlegmatic temperament craves constant stimulation; the political strife, in which there is no embittered fanaticism, but which in all good nature sways backward and forward, is an indispensable condition of the national life. Combativeness ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... Charlotte Sound to the Pacific Ocean, over all the islands, so far as any observations extend, except a few thousand acres of grazing lands. Small tracts of arable meadows and garden patches are cultivated by the natives. The narrowness of the island south of Skidegate leaves but little room for an interior, beyond the range of the eye, when standing upon the summits of the highest mountains, after having traversed their shores. The latter are uniformly rock bound, frequently bluffy or precipitous, from ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden

... then, as children use To make themselves a little hiding-place, We would rejoice in narrowness of space, And God should give us nothing ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... things we eat, by various juice control The narrowness or largeness of our soul. Onions will make e'en heirs or widows weep; The tender lettuce brings on ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss

... exhorts Edward the Sixth to plant olives, and is fully persuaded they would prosper in this island. With us, navigable rivers are most part neglected; our streams are not great, I confess, by reason of the narrowness of the island, yet they run smoothly and even, not headlong, swift, or amongst rocks and shelves, as foaming Rhodanus and Loire in France, Tigris in Mesopotamia, violent Durius in Spain, with cataracts and whirlpools, as the Rhine, and Danubius, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... unconscious mysticism in which it is clothed even by such hard heads as Pericles and Thucydides, the mysticism of men in the presence of some fact for which they have no words great enough. Yet for all its intensity it was condemned by its mere narrowness. By the fourth century the average Athenian must have recognized what philosophers had recognized long before, that a religion, to be true, must be universal and not the privilege of a particular people. As soon as the Stoics had proclaimed the ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray

... His liberality in giving his money to persons in distress was extraordinary. Yet there lurked about him a propensity to paultry saving. One day I owned to him that 'I was occasionally troubled with a fit of NARROWNESS.' 'Why, Sir, (said he,) so am I. BUT I DO NOT TELL IT.' He has now and then borrowed a shilling of me; and when I asked for it again, seemed to be rather out of humour. A droll little circumstance once occurred: as if he meant to reprimand ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... chambers, would give his evenings to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them than the neighbourhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Nor is the mere narrowness and crookedness of a road a defect within the meaning of the statutes. Towns and cities are only required to keep highways in suitable repair as they are located by the public authorities, and they have no right to go outside the limits defined by the location in order to make the road more ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter

... imprisoned in the darkness of the wine vaults. Such a discontent and fever had been thrilling in David's veins during these warm spring days, when the whole world had been in a ferment of life, and he had been bottled up in the gloom and narrowness of the little country village; and yielding himself to the emotions that seethed in his breast, he broke all the tender ties of the past and went blindly ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... some that boast that God can save some who have not the knowledge of the person of the mediator Jesus Christ the righteous; as the heathens that have, and still do make a great improvement of the law and light of nature: crying out with disdain against the narrowness, rigidness, censoriousness, and pride of those that think the contrary. Being not ashamed all the while to eclipse, to degrade, to lessen and undervalue the love of Jesus Christ; making of him and his undertakings, to offer himself a ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... all true!" she cried, silently, in her soul, while she stood for a minute with bonnet and shawl still on, looking out from her little window, dreamily, over the dazzle of the snow, even as her half-blinded thought peered out from its own narrowness into the infinite splendor of the promise of God—"I wonder if God will ever make me beautiful! I wonder if I shall ever have a real, great joyfulness, that ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... clay in the products of his genius, the discrepancy of elements, beauty and coarseness, Apollo's cheek, and the satyr's shaggy limbs, are explainable partly from a want of harmony and completeness in himself, and partly from the pressure of the half-barbaric time. His rudeness offends, his narrowness astonishes. But then we must remember that our advantages in these respects do not necessarily arise from our being of a purer and nobler essence. We have these things by inheritance; they have been transmitted to us along a line ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... twelve pounds, was supposed to have approached the inexpressible! Gerald said that she was not to think about prices. She was, however, forced by some instinct to think about prices—she who at home had scorned the narrowness of life in the Square. In the Square she was understood to be quite without commonsense, hopelessly imprudent; yet here, a spring of sagacity seemed to be welling up in her all the time, a continual antidote ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... The rough rock of the floor cut into her knees cruelly, but she disregarded the pain, and went forward. She tested each inch of the way by feeling over the stones with her hands, on either side and along the floor. The narrowness of the passage, which was hardly more than its height, rendered thorough examination easy. She found no lateral openings, nor did the space grow perceptibly larger. It suddenly occurred to her, after having advanced steadily, though very slowly, for five minutes, that she could not turn around. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily

... which it is distressing to think of. Again, in many men of science or literature there may be an animosity arising from almost a personal feeling; it being a matter of party, a point of honour, the excitement of a game, or a satisfaction to the soreness or annoyance occasioned by the acrimony or narrowness of apologists for religion, to prove that Christianity or that Scripture is untrustworthy. Many scientific and literary men, on the other hand, go on, I am confident, in a straightforward impartial way, in their own province and on their own line of thought, without any disturbance from religious ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... houses built of wood, plaster, and some even of stone; but all wear an aspect of poverty, and at the same time of singularity;—the gables projecting so much that they occupy half the width of the street, and render it completely dark, while they increase its narrowness. The inn, too, at which we put up, looked far from inviting when viewed from the outside, so that we had some dark misgivings respecting the quality of the accommodation that awaited us. But in proportion as the outside ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer

... if I ask for them! He will fall down in a fit, I am sure. Already he is vexed at my having cabled and written Lord K. for his (Maxwell's) Brigade of Gurkhas. To him I appear careless of his (Maxwell's) position and of the narrowness of his margin of safety. For the life of him K. can't help putting his Lieutenants into this particular cart. The same old story as the eight small columns in the Western Transvaal: co-equal and each thinking his own beat on the veldt ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton

... the world. But his intellect was less than mediocre. His passion for the bureau, his slavery to routine, his puerile ambition personally to superintend details which could have been a thousand times better administered by subordinates, proclaimed every day the narrowness of his mind. His diligence in reading, writing, and commenting upon despatches may excite admiration only where there has been no opportunity of judging of his labours by personal inspection. Those familiar with the dreary displays of his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... work, as I have said, the definiteness and the limits of the generally accepted theory of the Universe gave the required frame. The very narrowness of this scheme made Dante's design practicable. He had had the experience of a man on earth. He had been lured by false objects of desire from the pursuit of the true good. But Divine Grace, in the form of Beatrice, who had of old on earth led him aright, now intervened and sent to ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... awe which filled their minds as they entered the streets of the mysterious city gradually faded away, and they began to examine everything with great interest. The first thing that struck their attention was the extreme narrowness of the streets. There was only room for one carriage to pass at a time. The sidewalks were a foot higher than the carriage-way. There were crossing-stones that stood high above the pavement. The sidewalks were paved with brick, and ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille

... again, it showeth unto the children of men the straightness of the path, and the narrowness of the gate, by which they should enter, he having set the example ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous

... earth, broadened immeasurably the horizon of men and nations, and transformed the whole order of European thought. Columbus was the greatest educator who ever lived, for he emancipated mankind from the narrowness of its own ignorance, and taught the great lesson that human destiny, like divine mercy, arches over the whole world. If a perspective of four centuries of progress could have floated like a mirage before the eyes of the great discoverer as he was sighting San Salvador, the ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... in the World. The first Step towards Virtue that I have observed in young Men of Condition that have run into Excesses, has been that they had a regard to their Quality and Reputation in the Management of their Vices. Narrowness in their Circumstances has made many Youths, to supply themselves as Debauchees, commence Cheats and Rascals. The Father who allows his Son to his utmost ability avoids this latter Evil, which as to the World is much greater than the former. But the contrary Practice has prevail'd so much ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... his duty, and thus gains the good opinion of his fellow-townsmen and the confidence of his superiors; along with which, he gives himself up to the enjoyment of a pleasant contempt for all that immediately surrounds him. Pedantic /literati/, vain youngsters, every sort of narrowness and conceit, he banters rather than satirizes; and even his banter expresses no contempt. Just in the same way does he jest about his own condition, his misfortune, his life, ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... life. He who can retain this faculty of enjoyment after he has grown up, is indeed the true Idealist. For him things are not merely visible to the eye or audible to the ear, but they are also sensible to the heart, and their narrowness and imperfections are lost in the glad music ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore

... reduced to a smaller area as the morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge, and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every one put to death by the sticks and stones ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... of minute details, the refinements of analysis and introspection, he would miss any leading indications. For with all its variety, it seems to me that one characteristic of recent fiction is its narrowness—narrowness of vision and of treatment. It deals with lives rather than with life. Lacking ideality, it fails of broad perception. We are accustomed to think that with the advent of the genuine novel of society, in the first part of this century, a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... health by the stable-boy. It was expensive, but expense was not a first consideration with the Squire, and when he had once decided a matter, he was not apt to worry himself with regrets. As to Amabel the very narrowness of the white horse's escape from death exalted him at once to the place of first favorite in her tender heart, even over the head (and ears) ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... naively, Those virtues must necessarily be the greatest which are the most useful to others. So the ancients thought patriotism the highest virtue, although it is really a very doubtful one, since narrowness, prejudice, vanity and an enlightened self-interest are main elements in it. Just before the passage I quoted, Aristotle enumerates all the virtues, in order to discuss them singly. They are Justice, Courage, Temperance, Magnificence, Magnanimity, ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer

... oar, and, notwithstanding the breach of the seas and the narrowness of the passage, steered the boat close to the rock at the ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne

... of Confucius springs, first of all, from the narrowness and definiteness of his doctrine. He was no transcendentalist, and never meddled with supramundane things. His teaching was of the earth, earthy; it dealt entirely with the common relations of life, and the Golden Rule he must necessarily have stumbled upon, as the most obvious canon ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... Breton colouring and the Breton spirit, and in perusing them we encounter numerous little allusions to Breton customs or manners and obtain not a few sidelights upon the Breton character, its shrewdness and its goodwill, while we may note as well the narrowness of view and meanness so characteristic of peoples who have been isolated for a long period from contact with ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... laws of the gods, not the wretched laws of the dead. Their doctrine of equality, of fraternity, of humanity; their defence of individualism against public authority; their repudiation of slavery, redeemed democracy from the narrowness, the want of principle and of sympathy, which are its reproach among the Greeks. In practical life they preferred a mixed constitution to a purely popular government. Chrysippus thought it impossible to please both gods and men; and Seneca declared that the people is corrupt ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... is the sole cure for the evils which beset men and nations. The only philosophy of life is that derived from its science. We know right from wrong because the destruction is plain in human experience. Right action brings abundance of life. Wrong action brings narrowness, decay, and degeneration. A man must have principles of life above all questions of the mere opportunities of to-day, but these principles are themselves derived from experience. They belong to the higher opportunism, the consideration of what is best in the long run. The man who ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan

... E ai kakou. Literally, let us eat. While this figure of speech often has a sensual meaning, it does not necessarily imply grossness. Hawaiian literalness and narrowness of vocabulary is not to be strained to the overthrow of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... speculation. There is, indeed, and already before the canal proposal there was, a plan in motion for a railway across the isthmus, which seems far enough from meeting the vast and growing necessities of the case. But be that as it may, with what right does any man in Europe, or America, impute narrowness of spirit, local jealousy, or selfishness, to England, when he calls to mind what sacrifices she is at this moment making for those very oriental interests which give to the ship canal its sole value—the men, the ships, the money spent, or to be spent, upon the Canton war, and then in ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... believe that it will be found to be so; and that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his home ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... but one which is felt in all true emanations of the conscientious spirit of devotion. Fra Angelico had a special gift for expressing in his artistic creations is own spiritual life; the very qualities for which he stood, his virtues and his errors,—purity, unquestioning faith in the miraculous, narrowness of creed, and gentle and adoring humility,—all these elements are seen to completeness in his decorative pictures. Perhaps this is because he really lived up to his principles. One of his favourite sayings was "He who occupies himself with the things of Christ, must ever dwell ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... down for us the great principle, as against all narrowness and all externalism, and all so-called ecclesiasticism, that to be joined to Jesus Christ is the one condition which brings a man into the blessed unity of the Church. Now it seems to me that, however they may be to be lamented on other grounds, and they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... cheerfully have gone to China, had the sloop been bound thither, came back to his bunk on the first night after a wandering stroll through the lower part of the city. It is quite possible that he would have done the same, viewing the narrowness of his purse, upon the second night, had he not encountered at noon a gentleman in close conversation with the Captain, whom he immediately recognized—though he had seen him but once before—as Mr. Brindlock. This person met him very kindly, and with a hearty shake ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... surprise. The gunners were cut down, almost before they had time to draw their swords; after which we immediately charged upon the infantry, who, though they received us with an ill-directed fire, were at once thrown into confusion. Meantime the enemy's cavalry had wheeled about as fast as the narrowness of the road would permit them, and came charging down upon us to attempt to recapture the guns; but our infantry, who had now come up, poured in a hot fire, by which a third of their saddles was emptied. Unable to ascertain our numbers, they must have imagined that they were being attacked ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston

... shown by the long letter which he wrote in 1861 to Sir Henry Layard, then Political Under-Secretary of State.[44] It contained a masterly analysis of the character and upbringing of King William, showing how his intellectual narrowness had hampered Liberal Governments, while his professional training in the army had made him a most efficient instrument in promoting the aims of Junker politicians and ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... line to Weymouth. Though its surroundings are pretty, the town itself is an ill-arranged collection of steep and narrow streets, one of which—Cheap Street—deserves notice for its quaintness. The spaciousness of the market-place redeems the narrowness of the streets. With the exception of a little faint-hearted sympathy shown to Monmouth, Frome has never helped to make history. Nowadays it does a brisk trade in woollen cloth, and possesses some large printing-works, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... literary activity was devoted to controversy, he had none of the narrowness or bitter spirit of a controversialist. It is true that his zeal for what he deemed to be truth led him into vehemence of language in dealing with those whom he regarded as its perverters. But this intensity of speech was coupled with the ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... sphere to the progress of the human mind. For these reasons he wrote nothing; but consigned all to the frail and uncertain custody of tradition. And distant posterity has amply avenged itself upon the narrowness of his policy; and the name of Pythagoras, which would otherwise have been ranked with the first luminaries of mankind, and consigned to everlasting gratitude, has in consequence of a few radical and fatal mistakes, been often loaded with obloquy, and the hero who bore it ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... at her figure, noting, as if for the first time, the narrowness at the feet, the large loose waist, and the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... this should be considered also the influence upon our mercantile and naval communication between the Atlantic and the Gulf coasts exercised by the peninsula of Florida, and by the narrowness of the channels separating the latter from the Bahama Banks and from Cuba. The effect of this long and not very broad strip of land upon our maritime interests can be realized best by imagining it wholly removed, ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... Agassiz we are told that the great scientist "could not bear with superficial study: a man should give his whole life to the object he had undertaken to investigate. He felt that desultory, isolated, spasmodic working avails nothing, but curses with narrowness and mediocrity." This is exactly the view of one of our babies, already introduced, the little wise Lulla, who always knows her own mind and sticks to her ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael

... of Castle-lane; which proves that Ulverley went into disuse when Hogg's-moat was erected: it also proves that the lane terminated here, which is about two hundred yards from the turnpike road. The great width of the lane, from the road to Ulverley, and the singular narrowness from thence to Hogg's-moat, is another proof ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... [p.604] The narrowness of the valley of Feiran, which is not more than an hundred paces across, the high mountains on each side, and the thick woods of date-trees, render the heat extremely oppressive, and the unhealthiness of the situation is increased by the badness of the water. The ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... how useful this would be against future perils of the sea. For in the part of the sea which bears towards the monastery of I, there is a very great danger to those who cross, partly because of the vehemence of the currents, and partly because of the narrowness of the sea; so that ships are whirled round and driven in a circle, and thus are often sunk. For it is rightly compared to Scylla and Charybdis; I mean that by its grave and unmitigated dangerousness, ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous

... replica of Leopold II. Where the father was supple and adroit, the son was perversely obstinate or weakly pliable. In place of foresight and tenacity in the pursuit of essentials, Francis was remarkable for a more than Hapsburg narrowness of view, and he lacked the toughness which had not seldom repaired the blunders of that House. Those counsellors swayed him most who appealed to his family pride, or satisfied his other dominant feelings, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose

... Americans who go abroad ninety-nine return with what they have lost in narrowness of experience completely offset by what they have gained in pretentious affectation. So far from being improved in any way are they that their well-wishers are inclined to think it would have been far better had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... sometimes be repelled by a certain narrowness in the critical estimate of modern sculptors; though of all arts sculpture demands and justifies the most liberal eclecticism. Thus, a broad line of demarcation has been arbitrarily drawn between high finish and prolific ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... and open both their ears to the gospel; if our spirits were not narrow and limited, and so excluded the one half of the gospel, that is, our redemption from sin. There is too much of this, even among the children of God,—a strange narrowness of spirit, which admits not whole and entire truth. It falls out often, that when we think of delivery from death and wrath, we forget in the mean time the end and purpose of that, which is, that we may be freed from sin, and serve the living God without fear. And if at any time we consider, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning

... said Ethelberta. 'There is nowhere I like going to so much as the depths of the city. The absurd narrowness of world-renowned streets is so surprising—so crooked and shady as they are too, and full of the quaint smells of old cupboards and cellars. Walking through one of them reminds me of being at the bottom of some crevasse or gorge, the ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... times, contrasted favorably with the other colonies, nearly all of which required a larger property qualification, and some a religious test for the suffrage. The home of Roger Williams knew nothing of such narrowness, but was an asylum for those who suffered persecution elsewhere. Nevertheless this is now, in many respects, the most conservative ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... into the water, waist deep, he tossed the provisions far out on the island, caught up the guns, and made a frantic leap. He landed on the edge of the sand, and was instantly caught by eager arms, and pulled far up the beach. He turned, to realize with a shudder the narrowness ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon

... justified by power, but cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only because an age had come—the age of a negative, or agnostic philosophy—in which men's minds must needs be limited to the superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater

... complacent handfuls! And when some mariner of God seizes them with loving mighty arms, and bears them in his bark beyond sight of their wonted shores, what wonder that they perceive not the identity of this sky-circled sea with their accustomed handful? Yet, despite egotism and narrowness of brain and every other limitation, the spirit of man will claim its privilege and assert its affinity with all truth; and in such measure as one utters the pure heart of mankind, and states the real relationships of human nature, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... the town, they were struck with the narrowness and straightness of the streets, and at the generally European look of everything; and Mr. Thompson told them that nearly half the population of Buenos Ayres are European. The number of people upon horseback also surprised our young travellers; but horses cost only thirty ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty

... after the ordinary way, measure all others by themselves; but yet, when considered, may help us to enlarge our thoughts towards greater perfections of it, in superior ranks of spirits. For this of Monsieur Pascal was still with the narrowness that human minds are confined to here,—of having great variety of ideas only by succession, not all at once. Whereas the several degrees of angels may probably have larger views; and some of them be endowed with capacities able to retain together, and constantly set before them, ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke

... by the guides, Brigadier-General Moore's column fell in, an hour and a half sooner than it had expected, with the advanced picket of the enemy, who were thus put on their guard. At the moment when they were discovered, the troops, in consequence of the narrowness of the road, were marching in single file, and to halt them was impossible. In this state of things their leader resolved not to give his opponents time to recollect themselves, but to fall on them with his single division. The spirit of the soldiers fully justified the gallant ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis

... carry thyself and all with thee, by thy narrowness of spirit, to a port from which, when it is once ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper

... upon it. Each is a lighthouse, more or less lofty, and more or less illumined by the glory that burns within; yet their purest rays are only "broken lights." The glory itself is infinite: it is only through human narrowness and imperfection that it appears narrow and imperfect. The lighthouse is good in its place: it beckons home, with its "wheeling arms of dark and bright," many a benighted voyager; but we must remember that it is a structure made with hands, and not confound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... made a combined attack on Walthar, but because of the narrowness of the path they could not come at him with any better success than could one single warrior, and they too were put ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence

... characterizing many of the remains; but as already seen in the discussion of masonry, the latter results were attained by the patient industry of many hands, although laboring with but little of the spirit of cooperation. The narrowness of the largest doors and windows in the ancient pueblos suggests timidity on the part of the ancient builders. The apparently bolder construction of the present day, shown in the prevailing use of horizontal openings, is not due to greater constructive skill, but ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various

... amorous youth of our column would have so enthusiastically led under that spray which accords so sweet a license? The young ones prattled of those impossible joys; but the seniors, less frivolous, were concerned by the increasing narrowness of the gorge, and by the dropping fire that hung on our skirts as we entered it. However, there was but one casualty—a poor fellow of the 17th Regiment had his thigh smashed by a bullet—and we spent the night under the ilex trees without further molestation.... It was Christmas ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... with the exterior prevented them finding it out. Perhaps the projectile was falling through space. Perhaps after rising a short distance it had fallen upon the earth, or even into the Gulf of Mexico, a fall which the narrowness of the Floridian peninsula ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne

... been expected, while the self-forgetfulness of Orcagna has given, on the one hand, an awfulness to his work, and verity, which are wanting in the studied composition of the Sistine, on the other it has admitted a puerility commensurate with the narrowness of the religion he ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... Treves), Spain (Toledo, Leon, Barcelona, Segovia, etc.), and Belgium (Tournay, Antwerp). In England the choir had more commonly a square eastward termination. Secondary transepts occur frequently, and these peculiarities, together with the narrowness and great length of most of the plans, make of the English ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... it pressed upon him, and through him it crushed her. All things that he sought to be and could not be, all things that he would not be and was; all that was hard and unloving in him—his irritability and impatience, his narrowness and bitterness—in all this he showed her that cruel force that was ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... elegancies to which she had been accustomed; she had retrenched even her necessary expenses, and nearly secluded herself from society. Her physician had declared that by exercise only could her existence be prolonged; yet the narrowness of her circumstances obliged her to forego the only means by which it could be obtained. Thus, a prisoner in her own house, she was deprived of every solace but that which could be obtained by the activity of ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson

... instantaneous steering of the bicycle, combined with its narrowness, counteract, to a great extent, the advantage which the tricyclist has of being able to stop so much more quickly, for the bicyclist can "dodge" past a thing for which the rider of the three-wheeler must pull up. In one other respect the bicyclist has an advantage which, though of no real ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various

... women were sitting silently. Near them stood one of the beautiful red baskets for which the Katingans higher up the river are famous. As I proceeded a little further an extremely fine carved casket met my astonished eyes. Judging from its narrowness the deceased, who had been ill for a long time, must have been very thin when she passed away, but the coffin, to which the cover had been fastened with damar, was of excellent proportions and symmetrical in shape. The ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz

... petitioner would turn back to give sixpence or a shilling. And those who did not take bribes, such as the higher officials of the Department of Justice, were haughty, offered two fingers instead of shaking hands, were distinguished by the frigidity and narrowness of their judgments, spent a great deal of time over cards, drank to excess, married heiresses, and undoubtedly had a pernicious corrupting influence on those around them. It was only the girls who had still the fresh fragrance ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... REQUIESCIT IN SPE BEATE RESURRECTIONIS. This manner of burial, although I cannot but foresee it will prove unsatisfactory to sundry my nearest friends and relations, and be apt to be censured by others, as an evidence of my too much parsimony and narrowness of mind, as being altogether unusual, and not according to the mode of these times: yet it is agreeable to the sense of my heart, and I do very much desire my Will may be carefully observed herein, hoping it may become exemplary to some or other: at least however testifying at my death—what I ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... with each other modes of thought and feeling, periods of taste, forms of art and poetry, which the narrowness of men's minds constantly tends to oppose to each other, have a great stimulus for the intellect, and are almost always worth understanding. It is so with this theory of a Renaissance within the middle age, which seeks to establish a continuity between ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... understood how she felt at taking the friendship of the Old Chester people on false pretences—oh, these stupid people! That dull, self- satisfied, commonplace doctor's wife, so secure, so comfortable, in her right to Old Chester friendships! Of course, it was a great thing to be free from the narrowness and prejudice in which Old Chester was absolutely hidebound. But Lloyd might at least have understood that in spite of her freedom the years of delay had sometimes been a little hard for her; that it was cruel ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland

... times when there is a dearth of goods, and especially of capital, complains of a want of money, commits the same error as if he ascribed a scarcity or absence of grain, when it exists, to a too small number of wagons to carry it, or to the narrowness of country highways. The inference may, indeed, be sometimes well-founded, but certainly only by way of exception; and yet it is generally the first which politico-economical quacks think of in practice.(739) Like all tools or instruments, money constitutes ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... essentially practical, orderly, and conservative. No man ever stood at the head of a great revolution whose temper was so anti-revolutionary. In his earlier days the bishops had been forced to rebuke him for the narrowness and intolerance of his churchmanship. When Whitefield began his sermons in the fields, Wesley "could not at first reconcile himself to that strange way." He condemned and fought against the admission of laymen as preachers till he found himself left with none but laymen to preach. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green

... realise—a conception which prevailed for many years after the introduction of compulsory elementary education. For some time now, and especially during the past few years, a counter-reaction has set in against the narrowness of the aims of the preceding period, and like all reactions it tends to go to the opposite extreme, and so to broaden the aims of the Primary School as to be in danger of failing to realise efficiently any one of the ends which it ...
— The Children: Some Educational Problems • Alexander Darroch

... almost completed my first round of parish visits, and the experience has been a revelation to me of the mixture of pathetic narrowness, hardship, and self-denial of the people up here in the mountains. One minute I am all out of patience with their stupidity, and the next I am touched to the heart by their patience with unendurable conditions, and their generosity and kindness to each other. I hope ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... rest; for such a place for bad smells I never was in. It seems all the drains and sewers of the place run into that same salt basin, voiding into it all their impurities, which, not being able to escape into the sea in any considerable quantity, owing to the narrowness of the entrance, there accumulate, filling the whole atmosphere with these same outrageous scents, on which account the town is a famous lodging-house of the plague. The ship in which we embarked was bound for a place in Italy called Naples, where we were ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... that among others. Thence to my brother's, and there took up my wife and Ashwell to the Theatre Royall, being the second day of its being opened. The house is made with extraordinary good contrivance, and yet hath some faults, as the narrowness of the passages in and out of the Pitt, and the distance from the stage to the boxes, which I am confident cannot hear; but for all other things it is well, only, above all, the musique being below, and most of it sounding under the very stage, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... accomplishments, he went to visit his father in the country, who was a plain, rough, honest man, and wise though not learned. The son, who took all opportunities to shew his learning, began to establish a new religion in the family, and to enlarge the narrowness of their country notions; in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced the butler by his table talk, and ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... notice the principle on which he proceeds to defend himself: conscious that love to neighbours is in his heart a very narrow thing, he conducts his argument so as to justify its narrowness. If he can show that his neighbours are limited to a small circle of relatives, with the addition perhaps of some chosen individuals beyond the line of blood, he may yet be able to live on good terms with himself as a keeper of the law; accordingly, in ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... managed nursery, came across him, he was smitten as if by enchantment. His mind dwindled away under the spell from gigantic elevation to dwarfish littleness. Those who had lately been admiring its amplitude and its force were now as much astonished at its strange narrowness and feebleness as the fisherman in the Arabian tale, when he saw the Genie, whose stature had overshadowed the whole sea-coast, and whose might seemed equal to a contest with armies, contract himself to the dimensions of his small prison, and lie there the helpless slave ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... at Court gave my relatives some grounds to hope that I might have the coadjutorship of Paris. At first they found a great deal of difficulty in my uncle's narrowness of spirit, which is always attended with fears and jealousies; but at length they prevailed upon him, and would have then carried our point, if my friends had not given it out, much against my judgment, that it was done by the consent of the Archbishop of Paris, and if they ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz

... attracting and joining forces, knots in the political network—while this was going on more or less happily throughout the rest of Europe, in Italy the ancient classic idea lingered in its simplicity, its narrowness and jealousy, wherever there was any political activity. The history of Southern Italy, indeed, is mainly a foreign one—the history of modern Rome merges in that of the papacy; but Northern Italy has a history of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... him not only reckless but un-self-conscious. Possibly the Dream of Psyche had gone to his head. At any rate, he had been on the very verge of proposing to Claire when the interruption had occurred, and in bed that night, reviewing the affair, he had been appalled at the narrowness of his escape from taking a definite step. Except in the way of business, he was a man who hated definite steps. He never accepted even a dinner invitation without subsequent doubts and remorse. The consequence was that, in the days that followed the Reigelheimer episode, what Lord Wetherby ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... entirely over clay; thenceforward the valley is a flat mass of alluvium, in which the stream swings from one side to the other, and even where it touches higher soil, touches nothing better than the continuation of this clay. In spite, therefore, of the shallowness and narrowness of the upper river there always existed this impediment which an insecure soil would present to the formation of any considerable settlements. The loneliness of the stretch below Kelmscott is due to an original difficulty of this kind, and the one considerable settlement ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... sixteenth century, visited the place, and what he said about the "toyshop of the world." Also how he saw a "brooke," which was doubtless in his time a pretty little river, but which is now a sewery looking stream that tries to atone for its shallowness and narrowness by its thickness. They have likewise told us about the old lords of Bermingham—whose monuments still adorn the parish church—who have died out leaving no successors to bear for their proud title the name of the "best governed ...
— A Tale of One City: The New Birmingham - Papers Reprinted from the "Midland Counties Herald" • Thomas Anderton

... genius arise in sufficient numbers to counteract this tendency, such sex-obsessed masculine artists would be shamed into recognizing the narrowness of their perverted outlook. As it is, what normal women of talent do is simply to copy and imitate, in a diluted form, the sex-distortions of man's narrower vision. Sex-obsessed male artists have seduced the natural intelligence of the most talented women to their own narrow ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... Kept the ship lively combing my roan's mane; thought he would jump into the engine-room. By the way, yesterday, when waiting for his hay coming down the line, his impatience caused him to jump half over the breast-bar, bursting one head rope; an extraordinary feat in view of the narrowness and lowness of his stall. He hung in a nasty position for a minute, and then we got him to struggle back. Another horse died in the night, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... the place has as much room in it as it had before. There is abundant opportunity along the borders for dropping in cannas, dahlias, hollyhocks, asters, geraniums, coleuses, and other brilliant plants. The bushes will soon begin to crowd, to be sure, but a mass is wanted, and the narrowness of the plantations will allow each bush to develop itself laterally to perfection. If the borders become too thick, however, it is an easy matter to remove some of the bushes; but they probably will not. Picture the color and variety and life in that little ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey

... face plate. It will be evident that, by turning the sleeve, F, so that the screw works inward, the jaw and all its appendages will be moved bodily in corresponding direction. But its movement is limited by the arms of the washer, G, which, through the narrowness of the recesses, are allowed only just enough play to compensate for slight changes in the jaw. As the above device is applied to every jaw, it follows that any one of them may be nicely adjusted from the outside, so that all are caused to ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... you standing high, and marking the hills where you will see the next morning and the next, morning after morning, and one morning the dearest person in the world surprising you just before you wake: I thought this a heavenly pleasure. But, observing the narrowness of the tents, it struck me there would be snoring companions. I felt so intensely sensitive, that the very idea of a snore gave me tremours and qualms: it was associated with the sense of fat. Saddlebank had the lid of the pot in his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... before Merkle solved the mysteries of the lock and the heavy portals swung open. In another instant the door had closed noiselessly, and the three were shut off from the street by a barricade of iron grillwork and plate glass. Both Bob and Merkle were weak from the narrowness of their escape, but the way was still barred by another door, through which two elaborate H's worked into French lace ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... nothing to raise her spirits in the confined and scantily furnished chamber that she was to share with Susan. The smallness of the rooms above and below, indeed, and the narrowness of the passage and staircase, struck her beyond her imagination. She soon learned to think with respect of her own little attic at Mansfield Park, in that house reckoned too small for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... succeeded. There had already hovered over several of these anticipatory evenings, his very manifest intention to have very carefully planned "Rules." She felt there lay ahead of them much possibility for divergence of opinion about these "Rules." She foresaw a certain narrowness and hardness. She herself had made her fight against the characteristics of Sir Isaac and—perhaps she was lacking in that aristocratic feeling which comes so naturally to most successful middle-class people in England—she could not believe that what she had found bad and suffocating ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells

... Unconsciously Jean began to compare the two men, and to weigh their types of character. There was nothing to choose between them in honor or in manliness, though the one was a minister of the Evangel and the other a colonel of his Majesty's Horse, but they were different. Pollock, with all his narrowness of faith and extravagance of action, was a saint, and no one could say that of Claverhouse, even though they might admit he was not the devil of the Covenanting imagination. But John Graham was more human: he might not see visions, and there never came into his face that ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... being, seem to us to belong to the singer alone who fanned the first spark within us. We hear her voice and record only what she has sung. It is, however, the inheritance of us weak mortals that, clinging to the clods, we are only too fain to draw down what is above the earth into the miserable narrowness characteristic of things of the earth. Thus it comes to pass that the singer becomes our lover—or even our wife. The spell is broken, and the melody of her nature, which formerly revealed glorious things, is now prostituted to complaints about broken soup-plates or ink-stains ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... risked my life, and said, "If this passage grow any straiter, the raft will hardly pass, and I cannot turn back; so I shall inevitably perish miserably in this place." And I threw myself down upon my face on the raft, by reason of the narrowness of the channel, whilst the stream ceased not to carry me along, knowing not night from day, for the excess of the gloom which encompassed me about and my terror and concern for myself lest I should perish. And in such condition my course continued down the channel which now grew wide ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... been growing more unhappy in his place in creation. By temperament he was of a type the most joyous and self-reliant—those sure signs of health; and discontent now was due to the fact that he had outgrown his place. Parentage—a farm and its tasks—a country neighborhood and its narrowness—what more are these sometimes than a starting-point for a young life; as a flowerpot might serve to sprout an oak, and as the oak would inevitably reach the hour when it would either die or burst out, root and branch, into the whole heavens and the earth; as the shell and yolk ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... management of the present bishop, who is a very exemplary man, these things are being changed. The old Priests of New Mexico were formerly educated in Old Mexico. Their information was very imperfect, and their minds were contracted down to extreme narrowness, from want of observation; hence, they were the means of retarding the natural progress of the people. It cannot be denied but that the Catholic religion has been the pioneer system in the far West, and that, in the hands of good and pure men, it has done ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... narrowness of the valley up to Kammurd and the lofty ranges of precipitous hills by which it is flanked; and the reader will perhaps recollect my noticing two forts on either side of the river a little above Piedb[a]gh. ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem

... extremely surprised to see a slave of so beauteous a form so ignorant of the world. He attributed this to the narrowness of her education, and the little care that had been taken to instruct her in the first rules of civility. He went to her at the window, where, notwithstanding the coldness and indifference with which she had received him, she suffered ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.

... independence have ploughed the sea." He did not care, he declared boldly; he seized every opportunity to tell her that though she had managed to make a Blanco journalist of him, he was no patriot. First of all, the word had no sense for cultured minds, to whom the narrowness of every belief is odious; and secondly, in connection with the everlasting troubles of this unhappy country it was hopelessly besmirched; it had been the cry of dark barbarism, the cloak of lawlessness, of crimes, of rapacity, of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... not; and Lethbury had not escaped the solicitation of such alternatives. His immunity had been purchased at the cost of taking refuge in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of his perceptions; and his world being thus limited, he had given unusual care to its details, compensating himself for the narrowness of his horizon by the minute finish of his foreground. It was a world of fine shadings and the nicest proportions, where impulse seldom set a blundering foot, and the feast of reason was undisturbed by an intemperate flow of soul. ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... that, in proportion as a man gives himself to those instead of studying Truth's wardrobe of forms in nature, so will he decline from the high calling of the poet. George Herbert was too great to be himself much injured by the narrowness of the field whence he gathered his symbols; but his song will be the worse for it in the ears of all but those who, having lost sight of or having never beheld the oneness of the God whose creation exists in virtue ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald

... platforms of that Hall of Science in which very simple and sincere masses of men used to hail with shouts of joy the assurance that they were not immortal. He retains to this day something of the noise and narrowness of that room; as, for instance, when he says that it is contemptible to have a craving for eternal life. This prejudice remains in direct opposition to all his present opinions, which are all to the effect that it is glorious to desire power, ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... of the islands prevents the existence of very large rivers; the largest are in Borneo, the only non-volcanic island in the archipelago which can boast of three navigable rivers each about 400 miles long. Owing to the narrowness of Java and Sumatra, the rivers flowing towards the north-east coasts of these islands are very rapid, and as they are liable to be suddenly swollen by heavy rains, canals have been dug, and others are in course of construction, to ensure a regular outflow ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough

... the palm of the hand directed forward, the forearm and upper arm form an angle which is open outwards—known as the "carrying angle"; it is usually more marked in women in association with the greater breadth of the pelvis and the relative narrowness of the shoulders. When this angle is increased, the attitude is described as one of cubitus valgus. This deformity may be acquired as a result of rickets, but more commonly it is due to fracture of the lateral condyle of the humerus, in which the separated ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... Sunday afternoon, and asked permission to preach to the convicts. It was freely granted. Such wild heresy! Such odd, eccentric ideas! Such flights of oratory! Such fiery brands tossed into the old tabernacles of religious belief! Such blows upon the old batteries of narrowness and impossibility! They had never heard anything like it. Had he preached thus anywhere else he would have been promptly silenced. But a lot of convicts was not an audience likely to be injured by the too free circulating of the doctrine he ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... seriously Mandeville's rigorism, the narrowness with which he defines "virtue," the broadness with which he defines "vice," his failure to recognize any intermediate ground between "virtue" and outright "vice," or any shades or degrees of either, the positiveness with which ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville

... reveals a taste for a greater variety of the works of genius than is displayed by any contemporary, and the absence of "a catholic and many-sided sympathy"[52] is one of the last imputations that should have been brought against him. His criticism has limitations, but not such as are due to a narrowness ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... many as his fist could possibly hold, but when he tried to draw it out the narrowness ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various

... me, is a woman's chief claim to consideration from the neighbours. She who can pile them up nearest to the ceiling becomes the principal personage in the community, and a flat bed is a social disgrace. It is a mystery to me, when I see the narrowness of the bedsteads, how so many people can sleep in them. They are rather narrower than what are known as single beds, yet father and mother and often a baby manage to sleep very well in one, and three or four children in the opposite corner of the room in another. ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim

... this woman stanches the secret wounds in many families. She goes on her way to heaven attended by a train of benefactions. The grandeur of her soul redeems the narrowness of her education and the petty habits of her ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac

... until October, and they were then but inadequately protected, and losses were heavy, both from this cause and from the fact already mentioned—that the Mediterranean is a sea which, by reason of its confined nature, is particularly suited for operations by submarines against trade. Its narrowness at various points, such as the Straits of Gibraltar, the Malta Channel, the Straits of Messina, and the passages to the AEgean cause such convergence of trade as to make it a very simple matter for a submarine to operate with success. Evasion by change of route ...
— The Crisis of the Naval War • John Rushworth Jellicoe

... and to stifle my precious sense of the ridiculous,—of which, of course, you think I haven't a bit. It is, for instance, a constant vexation to me to be poor. It makes me frequently hate rich women; it makes me despise poor ones. I don't know whether you suffer acutely from the narrowness of your own means; but if you do, I dare say you shun rich men. I don't. I like to go into rich people's houses, and to be very polite to the ladies of the house, especially if they are very well-dressed and ignorant and vulgar. All women are like me in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various



Words linked to "Narrowness" :   breadth, pettiness, fineness, restriction, broad-mindedness, margin, thinness, wideness, parochialism, sectarianism, intolerance, denominationalism, narrow, narrow-mindedness, slimness, provincialism, narrow margin, limitation, width



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