"Subtlety" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... all see whether his heart be not wholly Spanish. The lord Cobham, who of his own nature was a good and honourable gentleman, till overtaken by this wretch now finding his conscience heavily burdened with some courses which the subtlety of this traitor had drawn him into, my lords, he could be at no rest with himself, nor quiet in his thoughts, until he was eased of that heavy weight: out of which passion of his mind and discharge of his duty to his prince and his conscience to God, ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden..." I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end. ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... Mottisfont was often indisposed, and even at other times could not honestly hinder an intercourse which gave bright ideas to the child. Dorothy welcomed her new acquaintance with a strange and instinctive readiness that intimated the wonderful subtlety of the threads which bind flesh and ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... subtlety was asked of Miss KYRLE BELLEW as Duval's lover, Berinthia; but she seemed to have learned a little more sincerity and to depend less upon the prettiness of her face and her frocks. Of Miss MIRIAM LEWES as Orange Moll something more was ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 5, 1916 • Various
... in classical learning which had begun in Italy in the fourteenth century had as yet been scarcely felt in Northern Europe, and education was still dominated by the requirements of Philosophy and Theology, which were regarded as the highest branches of knowledge. A very high degree of subtlety in thought and argument had been reached, and in order that the youthful student might be fitted to enter this arena, it was necessary that he should be trained from the outset in its requirements. In the schools, in consequence, little attention was paid to the form in which ...
— Selections from Erasmus - Principally from his Epistles • Erasmus Roterodamus
... George the Fourth as to Mr. Turveydrop, and had not only been known to the King, but had had twenty thousand a year. She wants nobody and nothing but him, as far as the "Him" is concerned: but she does not want him in a cottage. And here the subtlety comes in. She does not in the least mind giving to others what she gives him, provided that they will give her what he cannot give. The possibility of this combination is of course not only shocking to Mrs. Grundy, but deniable ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... with irresistible subtlety and skilful in the art and use of hysteria, had rekindled the embers of infatuation that was never more to be totally quenched. In all likelihood she would give a different explanation of her conduct to ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... that, while the real relics were in Abbot Hildoin's hands at St. Medardus, the Shrine at Seligenstadt contained nothing but a little dust. Though greatly annoyed by this "execrable rumour, spread everywhere by the subtlety of the devil," Eginhard had doubtless comforted himself by his supposed knowledge of its falsity, and he only now discovered how considerable a foundation there was for the scandal. There was nothing ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... manner and aspect appeared to denote that he was in a continual revery; and that he imagined himself in a court of law; brow-beating a witness, interrogating an idiot, or detailing cases and precedents, to shew the subtlety with which he could mislead and confound his hearers. A split-hair distinction without a difference gave him rapture; and whenever it happened to puzzle, which was but too often, he raised his left shoulder and gave a hem of congratulation to himself: denoting his conviction that he was indisputably ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... if the knowledge and acumen of prejudged scientific opponents, and the subtlety of orthodox special pleaders, have yet exerted their full force in mystifying the real issues of the great controversy which has been set afoot, and whose end is hardly likely to be seen by this generation; ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the extreme subjectivity of the wrong, injury, and crime committed by the press, causes the decision and sentence to be equally subjective. The laws are not only indefinite, but the press can, by the skill and subtlety of its expressions, evade them, or criticise the judgment of the court as wholly arbitrary. Furthermore, if the utterance of the press is treated as an offensive deed, one may retort that it is not a deed at all, but only an opinion, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... she cried patronizingly, and the bonanza king's sleigh went up the hill with its queer freight: queer, for this was that one of them whose strength was subtlety, whose forte was guile, whose left hand knew not the charitable acts of his right—and neither did the ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... struggle still raged—to see him, almost blind and deaf, looking like so much vitalized parchment rather than a figure of flesh and blood, as night after night he stood up to the agility of a Chamberlain, and the subtlety of a Balfour—each perfected to a fine art—surely never gamer, grander sight ever challenged the imagination of poet, patriot, or historian. It was a testimony to all time of what can come out of the brain and soul of a man, when the body ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... of marine subsistence, and their return from their winter quarters in the November following, when their animosity had not abated: a dark catalogue of murders, including every age, condition, and sex, attested their subtlety and sanguinary spirit. He still declared that no means were neglected to conciliate and reclaim them, consistent with the interests of the colony at large; but their indiscriminate attacks were equally directed against their ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... JAMES DRAKE, a man of genius, and an excellent writer. He resigned an honourable profession, that of medicine, to adopt a very contrary one, that of becoming an author by profession for a party. As a Tory writer, he dared every extremity of the law, while he evaded it by every subtlety of artifice; he sent a masked lady with his MS. to the printer, who was never discovered, and was once saved by a flaw in the indictment from the simple change of an r for a t, or nor for not;—one of those shameful evasions by which the law, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... answer; she had seen a glint in the rider's eyes while he had been looking at Masten which had made her draw a deep breath. She had seen guile in his eyes, and subtlety, and much humor. Stupidity! She wondered how Masten ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to take the author to task because this youthful drama exhibits no remarkable subtlety in its conception of character. It contains no really great living figure who stands squarely upon his feet and lingers in the memory. A certain half-rhetorical impulse carries you along; and the external effectiveness of the situations keeps ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... some distil cloves of gilofre and of spikenard of Spain and of other spices, that be well smelling; and the liquor that goeth out thereof they clepe it balm, and they think that they have balm, and they have none. For the Saracens counterfeit it by subtlety of craft for to deceive the Christian men, as I have seen full many a time; and after them the merchants and the apothecaries counterfeit it eft sones, and then it is less worth, and a great ...
— The Travels of Sir John Mandeville • Author Unknown
... studies, he received his first public instruction. It is related of him, that he used frequently to steal into one of the book-stores, and for hours together sit buried in some rare and erudite volume. And here the original bent of his genius was early developed; subtlety, profoundness, and intense subjectivity of thought were noticed as the distinguishing characteristics of his mind. In a letter from Neumann to Chamisso, bearing date February 11th, 1806, when, of course, he was ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... there was a call for Lord Vargrave, and Lord Vargrave promptly rose. It was one of those dilemmas out of which Lumley was just the man to extricate himself with address. There was so much manly frankness in his manner, there was so much crafty subtlety in his mind! He complained, with proud and honest bitterness, of the construction that had been forced upon his words by the Opposition. "If," he added (and no man knew better the rhetorical effect of the tu quoque form of argument),—"if every sentence uttered by the noble ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... death, we feel that the mournful catastrophe is demanded by the sombre prologue. The book may indeed justify, to some extent, one of the ordinary criticisms upon Balzac, that he showed a special subtlety in describing the sufferings of women. The question as to the general propriety of that criticism is rather difficult for a male critic. I confess to a certain scepticism, founded partly on the general principle that ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... bi-lingual talk there was little room for subtlety. The "beautiful" calmed her, but the second part of the sentence roused ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... on his own career as a man of affairs, Steve had an overpowering respect for what he thought of as the subtlety of men of affairs. With all the other American youths of his generation he had been swept off his feet by the propaganda that then went on and is still going on, and that is meant to create the illusion of greatness in connection with the ownership of ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... pleasure, especially when it is felt by a man intoxicated with love, and full of religious respect for the virgin of his election. This feeling is, from a rational point of view, absurd, and in its tendencies, immoral; but it is delicious in its sacredly voluptuous subtlety. Defloration thus has its powerful fascination in the respect consciously or unconsciously felt for woman's chastity. In marriage, the feeling is yet more complicated: in deflowering his bride, the Christian (that is, any man brought up in a Christian ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... ladies being in love with the three fast men, and resolved to win them back to regular hours and the paths of sobriety by every device of the female heart, dress themselves in men's clothes,—such is the subtlety of the female heart in the bosoms of modern young ladies of fashion,—and follow their lovers about from one haunt of dissipation to another and become themselves exemplarily vicious,—drunkards, gamblers, and the like. The first ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... be light and shadow; but none of these ought to appear to have taken up any part of the artist's attention. They should be so managed as not even to catch that of the spectator. We know well enough, when we analyse a piece, the difficulty and the subtlety with which an artist adjusts the background, drapery, and masses of light; we know that a considerable part of the grace and effect of his picture depends upon them; but this art is so much concealed, even to a judicious eye, that no remains of any of ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... Of Solomon's subtlety in riddle guessing only a few instances have come down to us, all of them connected with riddles put to him by the Queen of Sheba. (37) The story of this queen, of her relation to Solomon, and what induced her to leave her distant home and journey ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... proper to it, by reason of the very darkness of the body, covering and extinguishing its light, and blurring it, just as in the case of a clear mirror: when dense substance is put over it its light is obscured. And therefore God, by the subtlety of his substance, formed this world, and arranged it according to this most beautiful order, in which it is, and equipped the soul with senses, wherein, when it uses them, that which is hidden in it is manifested in act; and the soul, in apprehending sensible things, is like ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... silence. He had expected violence from Dunlavey; long before this he had expected him to show his hand, to attempt some covert and damaging action. And he had been prepared to fight to get the Kicker out. He had not expected subtlety from Dunlavey. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... a subtlety that had evidently not occurred to him, but he was intelligent enough to feel the force of what I said. 'You are right,' he admitted; 'you are not quite a fool in some respects. She shall see how little ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... why, so long as such thrashing had been thorough, which seemed quite evidently and happily the case. He stood now in my eyes, in some way that is too obscure for me to be able to explain to you, saved from some reproach whose subtlety likewise eludes my powers ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... you'd see. To me it's exactly as palpable as the marble of this chimney. Besides, the critic just isn't a plain man: if he were, pray, what would he be doing in his neighbour's garden? You're anything but a plain man yourself, and the very raison d'etre of you all is that you're little demons of subtlety. If my great affair's a secret, that's only because it's a secret in spite of itself—the amazing event has made it one. I not only never took the smallest precaution to do so, but never dreamed of any such accident. If I had I shouldn't in advance ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... contrasts—more especially the last, as extending over the whole field—must be struck with the impossibility of the theory which makes this letter part of the assumed Ignatian forgeries. This hypothesis requires us to believe that a very uncritical age produced a literary fiction, which, for subtlety and naturalness of execution, leaves the most skilful forgeries of the nineteenth century ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... made the others on the stage appear real great persons and not representatives. This was a nicety in acting that none but the most subtle player could so much as conceive." It is conceivable, however, that some of this subtlety existed rather in the fancy of the critic than in the method of the player. This story of Mr. Peer is hardly to be equalled; yet Davies relates of Boheme, the actor, that when, upon his first appearance upon the stage, he played with some "itinerants" ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... butler, whom Manton called Huroki, took our hats and retreated with a certain emanating effluvium of subtlety such as I had known only once before, when the Oriental attendant left me on the occasion of my only visit to ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... Constraint is but a stumbling block; For youthful ardour must prevail. Girls are precocious nowadays, Look at the men with ardent gaze, And longings' an infinity; Trim misses but just in their teens By day and night devise the means To dull with subtlety to sleep The Argus vainly set to keep In safety their virginity. Sighs, smiles, false tears, they'll fain employ An artless lover to decoy. I'll say no more, but leave to you, Friend reader, to pronounce if true What I've asserted when you ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... of the human understanding. The reason of man soared to the loftiest flights that it has ever attained. It cast its searching eye into the most abstruse inquiries which ever tasked the famous intellects of the world. It exhausted all the subjects which dialectical subtlety ever raised. It originated and it carried out the boldest speculations respecting the nature of the soul and its future existence. It established most important psychological truths. It created a method for the solution of the most abstruse questions. It went on, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... smiled up into his face. It was the shrewd smile of one who approves her own subtlety. "But I divide the catch before I make home. Five-sixths are for me. And I set them aside, and Little One Man helps me cache them. The rest is the catch I hand my step-father. He makes careful tab of it, and then, after a rest, I set out with the dogs over the winter trail ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... might expect, a little English-like (it might be in Suffolk on the other side of the Channel, and Beauvais, I recall, has something of the air of old Ipswich), but with a vivacity of movement, and at the same time an aristocratic precision and subtlety one fails to find in the English. When a pretty English girl of the people opens her mouth the charm is often gone. On the contrary, I have often noticed in Normandy that a seemingly commonplace unattractive ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... had considered subtlety, trickery, qualities to be desired, and not incompatible with honor. In a flash he realized the difference, the distinction between trickery and keenness of mind. He had been awed by his uncle's reputation and proud to name him of this family. Now he saw him for what ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... may be doubted if the knowledge and acumen of prejudged scientific opponents, or the subtlety of orthodox special pleaders, have yet exerted their full force in mystifying the real issues of the great controversy which has been set afoot, and whose end is hardly likely to be seen by this generation; so that, at this eleventh hour, and even failing anything new, it may be useful to state ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... been what they might, was ever opposed to Sir William Follett without feeling, as has been already intimated, the necessity of the greatest possible vigilance and research to encounter his boundless resources; his dangerous subtlety and acuteness in detecting flaws, and raising objections; his matchless art in concealing defects in his own case; and building up, with easy grace, a superstructure equally unsubstantial and imposing, and defeating all attempts to assail or overthrow ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... short-lived; for in May of the next year this wife died, and, without wasting time in sentimental repining, he was soon on the search for a new companion. In August he was calling on Madam Winthrop and approached the subject with considerable subtlety: "Spake to her, saying, my loving wife died so soon and suddenly, 'twas hardly convenient for me to think of marrying again; however I came to this resolution, that I would not make my court to any person without first consulting with her."[240b] Two months later he said: "At ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... most dangerous thing in the World for a young Gentleman, sober and virtuous, to venture into Italy, till he was thoroughly grounded in Principle, ... for that nothing was more ordinary, than for such either to be seduc'd, by the Subtlety of the Clergy, to embrace a false Religion, or by the Artifice of a worse Enemy, to give up all Religion, and sink into Scepticism and Deism, or, perhaps, Atheism." A New Family Instructor (London, 1727), ...
— Of Captain Mission • Daniel Defoe
... subtlety, I should even say craftiness, with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in the background, and nothing ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... theme the development of a clever neurotic, Arthur Gaffyn, who stands, in relation to normal life and normal feelings, Just Outside (METHUEN)—a common modern type, perhaps a commoner type in all ages than the obvious records show. The author handles with real subtlety the phases of Arthur's marriage with a woman much older than himself, a marriage in which the hunger of the woman for love was a greater factor than the not deeply stirred passion of the man. Then, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... the fate of the human soul, metaphysical subtlety and imaginative vastness, intellect and fancy, slavish tradition and audacious speculation, besotted ritualism and heaven storming spirituality, are mingled together on a scale of grandeur and intensity wholly ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... other races, will continue to produce fine and generous human types, not wholly Italian. Italians will continue to show a shining example to the world by reason of their gaiety and charm of character, their mental subtlety, which with time will grow less involved and more lucid in expression, by their art of life, even now not much inferior to the French, by their sensitiveness to beauty, by their capacity for enthusiastic appreciation, and by their technical genius ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... loosely plaited, flaxen hair. The new organs, as soon as Maskull had familiarised himself with them, imparted something to her face that was unique and striking. He could not quite define it to himself, but subtlety and inwardness seemed added. The organs did not contradict the love of her eyes or the angelic purity of her features, but nevertheless sounded a deeper note—a note that saved ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... the poor silly girl's embraces, and she turned extremely pale: directing one appealing look, first to Mrs Boffin, and then to Mr Boffin. Both understood her instantly, with a more delicate subtlety than much better educated people, whose perception came less directly from the heart, could have brought ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Government was preparing to picket the Bishops by a process of forcible feeding—a plethora of their own kind be thrust upon them—of their own kind but of a very different persuasion. And now at last the Bishops understood that the doubling of their dioceses was but a device of Machiavellian subtlety for the ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... for her; with how natural an air she had come out and said that only wind was necessary to make the morning perfect; and how naturally and how unconsciously had he responded to that subtly conveyed suggestion, the very subtlety of which made him believe that he had thought of the plan himself. But outwardly Daisy still was mistress of herself; it was from the inside, not the outside, that her control was beginning to give way. She put up the red ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... The subtlety of women, their wonderful perceptive powers, their knowledge, and their intuitive appreciation of men and things, are all shown in the following pages, which may be looked upon as a concentrated essence that has been since worked up into detail by many writers in every quarter ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... insolent fellow, and you have not looked," cried Mazarin, very angrily, "begone and wait my pleasure." Whilst saying these words, with perfectly Italian subtlety he snatched the packet from the hands of Colbert, and ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the subtlety of a true connoisseur, and in describing the sentiments aroused in her by some particular composition, or the entire work of a master, she ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... interests, and especially of interests fostered or directly evoked by principles that have proved their moral virtue. Thus the forms of prudence and justice are supported by the immediate love of these things. And a growing rationality involves an increasing subtlety and delicacy in desires, the enrichment of life through the multiplication of such sources of satisfaction as are consistent with order and liberality. The true democracy is considerate not only of present interests, but also of the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... falling down the chimney, and divers other strange things, many of which he had himself seen. Yet he did believe it might be accounted for in a natural way, especially as the old couple had a wicked, graceless boy living with them, who might be able to do the tricks by his great subtlety and cunning. Sir Thomas said it might be the boy; but that Mr. Josselin, who had travelled much hereabout, had told him that the Indians did practise witchcraft, and that, now they were beaten in war, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Dundasov family. What a charming creature Lizaveta Mkolaevna is even now! She sends you her greetings. Her young husband and three nephews are all in Berlin. I sit up talking till daybreak with the young people and we have almost Athenian evenings, Athenian, I mean, only in their intellectual subtlety and refinement. Everything is in noble style; a great deal of music, Spanish airs, dreams of the regeneration of all humanity, ideas of eternal beauty, of the Sistine Madonna, light interspersed with darkness, but there are spots even on the ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... how Diabolus came upon Mansoul (they being a simple people and innocent) with craft, subtlety, lies, and guile. Item, that he had treacherously slain the right noble and valiant captain, their Captain Resistance, as he stood upon the gate with the rest of the townsmen. Item, how my brave Lord Innocent fell down dead (with grief, ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... about absorbed in the interest and the actuality of this dream. His eyes glowed, he walked with his head up, full of the exquisite pleasure of aristocratic subtlety and grace, tormented with ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... ado, the sculpture is base, and bad. You will merely waste your time and corrupt your taste by looking at it. Nothing is so easy as to imitate drapery in marble. You may cast a piece any day; and carve it with such subtlety that the marble shall be an absolute image of the folds. But that is not ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... troubled the Church and the State during forty eventful years, Francis Atterbury. By such men as these every question in issue between the Papists and the Protestants was debated, sometimes in a popular style which boys and women could comprehend, sometimes with the utmost subtlety of logic, and sometimes with an immense display of learning. The pretensions of the Holy See, the authority of tradition, purgatory, transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the mass, the adoration of the host, the denial of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... respect for this gross tyrant's mentality came to me; it did not temper, it heightened, the hatred I felt for him. But now I recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; have temporized. Could he ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... me with a sullen gravity (as though they could not abide vice by daylight), rudely clothed, for to witness outwardly their contempt of outward things, with books in their hands against glory, whereto they set their names; sophistically speaking against subtlety, and angry with any man in whom they see the foul fault of anger. These men, casting largesses as they go, of definitions, divisions, and distinctions, with a scornful interrogative do soberly ask: Whether it be possible to find any path so ready to lead a man to virtue, as that which ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... The scene between Dorothea and Angelo, in which she recounts her first meeting with him as a "sweet-faced beggar-boy," and the scene in which Angelo brings to Theophilus the basket of fruits and flowers which Dorothea has plucked in Paradise, are inexpressibly beautiful in their exquisite subtlety of imagination and artless elevation of sentiment. It is difficult to understand how a writer capable of such refinements as these should have left no drama which is a part of the classical literature of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... "Astrological Practice of Physick," p. 89, observes that "the way which the witches usually take for to afflict man or beast in this kind is, as I conceive, done by image or model, made in the likeness of that man or beast they intend to work mischief upon, and by the subtlety of the devil made at such hours and times when it shall work most powerfully upon them, by thorn, pin, or needle, pricked into that limb or member of ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... foliage of the poplars by the river mingles with the sober greys of olive-trees and willows, every square inch of this landscape, glittering as it does with light and with colour, the more beautiful for its subtlety and rarity, would make a picture. Out of many such vignettes let us choose one. We are on the shore close by the ruined bridge, the rolling muddy Rhone in front; beyond it, by the towing-path, a tall strong cypress-tree rises beside a little house, and next to it ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... the souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardor of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has been only grotesque. Remember this especially, young man, since you ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Protogenes, which equalled the reality of nature herself; but when I stood before the work of Apelles, the kind which the Greeks call "Monochromatic," verily, I almost worshipped, for the outlines of the figures were drawn with such subtlety of touch, and were so life-like in their precision, that you would have thought their very souls were depicted. Here, an eagle was soaring into the sky bearing the shepherd of Mount Ida to heaven; there, the comely Hylas was struggling to escape from the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... there followed a completely enthralling display. On one side was perfectly trained orthodox, amateur boxing. On the other every clean trick and subterfuge of irreproachable ring-craft. Timing, footwork, feints, guarding and ducking; each subtlety of the art of defence ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... comparisons between McGraw men who had succeeded and other university men who had failed Mr. Pound had so many at his fingers' ends as to be absolutely overwhelming. So before I had seen McGraw I was a McGraw man to the core, and my mentor, with a subtlety astonishing for him, missed no opportunity to increase my devotion. He even taught me the college yell in one of his lighter moments, and I, in turn, taught it to James that it might ring out with more volume from ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... Atman dwells in the heart of every living being, yet It is not perceived by ordinary mortals because of Its subtlety. It cannot be perceived by the senses; a finer spiritual sight is required. The heart must be pure and freed from every unworthy selfish desire; the thought must be indrawn from all external objects; mind and ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... for in the black depth of my soul I had formed a plan of fiendish subtlety. I intended to allow him to win—with extreme labor—eight holes ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... he would have staid long in Park Row," replied Kittredge with a subtlety of meaning ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... with his soul. He must be a psychologist as well, and the success of his diagnosis depends upon his skill to unravel the intricate interrelations between both. That Schnitzler is such a physician admits of no doubt. His perspicacity as diagnostician lends subtlety to his analysis and portrayal of characters. While his professional bias may in a manner limit the range of his vision, his professional knowledge and experience are strong assets of the ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... Lewis drew and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago. Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence, and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical composition like ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... afterwards clearly proved by the works of Leonardo da Vinci, who, giving a beginning to that third manner which we propose to call the modern—besides the force and boldness of his drawing, and the extreme subtlety wherewith he counterfeited all the minutenesses of nature exactly as they are—with good rule, better order, right proportion, perfect drawing, and divine grace, abounding in resources and having a most profound knowledge ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... ASCHE, who dramatised Sir RIDER HAGGARD'S Child of Storm, did not aim at subtlety. But a rather nice question arose over the rival immoralities of Mameena's second and third husbands. Prince Umbuyazi (No. 3) had expressed regret to his old friend and comrade, Saduka (No. 2), for appropriating his wife; but the apology was not received in ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... of literature, of life, and of history. One English writer, indeed, Mr. Havelock Ellis, has realised that 'there are few more delightful books in the world,' and he has analysed them in an essay on Casanova, published in Affirmations, with extreme care and remarkable subtlety. But this essay stands alone, at all events in English, as an attempt to take Casanova seriously, to show him in his relation to his time, and in his relation to human problems. And yet these Memoirs are ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... I know the bondage which men endure, the realty and the delusion in what they think and feel; and the subtlety and strength of those evil forces which color his disposition ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... little disturbed to find that he had unintentionally disclosed so much of the design. The potency of the bright blue eyes that looked up so admiringly into his face at the revelation of the subtlety with which he had seen through a mystery impenetrable to less powerful vision, had betrayed him into unexpected depths ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... somewhere. Perhaps he did. Perhaps he merely congratulated himself that the little scene when he had given the roses to Miss Chaine had been lost by everyone except the children, who were too young and self-engrossed to value its subtlety. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... the process of inflation was not only exceedingly expensive, but uncertain. Two, and even three days, have frequently been wasted in futile attempts to procure a sufficiency of hydrogen to fill a balloon, from which it had great tendency to escape, owing to its extreme subtlety, and its affinity for the surrounding atmosphere. In a balloon sufficiently perfect to retain its contents of coal-gas unaltered, in quantity or amount, for six months, an equal quantity of hydrogen could not be maintained in equal ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... weary soul to the brink. He liked to confirm his faith in the power of sorrow and misery and bitterness ... he liked to triumph over that healing curse of indifference which time accomplished with such subtlety. He took a delight in cutting the heart and soul out of his victims and reducing them to puppets stuffed with sawdust, answering the slightest pressure of his hands. How completely Fred Starratt understood all ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... by the victory of Marengo. But the spirit of revolutionary aggression which had nominally roused Paul to action, had, as the Czar believed, been again hushed by the First Consul. Buonaparte had yielded to his remonstrances in preserving the independence of Naples and Sardinia; and with Italian subtlety he now turned the faith in French moderation which these concessions created in the mind of Paul into a dread of the ambition of England and a jealousy of her sovereignty of the seas. But his efforts would have been in vain had they not fallen in with the general current of Russian policy. From ...
— History of the English People, Volume VIII (of 8) - Modern England, 1760-1815 • John Richard Green
... understand how the inquisitors were able to devise that long array of minutely prying questions; questions whose subtlety and ingenuity and penetration are astonishing until we come to remember Loyseleur's performance and recognize their source. Ah, Bishop of Beauvais, you are now lamenting this cruel iniquity these many years in hell! Yes verily, unless one has come to your help. There is but one among the redeemed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... these with no better defence than stout leather jerkins, led them into a trap. At the battle of Courtrai the knights charged into an unsuspected ditch, and as they fell the burghers with huge clubs beat out such brains as they could find within the helmets. It was subtlety against stupidity, the merchant's shrewdness asserting itself along new lines. King Philip had to create for himself a fresh nobility to replenish his ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... in the air about her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour memorable? What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel the changes of temperature as the warm and cool currents of talk blow by turns? At one moment she is microscopically intellectual, critical, scrupulous in judgment as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... this digression, and speak of the man who occupied the chair, and who was very far from sleeping. He had a broad forehead, bordered with thin white hair, large, mild eyes, a wan face, to which a small, pointed, white beard gave that air of subtlety and finesse noticeable in all the portraits of the period of Louis XIII. His mouth was almost without lips, which Lavater deems an indubitable sign of an evil mind, and it was framed in a pair of slight gray moustaches and a 'royale'—an ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... destinies as if they were so many puppets. And the little drama shows how his accidental interference has created fates stronger and happier than his own—fates lying wholly outside his power. The play suffers from a tendency to exaggerated subtlety which is one of Schnitzler's principal dangers, though it rarely asserts itself to such an extent that the enjoyment of his work ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... the plan of an oblique and artificial attack, which would conceal the real purposes of their antagonists. The Scots and the Scottish commissioners, jealous of the progress of the Independents, were a new obstacle, which, without the utmost art and subtlety, it would be ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... this case he was in danger of losing the fruit of his long scheming and bold deeds. If Fink, by his wealth, covered the baron, Itzig lost the estate. While thus perplexed, he remarked that Anton was watching him, and decided, with the subtlety of a bad conscience, that Anton had heard of his plans, and had some ulterior purpose. Possibly this commission to buy was but a feint. Accordingly, he hastened to promise his co-operation, and to express the hope that he might succeed, at the right time, in discovering the present ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... to grant to begin with that they were neither ignorant nor base men, yet from the beginning of the trial almost every step taken by them appears base, as well as marked, in the midst of all their subtlety and diabolical cunning, by the profoundest ignorance of human nature. The spy of whom we have spoken, L'Oyseleur (bird-snarer, a significant name), was sent, and consented to be sent, to Jeanne in her prison, as a fellow prisoner, ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... of sinless perfection, was the Son of God! His guilelessness shining the more conspicuously amid the artful and malignant subtlety alike of men and devils. Passing by manifold instances in the course of His ministry, look at its manifestation as the hour of His death approached. When, on the night of his apprehension, He confronts the assassin band, in meek majesty He puts the question, ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... delightful hostelry of a god. Golden pillars sustained the roof, arched most curiously in cedar-wood and ivory. The walls were hidden under wrought silver:—all tame and woodland creatures leaping forward to the visitor's gaze. Wonderful indeed was the craftsman, divine or half-divine, who by the subtlety of his art had breathed so wild a soul into the silver! The very pavement was distinct with pictures in goodly stones. In the glow of its precious metal the house is its own daylight, having no need of the sun. Well might it seem a place fashioned ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... 'Romances of the Round Table,' our fabliaux themselves, whencesoever they came,—Germany or Tuscany, England or Brittany, Asia or Greece,—conquered, fascinated, charmed, from one end of Europe to the other, the imaginations of the Middle Ages. The amorous languor and the subtlety of our "courteous poetry" are breathed no less by the madrigals of Shakespeare himself than by Petrarch's sonnets; and after such a long lapse of time we still discover something that comes from us even in the Wagnerian drama, for instance in 'Parsifal' or in 'Tristan and Isolde.' A long time ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... the second and third hour; for it is supposed that the fortunes of cities, as well as those of men, have their certain periods which can be discovered by the position of the stars at their nativities. The quaint subtlety of these speculations may perhaps amuse the reader more than their legendary ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... opprobrious name of fanaticism, the regard which they owed to the great duties of mercy and justice, for the neglect of which (if they should neglect them) they would be answerable at that tribunal, where no prevarication of witnesses could misinform the judge; and where no subtlety of an advocate, miscalling the names of things, putting evil for good and good for ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... of force, directly applied. The strong man disdains subtlety, persuasion, sweeps opposition aside. "Might is right" is his motto; he beats down opposition by fist, by sword, by thundering voice, or look. Men who use this method are little troubled by codes; they follow the primitive line ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... Sketchley's prosaic muse? The wealth of his limited fancy, and his power of resolving it into well-ordered design, and presenting it with strange economy of means, invested these puppets of his with a vividness which is often startling. With greater force and subtlety, if with less refinement and grace, than Leech—though not, like him, the genial sketcher of the genial side of things—he has recorded, in the five or six thousand designs that make up the sum of his contribution, ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... speak that word," Mr. Sabin said. Lady Carey shrugged her shoulders. The subtlety of her smile faded away. Her whole face expressed ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... at him, now unknown to himself, she was conscious of what that last word of Lablache's meant. Everyt'ing meant herself. Lablache—who had neither the good qualities of the white man nor the Indian, but who had the brains of the one and the subtlety of the other, and whose only virtue was that he was a successful trader, though he looked like a mere woodsman, with rings in his ears, gayly decorated buckskin coat and moccasins, and a furtive smile always on his lips! Everyt'ing! ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... studies he learned that his father was dead. His nature was deeply affectionate, and the painful intelligence overwhelmed him for many days. At school he was not distinguished for brilliancy, but his tutors observed that he had solid parts, and much intellectual subtlety. He was not a great favourite among his class-mates generally, because his manners were shy and reserved, and he shrank from, rather than courted, the popularity and leadership which are the darling aims of so many lads ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... cloud into the sky and rained much gold upon the land; and Glaukopis herself gave them to excel the dwellers upon earth in every art of handicraft. For on their roads ran the semblances of beasts and creeping things: whereof they have great glory, for to him that hath knowledge the subtlety that is without deceit[2] is the ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... the original "had, or had not." These last words, as involving a subtlety foreign to our present purpose, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... freedom can only be known to those who have suffered the horrors of restraint. That is a trite enough statement, but when one is describing elemental things there is no room for subtlety. The voyage was a fairly eventless one. We saw very little of Kara, who did not intrude himself upon us, and our main excitement lay in the apprehension that we should be held up by a British destroyer or, that when we reached Gibraltar, we should be searched by the Brit's authorities. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... ticklish business of the dovetailing of two lives accomplished without some small mutual effort? No more could be said than that Carlisle felt, in rare and weak moments, a certain sense of strain. An immaterial subtlety this, properly out of the range of mamma's concrete observations. But papa's heart was tender: did he possibly suspect that his darling might feel herself just ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... upon Philip the Handsome to acknowledge it. On the 5th of December, 1301, he addressed to the king, commencing with the words, "Hearken, most dear son" (Ausculta, carissime fili), a long bull, in which, with circumlocutions and expositions full of obscurity and subtlety, he laid down and affirmed, at bottom, the principle of the final sovereignty of the spiritual power, being of divine origin, over every temporal power, being of human creation. "In spite of the insufficiency of our deserts," said he, "God hath established us above kings and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume II. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... there by accident or by intent? Was it merely kindness or a girl's subtlety? Was it a message couched elusively, a symbol, a hope in ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... and the earthly fiend re-entered his being anew with a subtlety so incorporate, that their two natures were identified, and he became SUSPICION ITSELF. Fruits are thus engrafted on wild stocks. One colour thus becomes the parent of many, when the painter takes a portion of this and of that from his palette ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... my lord," replied she, "by talents of more value than those of music; by a justness of sense more valuable than that which your sages set such a price upon, and which is only a mere subtlety of mind. I wish to establish myself in your heart upon foundations more solid than beauty, or those superficial talents that you have had the goodness to applaud. In short, I wish that love may in you only be a passage to that esteem ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... tried to match his wits against the little lawyer. Petit-Claud made an effort over himself, and gave his acquaintance to understand that he (Petit-Claud) was only an insignificant little country attorney, with no sort of craft nor subtlety. ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... as helping one another lowers one's pride. Such conceptions are already becoming putrid. To the museum with them! Those are foolish and evil prejudices. May the deuce take me, but it requires a European brain and hysterical subtlety to hesitate to accept money from a human being like yourself when you are in need. Why and to what purpose do you think the human herd unites itself into some form of society? Is it mutually to devour and rob one another ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... the Lords of the Council of the Star-Chamber, before whom the accused will be taken; and any judgment now given will have to be confirmed by that high and honourable Court. Of late, the course of justice has been too often baffled and turned aside by the craft and subtlety of certain powerful and audacious offenders. Hence it has been the wish of the King's Highness, in order that the laws may no longer be broken with impunity, that certain preliminary inquiries and investigations should be made on the spot itself, where it is ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... subtlety in the matter. It was clear to him that he had once been devoted to Clare and she to him, it was clear also that that relationship had recently been dimmed. Now that Stephen was gone that early intimacy must be restored and the fact that he was willing on his side to do anything to ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... love you. Give him good working conditions and he will tolerate the service. Put him to the test by short pay or bad conditions and he will hate you. All of this pointed to the love of men and women. I tried to draw him out on this. I do not know what the lack of his mind was, whether of subtlety or imagination. At any rate it was a realm of thought to which his face was a blank, and to which his mind seemed to ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... afraid the cunning and dexterity, the subtlety and tact required, interested him more in the commission than did the benevolence. He called, sent up his card, and composed his countenance for his part, like an actor at ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... - The mail has come upon me like an armed man three days earlier than was expected; and the Lord help me! It is impossible I should answer anybody the way they should be. Your jubilation over CATRIONA did me good, and still more the subtlety and truth of your remark on the starving of the visual sense in that book. 'Tis true, and unless I make the greater effort - and am, as a step to that, convinced of its necessity - it will be more ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guiltless of subtlety," Kenwick declared in his most humorous manner; "I, too, am a plain man. But, if you will pardon the platitude, we all know that there is one beauty of the sun, and another beauty of the moon, and it would be pure affectation ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... skill," answered the other; "for I am not afraid of thee, nor of any of thy servants." The king forthwith loudly bade his servants to seize him, but they answered, "We cannot see any man, although our ears hear him." Then the king and all his princes marvelled at his subtlety; but he said to the king "I will go my way"; so he went forth. And the king went after him; and the princes and servants followed their king until they came to the river-side. Then Alroy took off his mantle and spread it on the face of the water to cross thereon. ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... the memory. And still Meyer loved life's exuberant fullness, and a more finely attuned ear hears through this calm the beat of a heart that felt joy and sorrow deeply. Everywhere there is apparent a love of nature interpreted with all the modern subtlety of feeling. Meyer was a Swiss and his landscape, is that of Switzerland, one might even say that of Zuerich. Nature hardly ever speaks in herself, but only in her human relationship; not the field alone, but the field and the sower (121), the field and the reaper (118); ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... complimentary or superior importance. The student finds no attraction or benefit in studies outside of the programme, and, in this programme he finds only official texts, explained by the bill of fare, one by one, with subtlety, and patched together as well as may be by means of distinctions and interpretations, so as to provide the understood solution in ordinary cases and a plausible solution in disputed cases, in other terms, a ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... most worthy followers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath than movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aristocratic creation Marie Laurencin produces for us, one that makes the eye avid of more experience and the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern painting, this nacreous ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... ingredients in nature. What I do mean is 'the unconscious presupposition of space and time as being that within which nature is set.' This is exactly the sort of presupposition which tinges thought in any reaction against the subtlety of philosophical criticism. My theory of the formation of the scientific doctrine of matter is that first philosophy illegitimately transformed the bare entity, which is simply an abstraction necessary for the method of thought, into the metaphysical substratum of these ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead
... the pound of flesh is forfeited, the bosom of Antonio is bared to the knife—when this brief but brief-less barrister, this skylarking young judge of Belmont steps jauntily forward, with a most preposterous quibble on her lips, and manages by an adroit subtlety to defeat the judgment to which the plaintiff is legally entitled. She awards the flesh, fibres, nerves, adipose matter, in controversy, to Shylock; but declares his life and fortune confiscate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to London, and there was not one person to meet her. Other travelers were being welcomed on all sides by their friends. No one in all London expected her. She doubted if she had one single acquaintance in the whole town. Her mother, foreseeing this very moment, had with a subtlety of malice refrained from so much as sending a telegram to the girl's father; and Sylvia herself, not knowing him, had kept silence too. Since he did not expect her, she thought her better plan was to see ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason
... some time for self-control before answering, she thought her inquiry had deepened his resentment. "Not that I don't think you're right, maybe," she hastened to add, "though"—this wistfully, in a feminine and maternal subtlety of laying the first lines for sapping and mining his position—"I often think about our life, all work and no play, and wonder if we oughtn't to give the children the ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... and shining in his face, people could see far into his head. There was in him a quiet grimness, which would in his moments of displeasure have become surliness, had it not been tempered by honesty of soul, and which was often wrongheadedness because not allied with subtlety. ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... so straight and to the point that Gurdon fairly started. More and more did he begin to appreciate the subtlety and cleverness of his companion. It was impossible to fence the interrogation; it had to be answered, one ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... class which is alone liable to it; and in its serious form it is found only over a small part of the earth. There are many causes which conduce to this partial distribution. In one country manners are not minutely schooled, women being held of secondary account, and men content without subtlety; in another, life is in itself too primitive to devise the artifices of refinement; in a third, the fundamental disunion between the mind and the physical organism is prevented by the kindly hand of nature. For these reasons all the savage world, all the East, and the whole ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... Cardinals in Christendom. They know England, as Rome cannot; and, while I allow myself to be led by the nose by no man living, I would sooner do what they advise than what a Roman Cardinal advises. It is not by subtlety or plotting that the Faith will be commended in this country; but by courageous action; and since God has placed me here in the position that I hold, it is to Him alone that I must answer. You can send that message back to Rome, sir, as soon ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... in conversation, being, in appearance at least, quite unreserved, and open in his attempt to capture the good will of his auditor. However, if there was no covert artifice, there was at all events the native shrewdness of the Swiss peasant to reckon with, and doubtless the subtlety of genius—which will not, or cannot, always reveal itself in full. In his later years, accordingly, though his winning manners and his desire that you should completely display your thought to him might lead ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... world during a calamitous age. Those endowed with extreme benevolence set the world in order; those possessed of extreme maliciousness turn the world into disorder. Purity, intelligence, spirituality and subtlety constitute the vital spirit of right which pervades heaven and earth, and the persons gifted with benevolence are its natural fruit. Malignity and perversity constitute the spirit of evil, which permeates ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... rapidity, has an enormous appetite—a proof of godlike strain, because only the chief in Polynesian economic life has the resources freely to indulge his animal appetite—and phenomenal beauty or prodigious skill, strength, or subtlety in meeting every competitor. His adventures follow the general type of mythical hero tales. Often he journeys to the heavens to seek some gift of his ancestors, the ingenious fancy keeping always before it an objective picture of this heavenly ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... was a Puritan of the old leaven, who visited Oxford shortly before Johnson's period, and who speaks of "a power of gross darkness that may be felt constantly prevailing in that place of wisdom and of subtlety, but not of God . . . In this wicked place the scholars are the rudest, most giddy, and unruly rabble, and most mischievous." But this strange and unfriendly critic was a Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen showed their piety by wrecking chapels and ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... Bourgonef immensely. He seemed to enter completely into the minds of the sorrowing, pleading parents, and the sorrowing, denying lover. He appreciated and expounded their motives with a subtlety and delicacy of perception which surprised and delighted me. It showed the refinement of his moral nature. But, at the same time, it rendered his minor degree of interest in the other episodes of the story, those which had a more direct and ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Turner had strength enough to fell so vigorous a man, even with the capstan bar which we found lying near by. Nor could he have jerked and broken the amberline. Mrs. Johns I eliminated for the same reason, of course. I could imagine her getting the key by subtlety, wheedling the impressionable young sailor into compliance. ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... had called, as he said he would, and from the very first he had made plain in his grave, direct way the objects of his visits. There was no subtlety about Ted, no finesse. He was as frank as ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... health, so they hold that health is accompanied with pleasure. And if any should say that sickness is not really pain, but that it only carries pain along with it, they look upon that as a fetch of subtlety that does not much alter the matter. It is all one, in their opinion, whether it be said that health is in itself a pleasure, or that it begets a pleasure, as fire gives heat, so it be granted that all those ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... he said, turning and speaking with the bluntness of a boy without subtlety of speech. "I never'll speak ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... it, with all due respect to our young friend here," Sir Daniel replied, as he cut a card. "Kingley plays like a man with brain but without subtlety. In a duel between you two, I would back Immelan ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... crooked forefinger the moment she approached the gate, and in another ten seconds the iron clanged behind her, shutting her off from husband and all present hope of succor. The chance of any rescuer entering the palace that night, whether by force or subtlety, was infinitesimal. ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy |
