"Superficial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... thus was the nominal representative of education in the cabinet at a time when educational questions were rapidly becoming of great importance; and his own technical knowledge of this difficult and intricate question being admittedly superficial, a good deal of criticism from time to time resulted. He had however by this time an established position in public life, and a reputation for weight of character, which procured for him universal respect and confidence, and exempted him from bitter attack, even ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... the outward guise of regal office, in his bearing, politeness, address, magnificence, and high-heeled dignity, but he was sensual, ferocious, ignorant, profligate, and superstitious. His greatness was fictitious, his splendor superficial, and his character false. The king was the state, but his mistresses governed. A court thus constituted led the fashions and formed the manners of the people. It stamped the age with that type of character which belongs to the adventurer and devotee. The splendors of the court were maintained at ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... more decided etiquette of royalty, giving his hand to be kissed, and allowing no one, of whatever rank, to be seated in his presence. *40 But this is denied by others. It would not be strange that a vain man like Pizarro, with a superficial, undisciplined mind, when he saw himself thus raised from an humble condition to the highest post in the land, should be somewhat intoxicated by the possession of power, and treat with superciliousness those whom he had once approached with ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... "They are but superficial thinkers who imagine that the organic differences of races can be obliterated by the education of the schools. The qualities of races are perpetuated by descent, and are the result of historical influences reaching far back into the ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... law cannot change their hearts," muttered Faith, at last, "so the cure that it effects must of necessity be superficial. Oh, if only the fear of the Lord could be instilled into their system. If they could only be made to feel that to Him they are accountable!" She spoke with enthusiasm, her ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... subject as it were by intuition, yet wanted patience and perseverance for a thorough examination of all its bearings. "An observation," says the writer of the article on "Attica," in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, "more superficial in itself, and arguing a greater ignorance of the Athenians, can not easily be imagined." Plutarch lived more than three hundred years after the palmy days of the Athenian Demos had passed away. He was a Boeotian by birth, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... suspicion that he had the irritability as well as the dignity of genius. Moreover, the pleasure, if it should occur—for I could scarcely believe it was near at hand—would be so great that I wished to think of it in advance, to feel it there against my breast, not to mix it with satisfactions more superficial and usual. In the little game of new sensations that I was playing with my ingenuous mind I wished to keep my visit to the author of "Beltraffio" as a trump-card. It was three years after the publication of that fascinating work, which ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... consciousness of universal obstinacy and insensibility which regards human nature, apart from such renewal, as possessing but a 'heart of stone'! There are no sentimental illusions about the grim facts of humanity here. Superficial views of sin and rose-tinted fancies about human nature will not admit the truth of the Scripture doctrine of sinfulness, alienation from God. They diagnose the disease superficially, and therefore do not know how to cure it. The Bible can venture to give full weight to the gravity of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... was that he might be going to re-encounter the Well-Beloved that night: after her recent long hiding she meant to reappear and intoxicate him. That liquid sparkle of her eye, that lingual music, that turn of the head, how well he knew it all, despite the many superficial changes, and how instantly he would recognize it under whatever complexion, contour, accent, height, or carriage that it ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... of the worth of the wearer.—Neatness of dress and personal appearance indicates that there is some regard for decency and propriety, some love of order and beauty, some strength of will and purpose inside the garments. If dress is the most superficial aspect of a person, it is at the same time the most obvious one. Our first impression of people is gained from their general appearance, of which dress is one ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... the terms of the intended union, contained in the other articles. This proposal being rejected, some tory members quitted the house; and all the articles were examined and approved without further opposition. The whigs were so eager in the prosecution of this point, that they proceeded in a very superficial manner, and with such precipitation as furnished their enemies with a plausible pretence to affirm, that they had not considered the treaty with the coolness and deliberation which an affair ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Experience thereof, has asserted, That a Mother who understands not Latin before hand, may yet teach it to her Child; which, if she can, it is not to be doubted but that she may do the same of all the rest; for such a Superficial Knowledge as will serve to enter any one in every of the above-named Sciences, is much easier attain'd than the Latin Tongue; and if a Mother have ever so little more Capacity than her Child, she may easily keep before him, in teaching both him and her ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham
... hour, especially for the Mexican women who served it and who could not fail to note its success. The mingling of low voices and laughter, the old, gay, superficial talk, the graciousness of a class which lived for the pleasure of things and to make time pass pleasurably for others—all took Madeline far back into the past. She did not care to return to it, but she saw that it was well she had not wholly cut herself ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... preferred to it. How like the situation of this child is that of every man! What difficulties in the pursuit of his desires! what inanity in the possession of most, and satiety in those which seem more real and substantial! The delights of most men are as childish and as superficial as that of my little girl; a feather or a fiddle are their pursuits and their pleasures through life, even to their ripest years, if such men may be said to attain any ripeness at all. But let us survey those whose understandings are of a more elevated and refined temper; ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... sympathies and attributes, but still left Him the August and awful God of the Genesis, the Father of a Universe though the individual Protector of a fallen sect. Her attention had been less directed to whatever appears, to a superficial gaze, stern and inexorable in the character of the Hebrew God, and which the religion of Christ so beautifully softened and so majestically refined, than to those passages in which His love watched ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... time you'll learn to be polite," Kennon continued imperturbably. "After all, the superficial attributes of good breeding are not too ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. ...
— Up From Slavery: An Autobiography • Booker T. Washington
... however, maintain two propositions, which may perhaps be unfamiliar to some of those who have not as yet given more than a conventional and superficial attention to the Scriptural records, but which will meet with ready assent from all whose studies have been deeper. Fain would I avoid paining even a single reader, but I am convinced that the arresting of infidelity depends ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... weight of years should have taught him better. But then, one could hardly expect the Olympians to lay any measure of such crimes at the door of a grey-eyed, fair-haired angel. And that was what she had appeared to mere superficial observation. It required extreme perspicacity of vision, or great intimacy, to arrive at anything a trifle nearer the truth. He sought in the recesses of his memory for her name. That it had suited her admirably, and ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... the one beside which our adventurers halted, had a superficial area of some twenty or thirty acres; and its perpendicular sides rose nearly two hundred feet above the surrounding prairie. A thin growth of pine-trees covered it; while stunted pinons and cedars hung out ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... his splendid integrity, by his love of truth, his hatred of cant. Even though he has himself misunderstood Christianity, he has done a great deal to bring us back to the fundamental ideals of the Christian religion. He has done a great deal to undermine that superficial and "rose-water" view of Christianity current in official and academic Protestant circles. He has done a great deal to convince us that whatever may be the essence of Christianity, it has nothing in common with that silly and pedantic game which, for half a century, has made Eternal Religion ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... height, and was in fact despotic. This solution, we own, seems to us to be no solution at all. It has long been the fashion, a fashion introduced by Mr. Hume, to describe the English monarchy in the sixteenth century as an absolute monarchy. And such undoubtedly it appears to a superficial observer. Elizabeth, it is true, often spoke to her parliaments in language as haughty and imperious as that which the Great Turk would use to his divan. She punished with great severity members of the House of Commons who, in her opinion, carried the freedom of debate too far. She assumed the power ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the mine had been sunk, water was sold from it at the rate of a shilling per bucket, and at morning and evening the crush was so great that people had to wait perhaps half an hour before they could be served. I recall one occasion when, the need for a sudden superficial ablution having arisen, I ran over to the liquor-shop tent and bought a bottle of ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... Village—just as there are fakers everywhere else. Only, of course, the ardour of new ideas which sincerely animates the Village does lend itself to all manner of poses. And because of this a perfectly earnest movement will attract a number of superficial dilettanti who dabble in it until it is in disrepute. And, vice versa, a crassly artificial fad will, by its novelty and picturesqueness, draw some of the real thinking people. Such inconsistencies and discrepancies are bound to occur in any such mental crucible as Greenwich. And, ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... space here again prevents us from entering into a detail of the experiments by means of which the true solution of this question has been arrived at, and the proper angle determined at which the superficial spiral exercises the greatest amount of propulsive force of which such an engine is capable. These experiments have been chiefly carried on by Mr. Smith, the ingenious and successful adapter of this instrument ...
— A Project for Flying - In Earnest at Last! • Robert Hardley
... opportunity to sew up any laceration which may have occurred in the course of delivery. Slight injuries are not uncommon, especially if the confinement be the first, for the most skillful treatment often fails to prevent them. Since superficial tears are never serious if promptly closed, it is not their occurrence, but the failure to recognize them, or to sew them up when they are recognized, that ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... and the rest, naming them as the first or the beginningless. But they do not know that the universe had already gone through myriads of cycles of Kalpas of formation, existence, destruction, and emptiness. Thus even the most superficial of the Hinayana doctrines far excels the most profound ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... of that country known by the name of Senegal. Apparently, after the fatigues of a long and tedious journey, they have been charmed with the first fresh spot where they could repose. That first impression has all the force of reality to the superficial observer; but if he remain any time, the illusion vanishes, and Senegal appears what it really is—a parched and barren country, destitute of the most necessary vegetables for the nourishment and preservation of the ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... trusted; and I like to feel that the book has made me several gentle and unknown friends, whose company the laws of time and space forbid me to frequent. And more than that, there might be things about the people who liked my book which I should not like; superficial things such as manner or look; I might not even like their opinions on certain points; but now, by writing this book, the best part of me, I think, has made friends with the best part of them. All art depends upon a certain kinship of spirit between the man who produces and ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the so-called Agnostic School, which has the peculiarity of not being a school. The word "agnostic" was given its vogue by Huxley. To superficial people it was quite often used synonymously with "infidel" and "freethinker," both words of reproach. To Huxley it meant simply one who did not know, but ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... character are rarely sustained longer than a few years; for instance, the very valuable Bibliographical Journal, edited by P. Koeppen in 1825-26. The ephemeral race of Annuals, those vehicles of superficial taste and knowledge, early took broad possession of the Russian Parnassus. In the year 1839, eight hundred and eighty different works were published in Russia; of which seventy-three only were translations. The ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... as we have briefly sketched lays an egg on the leaf of some suitable food-plant, and there is hatched from it the well-known crawling larva[1] (fig. 1 b, c, d) called a caterpillar, offering in many superficial features a marked contrast to its parent. Except on the head, whose surface is hard and firm, the caterpillar's cuticle is as a rule thin and flexible, though it may carry a protective armature of closely set hairs, or strong sharp spines. The feelers (fig. ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... his reputation for wisdom in these first months quite as much to his silence as to his speech. His own superficial knowledge of men and things got easily from books, seemed to him—as indeed it was—a poor thing in comparison with the wisdom which some of these quiet, unpretending men had almost unconsciously been gathering through the experience ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... method of raising oneself to the ideas is what Plato termed dialectic—that is to say, the art of discernment. Dialectic differentiates between the fundamental and the superficial, the permanent and the transient, the indestructible and the destructible. This is the supreme philosophic method which contains all the others and to which all the others are reduced. Upon this metaphysic and by the aid of this dialectic, Plato constructed an extremely ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... but what is the use of education if it does not teach us to look on man as man, and judge by a nobler and more real standard than the superficial distinctions of society? ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... rather than the present age; his temper was indolent; his faculties, which were not of the first rate, had been relaxed by the climate, and he was satisfied, like his fellows, with the slight and superficial discharge of an important trust. As soon as my tutor had sounded the insufficiency of his pupil in school-learning, he proposed that we should read every morning from ten to eleven the comedies of Terence. The ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... outwards, so as to pass about one inch inside of the anterior superior spine of the ilium, and then prolonged upwards and inwards, as far as may be rendered necessary by the size of the aneurism or the depth of parts. It must extend through skin and superficial fascia, exposing the tendon of the external oblique, which must then be slit up to the full extent visible. The spermatic cord may then be easily exposed under the edge of the internal oblique, and the forefinger ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell
... system of moral philosophy, which was considered as immediately connected with the doctrines of pneumatology, with the immortality of the human soul, and with the rewards and punishments which, from the justice of the Deity, were to be expected in a life to come: a short and superficial system of ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... successfully opposed); and is especially severe on what he terms his affectation in disclaiming the compliments bestowed on his learning by some of his friends. The expressed estimate of his acquirements and works which so offended Lord Macaulay was that "there is nobody so superficial, that, except a little history, a little poetry, a little painting, and some divinity, he knew nothing; he had always lived in the busy world; had always loved pleasure; played loo till two or three in the morning; haunted auctions—in short, did not know ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... Mr. Churchill, to tell us something about Grayson," said Mr. Goodnight, in a most kindly tone; "not what all the world knows, those superficial facts which the most careless observer may glean, but something intimate and personal; we want you to give us an insight into his character, from which we may judge what he is likely to do or become. You know that he is from the West, the Far West, likely to be afflicted with local and provincial ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... exactly the same circumstances. The entire twelve he denominated categories; and the mode by which he ascertained their number—that there were so many and no more—is of itself so remarkable as to merit notice in the most superficial sketch. But, in fact, this one explanation will put the reader in possession of Kant's system, so far as he could understand it without an express and toilsome study. With this explanation, therefore, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... patience for cutting in confined spaces. When this has been accomplished to satisfaction, a piece of maple without curl or knot must be cut a little thicker than what has been removed, but as to superficial area, fitting to a hair's breadth if ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... inconsistent at the first blush. The intensity and passiveness of the spirit are as natural in their attraction and repulsion as the elements, whose harmony is only patent on the surface. Consistency is superficial, narrow, one-sided. I am both ambitious, therefore, and contented. My ambition is that of the earth, the ever producing and resuscitating earth, doing the will of God, combatting the rasure of time; and my contentment is that of the majestic pines, faring alike in shade and sunshine, in ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... either by the feeling in his heart or the thought in his head. It was a very serious situation, and he had assumed the appropriate manner.... Clara had slept soundly, and her fund of healthy good spirits made it possible for her to regard the whole complication as, in itself, rather superficial. The sun was shining in upon the mirror of her dressing-table, upon her silver brushes, upon the portrait of Julia in a silver frame, and upon the new frock which had come only the day before from the dressmaker. With the sun ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... aspect of Salisbury Plain. On the south and west are those wooded hills that are seen also from the neighbourhood of Fonthill, and though both sides of the valley are made of the same material—the current chalk of Wiltshire—they are very unlike in their superficial scenery. The Wylye is perhaps the most beautiful of Wiltshire rivers, and although it has an important cross-country railway running close to it for the greater part of its length, the villages and hamlets upon the banks are peculiarly ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... saw a small face peering down over the coping of the roof. It was a face that was very frightened, under a superficial covering of soot. It was ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... The superficial view which accounts for the pure monotheism of the Hebrews from their peculiar national character, is sufficiently refuted by their history. Notwithstanding the severe penalties with which the Mosaic code of laws visited idolatrous practices in every form, the ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... House to this ancient problem, and even to his own daring and statesmanlike solution of it. The whole subject, as he thought, had been commonly treated by the superior race in a spirit not only mean and hard, but superficial also; the result being nearly two centuries of mutual suspicion, hatred, and slaughter. At last the time had come for the superior race to put an end to this traditional disaster and disgrace. Instead of tampering with the difficulty by remedies applied merely to ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... explanation would be complex, and is now superfluous. The clergy were, like the majority of their fellows, obsessed by the military system and unable to realise the possibility of a change. In part they were deluded by the catch-words of superficial literature. They had an idea that we were asking England to lower its armament while the rest of the world increased its armament. They muttered that "the time was not ripe," not realising that it was their business to make it ripe. They had been accustomed ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... discipline be obtained which is necessary to the mature development of character. Neglect to cultivate the ability to go down to the root of a subject, to observe it in its relations, and to apply it practically, will inevitably lead to superficial consideration of every subject, and even ignorance of the fact that this is superficial consideration. As a practical result, the person will drift through life rudderless, the sport of circumstance. She will act by impulse ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... longer felt to be the sole "natural" human relation; there the ancient habit of purposeful activity will begin to assert itself in the less conformable individuals against the more recent, relatively superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views which the predatory and the pecuniary culture have contributed to our scheme of life. These habits and views begin to lose their coercive force for the community or the class in question so soon as the habit of mind and the views of life ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... accurately known in a region so remote. The affair with Hamilton had not injured his reputation in communities where such affairs were common and often applauded. The circumstances of the time, to his superficial glance, seemed to be encouraging. A large portion of the country had lately passed under our flag;—many of the inhabitants spoke a foreign language, and retained foreign customs and predilections;—the American ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... shone over Egdon and fired its crimson heather to scarlet. It was the one season of the year, and the one weather of the season, in which the heath was gorgeous. This flowering period represented the second or noontide division in the cycle of those superficial changes which alone were possible here; it followed the green or young-fern period, representing the morn, and preceded the brown period, when the heathbells and ferns would wear the russet tinges of evening; to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... glanced at the past while it peered into the future. What a sinuous underground plot the superficial incidents of this journey covered! To his fellow-travellers it was a straight line; to him it was a complicated and endless labyrinth. How much more he had to think of than they! Only he knew that Pedro Munoz was dead, that Clara Van Diemen was an heiress, that she was in danger of being abandoned ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... which they strike. The surface of the earth is more suddenly heated by the rays of the sun than that of the sea, from its greater density and state of rest; consequently it reflects those rays sooner and with more power: but, owing also to its density, the heat is more superficial than that imbibed by the sea, which becomes more intimately warmed by its transparency and by its motion, continually presenting a fresh surface to the sun. I shall now endeavour to apply these principles. By the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... 1890, in its endeavor to secure the passage of bills for various purposes, has applied to more Legislatures, during the past few years, than has the Suffrage Association. It is indeed a most interesting study to watch the evolution of the so-called women's clubs. Formed at first merely for a superficial literary culture, they widened by degrees into a study of practical matters related to law and economics. From these it was but a step into civics, where they are to-day, struggling to improve municipal, and indirectly national conditions and gradually having revealed to them the narrow limitations ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and I conceive he will be gradually initiated into the largest and truest philosophical views, and will feel nothing but impatience and disgust at the random theories and imposing sophistries and dashing paradoxes, which carry away half-formed and superficial intellects. ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... Leopold II died; and an irritating despatch, which he and Kaunitz had recently sent to Paris, was read out to the Legislative Assembly. Thereafter a rupture was inevitable. Francis II, who now ascended the throne of his father, was a shy, proud, delicate youth of twenty-four years, having only a superficial knowledge of public affairs, scarcely known to the Ministers, and endowed with a narrow pedantic nature which was to be the bane of his people. He lacked alike the sagacity, the foresight, and the suppleness of Leopold. Further, though his inexperience should have inspired him with a dread of war ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... strength to weakness. He wanted to take her in his arms, and dared not even touch her hand. There had been no talk of love between them, and she had kept him at a distance with her air of distinction and superficial refinements. She seemed to spread a silken barrier between them that exasperated and entranced him. Some identity in his sensations puzzled him, and as he looked, with a flash he was in Cardigan Street again, ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... Mayenne, holding the proxies of their brother the Cardinal and those of their uncles, Aumale and Elbeuf, on the one part, and John Baptist Tassis and Commander Moreo, on the other, as representatives of Philip. This transaction, sufficiently well known now to the most superficial student of history, was a profound mystery then, so far as regarded the action of the Spanish king. It was not a secret, however, that the papistical party did not intend that the Bearnese prince ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... are so conspicuously yellow, no doubt this warbler is quite generally confused with the goldfinch; but their distinctions are clear enough to any but the most superficial glance. In the first place, the yellow warbler is a smaller bird than the goldfinch; it has neither black crown, wings, nor tail, and it does have reddish-brown streaks on its breast that are sufficiently obsolete to make the coloring ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... by this cruel enemy to beauty, I am sure you will congratulate me upon a felicity so desirable: but were it to be otherwise, if I were capable of slighting a person, whose principal beauties are much deeper than the skin, I should deserve to be thought the most unworthy and superficial of husbands. ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... Herodotus, however, describes the process of thought as consecrated by custom among the Egyptians. But there are many other practical ways in which the idea of supernatural power is attached to fetiches. Some fetich-stones have a superficial resemblance to other objects, and thus (on the magical system of reasoning) are thought to influence these objects. Others, again, are pointed out as worthy of regard in dreams or by the ghosts of the dead. {230} To ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... plain as the difference in the art of war between the two sides of the battle of Hastings, which indeed is another form of the same thing; for the victory of the Norman knights over the English axemen has more than a fanciful or superficial analogy to the victory of the new literature of chivalry over the older forms of heroic narrative. The history of those two orders of literature, of the earlier Epic kinds, followed by the various types of medieval Romance, is parallel to the general political history of the earlier ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... made but superficial studies in the natural history of the human mind, have been taught to look on religious opinions as the only cause of enthusiastic zeal and sectarian propagation. But there is no doctrine whatever, on which men can warm, that is not capable of the very same effect. The social ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... law without being able to decide on either of the two professions; I had worked for a banker for six months and my services were so unsatisfactory that I was obliged to resign to avoid being discharged. My studies had been varied but superficial; my memory was active but ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... other alleged stigma of Puritanism. Could Virginia maintain her claim to a Cavalier ancestry instead of failing on even a superficial scrutiny, the contrast attempted to be drawn between Puritan and Cavalier is based on a fallacy. When these colonies were established, the distinction was a political one as clearly as the succeeding divisions of Whig and Tory. In ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... were some who held that such opinions should be suppressed by law; that they were, or might become, dangerous to society. Perhaps it was the confessor of his mother who thought of the matter most justly. The aged man smiled, observing how, even for minds by no means superficial, the mere dress it wears alters the look of a familiar thought; with a happy sort of smile, as he added (reflecting that such truth as there was in Sebastian's theory was duly covered by the propositions of his own creed, and quoting Sebastian's favourite pagan wisdom from the lips of Saint ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... all this mass of matter, relating to many persons and episodes with whom and with respect to which they may feel that they are in no way concerned. I quite realize that my action may appear strange and uncalled for to the superficial observer. But I do not hold that view. I, personally, have always felt a desire to read this kind of literature. The Press does not cease to pour forth volumes of memoirs by leading and prominent persons—matter which is all wanted for a true understanding of the history of our times. ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... the trains. It is necessary to bear these considerations in mind, for the idea prevails throughout the world outside Russia that this colossal road was carried through, not only with great haste, but also on a flimsy and superficial system. The bridges are necessarily very numerous, for Siberia is a land of mighty rivers with countless tributaries. All the permanent bridges are of iron. Those which were temporarily made of timber are being in every case reconstructed, and the Great Siberian includes some ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... begun. The delay that may be warranted for the purpose of reconnaissance depends upon the nature of the attack and the necessity for promptness. For example, in a meeting engagement, and sometimes in a holding attack, the reconnaissance may have to be hasty and superficial, whereas in an attack against an enemy carefully prepared for defense there will generally be both time and necessity ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... Westermarck, Grosse, and others have done—with the remarks of travellers regarding the addiction of savages to personal "ornamentation"; but this testimony rests, as we shall see, on the unwarranted assumptions of superficial observers, who, ignorant of the real reasons why the lower races paint, tattoo, and otherwise "adorn" themselves, recklessly inferred that they did it to "make themselves beautiful." The more carefully ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... due most of all to the impression made on our mind and heart by the sacrifice at the cost of which Jesus procured salvation for us. And here the depth or shallowness of our theology will be sure to tell. If our views are superficial either of the difference which salvation has made to ourselves or of what Christ did to constitute Himself the Saviour, the likelihood is that we shall love little. It is the man who knows that he has been forgiven much and saved at a great cost, who loves ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Seymour's, seemed to know Sheen very well, with the exception of Drummond; and those who troubled to think about the matter at all rather wondered what Drummond saw in him. To the superficial observer the two had nothing in common. Drummond was good at games—he was in the first fifteen and the second eleven, and had won the Feather Weights at Aldershot—and seemed to have no interests ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... attempting this task, or any other, besides the great reluctance that I have to being a voluminous author. Though I am by no means the learned man you are so good as to call me in compliment; though, on the contrary, nothing can be more superficial than my knowledge, or more trifling than my reading,—yet, I have so much strained my eyes, that it is often painful to me to read even a newspaper by daylight. In short, Sir, having led a very dissipated life, in all the hurry of the world of pleasure, I scarce ever ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... 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 invention, originality and superficial skill; as if these merits could not be united, or were incompatible with each other,—and that, invariably, works of "outward skill elaborate" are "of inward less exact." A Boston critic denominates Powers "a sublime mechanic," as if there were only physical imitation in his busts, and no expression ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... not seen directly that we were not relations? but I see how it is; I pity you, poor imperfect being with only two eyes and one mouth, and no trunk," answered the fly. "It is natural that thou hast only a superficial knowledge. This little upstart who devours the sugar as if he did not mean to leave any of it for any one else, this little person, who has but a few minutes ago escaped from his shell, yet hanging to a dead rose leaf long since forgotten as it lay ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... a remote origin of the earth, derived from the vast superficial extent, the enormous thickness, and the varied characters of its strata, was added an imposing body of proof depending on its fossil remains. The relative ages of formations having been ascertained, it was shown ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... indifference. An underlying cause of this indifference among those who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, is lack of conviction for sin, want of positive faith in the fundamental truths of the Scriptures, too little and superficial prayer, and lack of personal, soul-saving work. Is the class-meeting becoming extinct? Is the prayer-meeting lifeless? Is the revival spirit decaying? Is family worship formal, or has it ceased? However some may answer these questions, still we believe that the Church has a warm ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... English; and not many British generals at that time spoke much French. Yet he somehow managed to get on, with the aid of interpreters, so that his relations with the British officers were not only cordial, in a superficial social way, but important in their results of deepened understanding on his part and of ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... the blue and red and yellow that may be produced upon a piece of tempered steel; for these colours, though they be very vivid, yet if you break the steel they adorn, they will appear to be but superficial.' He then describes, in phraseology which shows the delight he took in his work, ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... to be only superficial; but, all the same, they were four ugly scratches down the fleshy part of the man's left arm, while over his right shoulder there were three more marks, which had bled pretty freely; and now, as I stood by helpless myself, I listened as he told the attendants how he was slowly journeying, thinking ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... was no other influential literature in the West except the Latin. Greek literature had long ago retired to the East. The traces of Greek upon Anglo-Saxon literature are rare and superficial. Practically the one external influence with which we shall have to reckon is that of Latin literature, and as the points of contact with this literature are numerous, it will be convenient to say something of the Latin literature in a ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... Tollman of this evening was not the same man that he had ever been before. To a superficial eye he was, as usual, sedately quiet, yet there was a new quality in his mood. This was the sort of quiet that might brood at the bottom of an ocean whose surface is being lashed into the destructive turmoil of tempest. Only since Eben Tollman was a madman—not a noisy and raving maniac ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... enclosure, though it is so wide that at a superficial glance the beholder has only a sense of standing on a breezy down, the solitude is rendered yet more solitary by the knowledge that between the benighted sojourner herein and all kindred humanity are those three concentric walls of ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... must generally consist of mere sketches, instead of detailed observations. Hence arises, as I have found to my cost, a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge, by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and private investigators have suffered much hardship and lost many days in opening paths through tangled underbrush, and in crossing rugged mountain ranges in uninhabited regions. The physical obstacles and the necessarily superficial examination consequent thereon may explain the contradictions of detail in different reports. About the middle of the nineteenth century several studies were published, and three scientists who accompanied the American Commission of Inquiry in the ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... says, "visibly not to be." In the second place, I believe that I understand American susceptibilities; and they will not be hurt by any one who shows that he does understand. What the American resents bitterly is the arrogant and superficial criticism of the foreigner who sums up the characteristics and destiny of the nation after a few weeks of observation. Moreover, Americans do not as a rule like whispering or the attempt to come at ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... primitive, arid and brutal.... I am shown a deceived husband killing his wife, a woman poisoning her lover, a son avenging his father, a father slaughtering his children, murdered kings, ravished virgins, imprisoned citizens—in a word all the sublimity of tradition, but alas how superficial and material! Blood, surface-tears and death! What can I learn from creatures who have but one fixed idea, who have no time to live, for that there is a rival, a mistress, whom it behoves them to ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... fervent admirer of Sir Walter, and I think Mr. Wedmore, in his passage on the subject, distinctly undervalues both the character and the duration of this esteem. Balzac was far too acute to commit the common mistake of thinking Scott superficial—men who know mankind are not often blind to each other's knowledge. And while Mr. Wedmore seems not to know any testimony later than Balzac's thirty-eighth year, it is in his forty-sixth, when all his own best work was done, except ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... the thought came into my mind. How superficial was my acquaintance with her, poor girl,—how little was she a part of my life, since I could really so heartlessly think of her beauty when her breath should be gone! Of course, though, it was natural enough, why should I feel any personal pang for her? It was odd ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... that honestly sympathetic nature without which it is impossible to discriminate between what is noble and what is mediocre, still Mrs. Jameson, in the above reflections upon the character of Madame de Longueville, was obviously led to draw hasty and erroneous conclusions either from a superficial glance at detached passages in the Duchess's extraordinary career with regard to the dates of which she is widely in error, or others during which her conduct and actions were but too easily susceptible of misrepresention and distortion at the hands of partisan writers. Such unjust ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... that inconspicuous character which obscures the fact that without the Navy the operations could not have been undertaken at all, and that the Navy played to them the part of the base of operations and line of communications. Like the foundations of a building, these lie outside the range of superficial attention, and therefore are less generally appreciated than the brilliant fighting going on at the front, to the maintenance of which they are all the time indispensable. Consequently, whatever of interest may attach to ...
— The Major Operations of the Navies in the War of American Independence • A. T. Mahan
... young man the most superficial observer would have paused to take a second look; an artist would have instinctively seized his pencil or his brush; a scientist would have paused to inquire what mysterious influences could have produced so finely proportioned a nature; a philosopher to wonder ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... in general, superficial relationships. Athorough consideration of these problems, especially as concerns the cultural indebtedness of Goethe to the English master would be a task demanding a separate work. Goethe was an assimilator ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... even a year ago, but as yet it only half knows him. His mind seems to me a fabric as simple and unpretending as it is deep-founded and enduring—there is no meretricious ornament to attract or fix a superficial glance; his great distinction of the genuine is one that can only be fully appreciated with time. There is something, a sort of "still profound," revealed in the concluding part of Vanity Fair which the discernment of one generation will not suffice to fathom. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the unseen steering of the wind; Sought thee in Heaven and Earth and Nature all, Led by supreme adorings and desires, Till by communion with thy perfect soul, Mine hath grown wise, in measure, to discern. Not now can I be satiate with grace That gildeth but the superficial frame With the false tissue of deep-seeming life; The searching knife must pierce into the heart, And shew a frame veined with the same warm stream That melts in blushes on the downy cheek. My bright ideal, like the bow of heaven, Hath faded ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... conscious—few can be, from the nature of our human sense of time—of the temporal rhythm that underlies verse. Thus it has come about, historically, that modern English verse is written and regarded as a matter of stress only, because to the superficial view stress is predominant.[32] Probably the truth is that most poets compose verse with the ideal metrical scheme definitely in mind and trust (as they well may) to their rhythmical instinct for the rest. Whatever device they ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... Everyone knows that that superficial film of the earth's substance, hardly ten miles thick, which is accessible to human investigation, is composed for the most part of beds or strata of stone, the consolidated muds and sands of former seas ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... sky-light through the gloom, as has been the case to-day; and, as I found in Lenox, we get better acquainted with clouds by seeing at what height they lie on the hillsides, and find that the difference betwixt a fair day and a cloudy and rainy one is very superficial, after all. Nevertheless, rain is rain, and wets a man just as much among the mountains as anywhere else; so we have been kept within doors all day, till an hour or so ago, when Julian and I went down to the village in quest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... was postponed. Nevertheless, Commissioners Stranahan, Fiske, and Haynes, with Mr. Martin, engineer in charge, and Mr. John Y. Culyer, his assistant, were at the well. During the last summer some difficulties were encountered in the sinking of the wall, which were set down by superficial observers as the utter failure of the enterprise. Mr. Stranahan received but little encouragement from his fellow Commissioners, some of whom had never seen greater works of engineering than the construction of street sewers. He assumed the responsibility of seeing the work through, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... seem to me remarkable, and he willingly allowed his mouthpiece to talk for him. But here, in the matter of his parchments, he was loquaciously full of anecdotes, recollections, heraldic knowledge; in short, he was exactly the old noble, ignorant and superficial in all things, but possessed of Benedictine erudition where the genealogy of his ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... prevent any crevices in between, the shingles which the ingenious carpenter had improvised out of the staves of the empty casks—although, as the space to be covered amounted to some seven hundred superficial feet or thereabouts, every one of the casks had to be broken up save the six containing their beef and pork and the salted- down flesh of the sea-elephant, Ben even then hardly having enough shingles ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... and bar. Here the glow of a wood fire from the well swept hearth and the aspect of the varied assortment of bottles, glasses and tankards, gave more proof of the fitness of the appellation on the creaking sign of the road-house than appeared from a superficial survey of its exterior and far from neat stable yard, or from that chilly, forbidding room, so common especially in American residences in those days, the parlor. Any doubt regarding the contents of ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... might easily be a depth of feeling which his friend with a lesser knowledge of human nature never suspected. An interesting girl, decidedly, Gifford concluded as he made a suitable acknowledgment of her greeting, and, I fancy, my friend Harry takes a rather too superficial view of her character, he thought, as strolling off in search of Kelson, he found himself watching his hostess from across the room ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... Whatever may happen indeed, all must turn out as usual for the best in general, at the end of the account, although this cannot happen without the punishment of those who contribute even to general good by their evil actions." The most superficial reader will hardly require a commentary on this very remarkable passage; he must instantly perceive how Leibnitz, in the seventeenth century, foresaw what has occurred in the eighteenth; and the prediction has been ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... insisted that they should prove their sincerity by pledging to follow the line of conduct he had lain down, and they did so with such readiness that a superficial observer would have declared ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... people all reasoning and comment is superficial that is not expressed in the jargon of sociology and political economy. Expand a three-line paragraph in that manner and it ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... To a superficial observer from a distance, it sometimes seems as if University education in Maryland began with the foundation of the Johns Hopkins University, a sketch of which follows from the pen of its honored President. Our study into the history of education in the State, ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner
... imagination, these stories retain much of their genuine character. Nor could even the tasteless Dionysius distort and mutilate them into mere prose. The poetry shines, in spite of him, through the dreary pedantry of his eleven books. It is discernible in the most tedious and in the most superficial modern works on the early times of Rome. It enlivens the dulness of the Universal History, and gives a charm to the most ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... marauders, a British commission visited the Russian islands and took testimony of the Russian commandant in a manner grossly unfair. This commandant was an honest man, with good powers of observation and with considerable insight into the superficial facts of seal life, but without adequate scientific training; his knowledge of English was very imperfect, and the commission apparently led him to say and sign just what they wanted. He was somehow made to say just the things which were needed to help the British case, and not to ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... premises, as well as in the acceptance of hearsay truths as ultimate verities—we do not see any fundamental disparity in these regards between the mind of the Northwest and that of the Southeast; and what superficial difference exists goes to the credit of Buddhism. For if one must have dogma it is something to have system, and while precedent theosophy was based on the former it knew nothing of the latter. Moreover, in Buddhism there is a greater intellectual vigor than in any phase ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... not, in matters of a purely speculative nature, be detected as a legitimate source of falsity and error. In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found. Nature herself seemed to afford me corroboration of these ideas. In the contemplation of the heavenly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... almost deify the animals which they habitually hunt, kill, and eat, is not so flagrant as at first sight it appears to us: the people have reasons, and some very practical reasons, for acting as they do. For the savage is by no means so illogical and unpractical as to superficial observers he is apt to seem; he has thought deeply on the questions which immediately concern him, he reasons about them, and though his conclusions often diverge very widely from ours, we ought not ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the rumor of her death went out; but when this proved false it was known for a good sign, and no woman, at least, was surprised when she began to get well. She was delirious part of the time, and then she raved constantly about Ludlow, and going to New York to study art. It was a mere superficial effect from her talk with Mrs. Burton just before she was taken down with the fever; but it was pathetic, all the same, to hear her pleading with him, quarrelling, protesting that she was strong enough, and that she was not afraid but ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... 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 and friendship which I aspire to deserve. Submit your impatience to grant me this favour—it perhaps gives me more pain to ask it than your Majesty ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... stopped to consider it, began to appear more and more of a task. Paris must be full of churches; to visit each of them in turn would take weeks at least. Hephzy had given me three days. I must join her at Interlaken in three days or there would be trouble. And how was I to make even the most superficial ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... should lead to perfect happiness, seemed to plain! Alas! it is often so! and the resisting forces which make all such harmony and delight impossible are not recognized by the bystanders, hardly by the actors. But if these resisting forces are only superficial, or constitutional, they are but the necessary discipline here, and do not radically affect the love which will make all things ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... had recently concluded a tense examination of the two antique rings on her fingers—saw an occasion for laughter and embraced it. The girl glanced somewhat timidly toward Anna and addressed her softly, as if desiring to engage in some conversation beyond the superficial excitement of the moment. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... happiness into the bosom of another happiness,—sleep. Sleep for the sleepy is bliss just as truly as society to the lonely. What in the distance would have seemed Purgatory, once reached, is Paradise, and your happiness is continuous. Just as it is in mending. Short-sighted, superficial, unreflecting people have a way—which in time fossilizes into a principle—of mending everything as soon as it comes up from the wash, a very unthrifty, uneconomical habit, if you use the words thrift and economy in the only ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... virtues) our sorrow will be nearer akin to veritable happiness than the happiness of those whose consciousness still is confined within narrowest limits. Would Carlyle have desired to exchange the magnificent sorrow that flooded his soul, and blossomed so tenderly there, for the conjugal joys, superficial and sunless, of his happiest neighbour in Chelsea? And was not Ernest Renan's grief, when Henriette, his sister, died, more grateful to the soul than the absence of grief in the thousands of others who have no love to give to a sister? ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it was, she was convinced that he was not the erring one. In some strange way, my two rooms are the only ones which have been invaded by this plague of vermin. Under Miss West's instructions bunks, drawers, shelves, and all superficial woodwork have been ripped out. She worked the carpenter from daylight till dark, and then, after a night of fumigation, two of the sailors, with turpentine and white lead, put the finishing touches ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... dramatists, and they are not like them as a copy is like an original, but rather resemble them as the inspirations of a kindred genius. To find the superiors of some of Blake's songs we must go to Shakespeare. The faults of his best poems are always superficial, and often mere errors of carelessness and of the absence of literary workmanship, but the hand that strikes the keynote is the hand of a master. Such pieces as the "Lines to the Evening Star," the songs beginning "Memory, hither come," "How sweet I roamed from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... nothing but place and power; their great end and aim were the same. The watch-word which, notwithstanding their ostensible difference in principles, was common to them, was this—"keep the people in ignorance, or neither of our parties will be able to plunder them." Therefore, though to the superficial observer, they appeared inveterately hostile to each other, yet I repeat, that they had the same object in view, and this was proved beyond all the possibility of doubt when the Whigs came into power. For twenty long years had Mr. Fox and his party been ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... feudal times might have alarmed a king. He, the civilest, must be the greatest. A man still young, decidedly good-looking, wonderfully well-dressed, wonderfully well-mounted, the careless ease of high rank in his air and gesture. To the superficial gaze, just what the great Lord of Montfort should be. Look again! In that fair face is there not something that puts you in mind of a florid period which contains a feeble platitude?—something in its very prettiness that betrays a weak nature and a ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... I was driven to melancholy and spiritual tears. I could neither laugh with nor at the solemn utterances of men I esteemed ponderous asses; nor could I laugh, nor engage in my old-time lightsome persiflage, with the silly superficial chatterings of women, who, underneath all their silliness and softness, were as primitive, direct, and deadly in their pursuit of biological destiny as the monkeys women were before they shed their furry coats and replaced them with ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... this great work, is what we are maintaining to be the central moral purpose of all the author's works, that it can scarcely escape the notice of the most superficial reader. Affirmatively and negatively, in Romola and Tito—the two forms of illustration to some extent combined in Savonarola—the constant, persistent, unfaltering utterance of the book is, that the only true worth and greatness of ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... much myself. Women are generally superficial,—but some are honestly superficial and some dishonestly. Emily at ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Medici, that imperious intriguer whose splendid surroundings were tainted with the corruption which she had brought from her native Italy. It was, indeed, a singular training-school for a girl of Mary Stuart's character. She saw about her a superficial chivalry and a most profound depravity. Poets like Ronsard graced the life of the court with exquisite verse. Troubadours and minstrels sang sweet music there. There were fetes and tournaments and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... in the far West, we should often meet with men who unhesitatingly declare that the red man, if capable, is unwilling to entertain in his character even one redeeming trait; but, on investigating their individual case, we find that they are but superficial observers who are prone to find fault with everything that does not exactly suit their tastes. It is necessary to spend a whole life with Indians, in order to judge them without prejudice. The Great Spirit has endowed his red children ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... little of these sciences already, and could impart my knowledge to the Captain, which would have the effect of fixing it more firmly in my own memory; and every one knows that it is of far greater importance to lay a good, solid groundwork of education, than to build a showy, superficial structure, on a bad foundation. Come, then, Captain, you see your advantages. This is the last time of asking. If you don't speak now, henceforth and ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... at patronage, her hints, suggestive or corrective, were received in silence, though resented in private with sufficient energy by Rose, and sometimes even by Graeme. But it could not be so always, and she should never be able to tolerate the interference of that vain, meddlesome, superficial woman, she said ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... why men imagined for many centuries that the sky was a solid superficies, and that the earth was a superficial plane, bounded by the horizon; that the sun moved round the earth; that the existence of the antipodes was a chimera; that the dew fell in the same way as the rain from the upper regions of the atmosphere; and other popular errors which science has corrected, ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... well-nourished cheeks. An acute observer might have detected a danger warning in the sidelong glances of her rather bulgy eyes, and in a certain tightness at the corners of her expansive mouth, which boded ill for any who came within snapping distance, but to a more superficial view she was a rollicking, good-natured figure of a woman. Her mode of address, too, bore out this misleading impression: nothing, for instance, could have been more genial just now than her telephone voice to Isabel Poppit, or her smile to Withers, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... imagine. He who endeavours to copy nicely the figure before him not only acquires a habit of exactness and precision, but is continually advancing in his knowledge of the human figure; and though he seems to superficial observers to make a slower progress, he will be found at last capable of adding (without running into capricious wildness) that grace and beauty which is necessary to be given to his more finished ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... ended none of the clubs had made any money, but the game was growing steadily in public favor, and it was evident to even the most superficial observer that there was "a good ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... English classics Bryda had formed hers, and thus her expressions were somewhat quaint, and yet she was free from the stilted and flowery mannerism of the women of her time who had received a superficial education. ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... worked upon them with fresh energy. He rehabilitated the love-business as he and his wife had newly imagined it, and, to disguise the originals the more effectively, he made the girl, whom he had provisionally called Salome, more like himself than Louise in certain superficial qualities, though in an essential nobleness and singleness, which consisted with a great deal of feminine sinuosity and subtlety, she remained a portrait of Louise. He was doubtful whether the mingling of characteristics would not end in unreality, ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the work of earlier observers, and may be regarded as satisfactory. In some cases, notably the Dakota confederacy, the constitution of the divisions is also satisfactory, though in others, including the Asiniboin, Mandan, and Winnebago, the tabulation represents little more than superficial enumeration of villages and bands, generally by observers possessing little knowledge of Indian sociology or language. So far as the survivors of the Biloxi are concerned the classification is satisfactory; but there is doubt ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... Claudius an attack on royalty. Here again the clamor for naturalness and human feeling, raised by so many critics when they are confronted by the real thing on the stage, is really a clamor for the most mechanical and superficial sort of logic. The dramatic reason for making the clergyman what Mrs Warren calls "an old stick-in-the-mud," whose son, in spite of much capacity and charm, is a cynically worthless member of society, is to set up a mordant contrast between him and the woman of infamous ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... across his grey face it invariably owed its existence to some sally made by his son, Alfred Pleydell, gay, light-hearted, debonnaire, at the far end of the table. When Sir John's thoughtful eyes rested on his motherless son, a dull and suppressed light gleamed momentarily beneath his heavy lids. Superficial observers said that John Pleydell was an ambitious man; 'not for himself,' added the few who ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... The Cardinal, thin and pale, with shadows of thought and pain in his eyes, and the many delicate wrinkles of advancing age marking his features, would never possess so much attractiveness for worldly and superficial persons as the handsome Archbishop, who carried his fifty-five years as though they were but thirty, and whose fresh, plump face, unmarred by any serious consideration, bespoke a thorough enjoyment of life, and the things which life,—if encouraged to demand them,—most ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... ancient life of Greece, all struggle, all external, no longer satisfied any one. It had been glorious in its day, but that brilliant democratic Olympus of demigods had lost its freshness, and become dry, cold, unmeaning, vain, superficial, and lacking in both head and heart. Hence the success of the Macedonian rule, and afterward of the Roman. The empire had not yet fallen into the error of excessive centralization. Until the time of Diocletian, the provinces and ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... not want her and there would be the complication of kicking against the pricks of a very determined character, which had grown more determined since her literary success. In fact, Aunt Susan stood in a slight awe of her niece since that success, for all her revolts which were superficial. Therefore, she remained upon her side of the door which she did not open until the visitor had departed after making definite arrangements concerning trains and meetings. Then Aunt Susan entered the room with a cloud of pink crepe ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... and his facile supremacy on the cricket-ground and in the racquet-court, was a popular hero; and of all his schoolfellows none paid him a more whole-hearted worship than the totally dissimilar Philip Vaughan. Their close and intimate affection was a standing puzzle to hard and dull and superficial natures; but ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... outcome of maturity, not of the student stage. This implies something deeper than superficial facts, and a power of selection,—of choice and of purpose which must rest on a very broad and deep knowledge. The artist is always a student, of course; but he is not a student only. He is a student who knows what and why he wants ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... gold is impure in the end, it is because it has contracted fresh defilement by coming in contact with other bodies. But this impurity is only superficial, and does not prevent its being used; whereas its former impurity was hidden within it, and, as it were, ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon |
