"Actuality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... highest of which are friendship and sympathy, love and duty, patriotism and reverence. The opposite of some of these is anger, hate and jealousy. Feeling makes heaven or hell a possibility and sometimes an actuality. ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... has become an actuality. The old house is now comfortably settled on its new site and like most transplanted things will thrive better if some faint flavor of its old surroundings is present, such as an apple orchard or one or two fine old trees that ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... the shouter's throat. Cyril, naturally, had not had the remotest intent of laboring through the bitter cold and the snow to the house of any neighbor; there to tell his woeful tale of oppression. The semblance of martyrdom, without its bothersome actuality, was quite enough for his purpose. Once before, at home, when his father had administered a mild and much-needed spanking, Cyril had made a like threat; and had then gone to hide in a chum's home, for half a day; returning to find his parents in agonies of remorse ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions. ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... spirits, of which he traces the operations and qualities as if they were as certain as the nerves or the blood, and of which he gives this account—"that in every tangible body there is a spirit covered and enveloped in the grosser body;" "not a virtue, not an energy, not an actuality, nor any such idle matter, but a body thin and invisible, and yet having place and dimension, and real." ... "a middle nature between flame, which is momentary, and air which is permanent." Yet these are the very things for which he holds up Aristotle and the Scholastics and the Italian ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... . ." he then observed placidly—"But I would not swear to it,—nor to anything else of which the actuality is only supported by the testimony of my own eyes and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... than those with which we usually deal—has thrust past the current notion to the Fact: that the claim of such a saint as Teresa is bound up with her declaration that she has achieved union with the Divine Essence itself. The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is a mystic when he knows his actions to be a part of a greater ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle enough—and he could see her divine it as what he wanted—not to insist on the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success was thus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any one better; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended together that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in the past tense; they said no ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... When nobody could read, except people whose own literary nature impelled them to learn, better books were written, because the public, if relatively few, was absolutely fit. Secondly, these new educated people insist on our national cursed "actuality." They live solely in the distracted moment, whereas true literature lives in the absolute; in the past that perhaps never was present, and that is eternal; "lives ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... little red men and women have the flavor of actuality, with all the wonder and strangeness that children demand. The background of the Western plains when Injun babies lived in tepees made of buffalo skins is a new one for children's stories; the adventures of the little Indians with ...
— Europa's Fairy Book • Joseph Jacobs
... among other things, I found there a civilization perfect in its union of the art of living with the grace of life; an Americanism ideal in its simple strength. Grady told us, and told us truly, of that typical American who, in Dr. Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who, in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of that great man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches deep beneath the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... was passed in principle by the Congress Commission of Actuality, with the proviso that some words should be left out ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot
... art—just as certain universal sentiments afforded the basis of folk-songs, which were constantly taken up and moulded into fine artistic forms. The Dop Doctor is a book compounded of vulgar sensationalism on the one hand, and a strange imaginative vigour and actuality on the other. ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... had a vision of her tying the broad ribbon about her rounded, silken knee. "... a man now," his mother's voice was distant, blurred. "Responsibilities; your father—" He had heard this before without being moved; but suddenly the words had a new actuality; he was a man now, that was to say he stood finally, irrevocably, alone, beyond assistance, advice. He had never heeded them; he had gone a high-handed, independent way, but the others had been there; unconsciously he ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... visionary mood; so much so, that even when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward. Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold, presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle and its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... revelation, (4) the creation of the world out of nothing, (5) the unity of the human race, (6) the origin of evil from freedom, and the inalienable nature of freedom, (7) the two Testaments, (8) Christ as God and Man, the unity of his personality, the truth of his divinity, the actuality of his humanity, the reality of his fate, (9) the redemption and conclusion of a covenant through Christ as the new and crowning manifestation of God's grace to all men, (10) the resurrection of man ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... realistic, loads himself down with the vacuous and the trivial. Thus he runs a risk of losing the deep-lying truth which constitutes the real nature of the poetical. He would fain imitate an actual occurrence, and does not consider that a poetic representation can never coincide with actuality, because it is ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... may remark, for the benefit of any medical reader, that it involved the use of two pails, one full of water, the other empty. When he got through the ablution, one pail was empty, and the other full. My authority for the actuality of this remarkable proceeding was some inmate of the house at the time, and I give credence to the story because it was not one ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... reader with complete candour, I have attempted to recommend to him that method of approach, that mental attitude which alone can divest him of his preconceptions, and put him in rapport with the true spirit of the Ireland of actuality. To that end the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... delighted in describing she deliberately turned away, and it is certain also that she introduced into her fiction not a little of the Utopian world that has haunted man in his later development without there being actuality or the least chance of realization to lend it substance. But Balzac's fiction has, too, its pocket Utopias, less attractive and less invigorating than Madame Dudevant's, and in his most realistic portrayals there are not infrequently dream-scapes of the fancy. The truth that we can most readily ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... piece of territory, which was lent him, then gradually given him, that he might govern it. These Vicekings, each on his portion of the common soil of England, with a Head King over all, were a 'Virtuality perfected into an Actuality' ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... if this comparative freshness and actuality of subject did not make Gryll Grange one of the lightest and brightest of Peacock's novels; and I think it fully deserves that description. But it would be doing it extremely scant justice to allow any one to suppose ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... in detail; in fact told him the scene in greater detail and with a greater length than had been the actuality. Also she censored the scene by omitting her own opposition to Larry's determination. She enjoyed playing with Barney, the exercise of the power she had over ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... more, but less, than other people. They do all their work three times over: once in anticipation, once in actuality, once in rumination. I do mine in actuality alone, doing it once instead ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... upon the mind, to have its free conceptions thus crampt and pressed down to the measure of a strait-lacing actuality, may be judged from that delightful sensation of freshness with which we turn to those plays of Shakespeare which have escaped being performed, and to those passages in the acting plays of the same writer which have happily been left out in performance. How far the very ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... in the story; so that this bit of intense realization thrown into the near foreground of his picture, as it were by chance, and without meaning, yet certified by his own signature, is the point at which he gets touch of his reader and convinces him of actuality throughout the romance. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... have received a tithe of the excitement and attention caused by William H. Vanderbilt's death. The newspaper offices hotly issued page after page of description, not without sufficient reason. For he, although untitled and vested with no official power, was in actuality an autocrat; dictatorship by money bags was an established fact; and while the man died, his corporate wealth, the real director and center, to a large extent, of government ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... recognize this outstanding truth. No Saint's life is dull to the average intelligent child. Grown-ups are dull: they never yield to sublime impulses: they measure, calculate, practice a hard-and-fast moderation, reduce the splendid possibilities of life to a drab level of safe actuality, and pursue ideals at a canny and cautious pace. Not so the Saints. They always retained the freshness and confidence and generous impulses of childhood. If God spoke to their inner ear and bade them leap boldly forth into His Infinite Arms, spurning ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... Ossas of searching speculation upon Pelions of hardly-won positive knowledge. The highest exemplar of the former is Shakspere, Browning the profoundest interpreter of the latter. To achieve supremacy the one had to create a throbbing actuality, a world of keenest living, of acts and intervolved situations and episodes: the other to fashion a mentality so passionately alive that its manifold phases should have all the reality of concrete ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... deserted, and the supposed requirements of fiction have been listened to; whatever has really affected the public mind is, we are equally, certain, the transcript of some actual incident, character or emotion. Note, moreover, that beyond this basis of actuality these writers have the further advantage of deep feeling ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... their personalities; that he himself was a Napoleon, a temerarious individual, an incomprehensible fellow; and that the future of the intellectual-poetic drama in London was not a topic of burning actuality.... He remembered sadly the superlative-laden descriptions, in those same newspapers, of the theatre itself, a week or two back, the unique theatre in which the occupant of every seat had a complete and uninterrupted view of the whole of the proscenium opening. Surely that ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... read the terms of this convention, have you never glanced through the sixty-odd articles which today, in the presence of the nameless horrors in which we lend a hand, offer a prodigious interest to actuality? ...
— Fighting France • Stephane Lauzanne
... compilation, and it is pervaded by such a tone of earnestness, and contains so many original observations, that the reader is inducted by it out of the usual book-land of idealism into the substantial region of actuality and fact.—Scientific Opinion, London. ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... is the appearance of a ferocious aristocrat from the class which has ridden rough-shod over the fields of submissive actuality for many tyrannous centuries. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... trust, to risk a little beyond the literal evidence, is an essential function. Any mode of conceiving the universe which makes an appeal to this generous power, and makes the man seem as if he were individually helping to create the actuality of the truth whose metaphysical reality he is willing to assume, will be sure to be responded to by ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... consciousness he was born to, and moved about in it as a stripped young swimmer might have kept splashing through blue water and coming up at any point that friendliness and fancy, with every prejudice shed, might determine. Rupert expressed us all, at the highest tide of our actuality, and was the creature of a freedom restricted only by that condition of his blinding youth, which we accept on the whole with gratitude and relief—given that I qualify the condition as dazzling even to himself. How can it therefore not be interesting ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... in reading James's, work: "His one preoccupation was the criticism, for his own purpose, of the art of life." The emphasis is on the word art. His purpose is suggested by his own claim to have "that tender appreciation of actuality which makes even the application of a single coat of rose-color seem an ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... of the events of that evening, which he went over again and again as the midnight car carried him eastward, in spite of a new-born happiness the actuality of which was still difficult to grasp, Hodder was vaguely troubled when he thought of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Champnell, I wish to point out, and to emphasise the fact, that I am not prepared to positively affirm what portion of my adventures in that extraordinary, and horrible place, was actuality, and what the product of a feverish imagination. Had I been persuaded that all I thought I saw, I really did see, I should have opened my lips long ago, let the consequences to myself have been what they might. But there is the crux. The happenings were of such an incredible ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the rejected contributor retorted. "There are now, and that is the important matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality, to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my paper down to mention if it had been accepted." He drew a long breath, and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: "It is all of a charming unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization. When I go to a variety ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... then has entered into the dread actuality of war and is in greater need of woman's loyal service than our readiest anticipation could visualize ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... of the art of story-telling, the narrators must have gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing; and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist has stolen his characters ready-made,—filching them from nature's shop-window, without ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... battle of Manila Bay will to the future appear one of the decisive events of history, for there the visions of the few, which had quickened unconsciously the conceptions of the many, materialised as suddenly as unexpectedly into an actuality that could be neither obviated nor undone. What Dewey's victory was to the over-sea expansion of the United States, what the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861 was to the sentiment of Union in the Northern States, that Paul Kruger's ultimatum, summarizing in itself the antecedent ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... during the War, but also that a better and brighter future is in store. Plans must be framed and action taken under the inspiration of a firm trust that the ideals we aim at are to be realised, that the "things hoped for" have a potential actuality. Fatalism in politics—we use the term in the original sense including ethics—is deadly, whether it is the fatalism due to a sloppy optimism which is satisfied that somehow things will come right whatever ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... because her religion was such an actuality to her, is, I think, due half the misunderstandings which have arisen with regard to Lady Burton's attitude towards so-called "spiritualism." She always held that Catholicism was the highest form of spiritualism—using the word in its ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... Saint-Jacques, what wind is blowing up for the morrow, and what it will bring with it. In that great city of nerves, through which electric vibrations pass, there are invisible currents of fame, a latent celebrity which precedes the actuality, the vague gossip of the drawing-rooms, the nescio quid majus nascitur Iliade, which, at a given moment, bursts out in a puffing article, the blare of the trumpet which drives the name of the new idol into the thickest heads. Sometimes that trumpet-blast alienates the first ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the Republic''; all specifications of the folly of Marat paled before the ravings in the original copies of his newspaper, "L'Ami du Peuple''; no statistics regarding the paper-money craze in France could so impress its actuality on students as did the seeing and handling of French revolutionary assignats and mandats, many of them with registration numbers clearly showing the enormous quantities of this currency then issued; no illustration, at second hand, of the methods of the French generals during ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... army of servants—which might be an army of slaves without a single manly right, so mute, impassive, and highly trained it is—the breeding of a tyrannous temper in the men, of a certain contempt for facts and actuality even in the best of the women. Mrs. Wellesdon poured out her social aspirations to me. How naive and fanciful they were! They do her credit, but they will hardly do anyone else much good. And it is evident that they mark her out in her own circle, that they have brought her easily ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and visible sign that a nation recognizes its own needs and aspirations. Democracy wells up from the very pit of things. Its value is its foundation in actuality, its concordance with the slow unending process of man's evolution from the animal he was. Democracy, for one with any comic and cosmic animal sense, is the only natural form of government, because alone it recognizes States as organisms, with spontaneous growth, and a free will of their own. Democracy ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... deep strange instinct rejoiced. This was no dim theological rescue, no boon of a contingent world; they were saved better than faith or works could save them, saved for the warm world they had shrunk from dying to, for actuality, for continuity, for the certainty ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James
... This diminishing actuality of our political life is a matter of almost universal comment to-day. But it is extraordinary how much of that comment is made in a tone of hopeless dissatisfaction, how rarely it is associated with any will to change ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... upon a lounge to laugh the better. His stricken comrade, meanwhile, recovered so far as to pace the floor. "I'm goin' to pack up and light out for home!" he declared, over and over. And even oftener he read and reread the card to make sure of the actuality of that fatal coincidence, ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... the newspaper I receive from London, and glancing down the correspondence from Russia—not the telegrams but the correspondence—the first thing that caught my eye was the name of Haldin. Mr. de P—-'s death was no longer an actuality, but the enterprising correspondent was proud of having ferreted out some unofficial information about that fact of modern history. He had got hold of Haldin's name, and had picked up the story of the midnight arrest in the street. But the sensation ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Louse. My first doubt regards this point, but it is not at all founded on what the defender alleges, that there is no such animal as an Egyptian Pediculus or Louse in rerum natura; for though it does not actually exist, it may possibly exist (if not in actio, yet in potentia—if not in actuality, yet in potentiality or capacity); and whether its existence be in esse vel posse, is the same thing to this question, provided there be termini habiles for ascertaining what it would be if it did exist. But my doubt is here:—How am I to discover what are the essentia ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... grief, or of both. Failing in this, it fails altogether. To this end Seneca introduced his Ghost, and his disciples filled their speeches with passionate outcry and lurid pictures of horrible events unfit to be presented in actuality. Gorboduc rained death upon a whole nation, Tancred and Gismunda invoked every awful epithet and gruesome description of dungeon and murder, for the same purpose. But the purpose remained unfulfilled—at ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... and buoyancy of the morning. Would her sparkling gaiety endure, I wondered, through the monotonous days ahead, when poverty became, not a child's play, not a game tricked out by the imagination, but the sordid actuality of ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... reached Saranac when the woods were all aflame with autumn glory, and to Mr. Stevenson's mother it all seemed unreal and "more like a painted scene in a theatre" than actuality. ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... of Pleasure. Aristotle now goes back to his starting point—the nature of the Good, and Happiness. He re-states his positions: That Happiness is an exercise or actuality [Greek: energeia], and not an acquirement or state (hexis), That it belongs to such exercises as are worthy of choice for their own sake, and not to such as are worthy of choice for the sake of something else; That it is perfect and self-sufficing, seeking ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... no cheering—the cheering days came later—no ebullient emotion, but the tightening of lip and jaw in their stern, set faces was a sufficient index of the tensity of feeling. Canadians were thinking things out, thinking keenly and swiftly, for in the atmosphere and actuality of war mental processes are ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... bringing down her vague ideas of money that came from somewhere, through her father's pocket, as water comes from Lake Kinsittewink by the turning of a faucet, to the narrow point of actuality. ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... force it was soon felt that a new power had arisen. The Commissioner was not only a name but an actuality. Nothing was so trivial as to escape his attention; nothing too wide for him to grasp. He knew his men—it is said that he knows every man in the force, an exaggeration with a great deal of truth in it—and they soon ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... God is FACT, and Spinoza denies any reserve in Him of something unexpressed. "The omnipotence of God has been actual from eternity, and in the same actuality will remain to eternity," {38} not of course in the sense that everything which exists has always existed as we now know it, or that nothing will exist hereafter which does not exist now, but that in God everything that has been, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... like an enchanter who has but to conjure up in actuality the wildest fancies, Monsieur Fouquet. I could not ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was at once intimate and remote. Its distinguishable features had the sense of nearness and actuality of some piece of splendid stagecraft, yet he seemed to be peering not at the rigid outlines of time but rather into the vague, almost terrifying, depths of eternity. And it was a bewildering fact that this glimpse into the portals ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... was the one that showed that an aptitude for delineation is the same as adjustment. It was admitted that having explained that there would be undertaken a readjustment. The end was outlined. The completion was distinguished. The relative actuality was not detailed. There was precedence. There was not lingering. There was the article that was not destroying. There was that meaning. There was the description. These did have what there was no need to occupy. ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... voluptuous emotions inspired by clouds lost in the blue sea of heaven and valleys visioned away into the purple sky. What opium is to one, what hasheesh may be to another, what kheyf or mere repose concentrated into actuality is to the Arab, that is Nature to him who has followed her for long years through poets and mystics and in works of art, until at last he pierces through dreams and ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... passed the experimental stage. It is no longer in a stage of incubation. It is an actuality,—an active, aggressive, and progressive reality. It has thoroughly established its rights to existence and its indispensability as a religious force and influence. Our religious fervor may at times appear to be unduly emotional and lacking in solemnity, ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... from this time on, when I needed help and encouragement the most, I felt a vague assurance that my wife was by my side; and I verily believe, that if it had not been for this,—hallucination, delusion, actuality, reality, or whatever it may have been,—I should now be in a land where the truth about these things is probably known ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... and beautiful enterprise, which, also, is still in its proper stage. The drawing of plans so large and detailed has occupied many months. We are looking to America for the generous gift which shall bring these plans into actuality, but help from other sources is welcome, too, and particularly help from the students. They have made many efforts and reached a sum of more than Rs. 500. Their most important undertaking was a performance of "Everyman" most ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... President surrounded his intercourse with the foreign statesmen and the proceedings of the Commission on the League of Nations, his secret negotiations caused the majority of the delegates to the Conference and the public at large to lose in a large measure their confidence in the actuality of his devotion to "open diplomacy," which he had so unconditionally proclaimed in the first of his Fourteen Points. If the policy of secrecy had ceased with the discussions preliminary to the organization of the Conference, ...
— The Peace Negotiations • Robert Lansing
... my tongue, and refused to come further, I got up again and walked about the room, and felt that it had not been like a dream at all; it was more "recollectable" than all my real adventures of the previous day. It had ceased to be like a dream, and had become an actuality from the moment I first touched the duchess's hand to the moment I kissed my mother's, and the blur came. It was an entirely new and utterly bewildering experience that I had ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... all events, it was plain that the new policy was suffering from a certain flatness on the further side. As a ballon d'essai it lacked buoyancy; and no doubt Mr Farquharson was right in declaring that above all things it lacked actuality, business—the proposition, in good set terms, for men to turn over, to accept or reject. Nothing could be done with it, Mr Farquharson averred, as a mere prospect; it was useful only to its enemies. We of the young countries must be invited to deeds, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... conclusion which I come to is, that we cannot pretend, with our present knowledge, to put any limit to the possible, and even probable, migration of plants. If you can show that many of the Fuegian plants, common to Europe, are found in intermediate points, it will be a grand argument in favour of the actuality of migration; but not finding them will not, in my eyes, much diminish the probability of their having thus migrated. My pen always runs away, in writing to you; and a most unsteady, vilely bad pace it goes. What would I not give to write simple English, without having to rewrite and rewrite ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... years had passed since the publication of the first part of "The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined," the Colenso question was only just filtering down to the thinking classes of the Five Towns; it was an actuality in the Five Towns, if in abeyance in London. Even Hugh Miller's "The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field," then over thirty years old, was still being looked upon as dangerously original in the Five ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in prosaic actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations, the phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example of this imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale. The same huge fancy is in the phrase "if all the trees were bread and cheese," which I have cited elsewhere in this connection; ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... character entirely his own to the last peculiarity, such as the aged Aunt Cooley Hunchberg's deafness, on which account Beasley never once forgot to raise his voice when he addressed her. Indeed, the details of actuality in all this appeared to bring as great a delight to the man as to the child. Certainly he built them up with infinite care. On one occasion when Mr. Hunchberg and I happened to be calling, Hamilton remarked with surprise that Simpledoria had come into the room ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... limbs. He pondered it, trying to pierce the fog that dulled his intellect. He had a subconscious impression of some strenuous adventure through which he had passed, but knowledge still hovered on the borderland of fancy and actuality. He had no recollection of the fight or of events preceding it. That he was Barry Craven he knew; but of where he had no idea—nor what his life had been. Of his personality there remained only his name, he was quite sure about that. And out ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... to me without constraint. The two friends were not at all alike. Hor was a positive, practical man, with a head for management, a rationalist; Kalinitch, on the other hand, belonged to the order of idealists and dreamers, of romantic and enthusiastic spirits. Hor had a grasp of actuality—that is to say, he looked ahead, was saving a little money, kept on good terms with his master and the other authorities; Kalinitch wore shoes of bast, and lived from hand to mouth. Hor had reared a large family, who were obedient and united; Kalinitch had once had a wife, whom he ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... ago, may serve to mark the distinction I draw between my conception and a Utopia. His is the ingenious invention of a modern mind thoroughly schooled in the principles of political economy, it is as remote from actuality as the Equatorial mountain on which his dream State lies. "Freiland" is a complicated piece of mechanism with numerous cogged wheels fitting into each other; but there is nothing to prove that they can ...
— The Jewish State • Theodor Herzl
... reality that he and his church or group have projected the god. He knows that prier, c'est elaborer Dieu; or, as he would put it, he is "one with" his god. Religion has this in common with art, that it discredits the actual practical world; but only because it creates a new world and insists on its actuality ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... painting." Impressionism has had more effect on the current of art than has any other movement in history. Not only in the handling of light and in freshness of coloring has the whole of painting been profoundly changed, but there is a general tendency to paint the impression rather than the actuality, the harmonious effect rather than the literal fact-and these things are notably illustrated ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... Empire, Iraq was occupied by Britain during the course of World War I; in 1920, it was declared a League of Nations mandate under UK administration. In stages over the next dozen years, Iraq attained its independence as a kingdom in 1932. A "republic" was proclaimed in 1958, but in actuality a series of military strongmen ruled the country, the latest was SADDAM Husayn. Territorial disputes with Iran led to an inconclusive and costly eight-year war (1980-88). In August 1990, Iraq seized Kuwait, but was expelled by US-led, UN coalition forces during the Gulf War of January-February ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... he began to loom up, the embodiment of a powerful force—the Ranger Service—the fame of which, long known to this lawless Pecos gang, but scouted as a vague and distant thing, now became an actuality, a Ranger in the flesh, whose surprising attributes included both the law and the enforcement ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... the way of intuition poets promise to carry us beyond the boundary of the vicious circle. When the ceaseless round of the real world has come to nauseate us, they assure us that by simply relaxing our hold upon actuality we may escape from the squirrel-cage. By consenting to the prohibition, "Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss!" we may enter the realm of ideality, where our dizzy brains grow steady, and our pulses are calmed, as we gaze upon the quietude of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... form another type, and positively declare something about the world of actuality. Although they tell us nothing of the elements of things, either abstract or concrete, they affirm that the resultant of their actions drifts preponderantly in a particular direction. Population tends toward cities; the working ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... from the lips, models of tale-telling for children. Emma had two classes of story: the one concerned itself with rich children, the other with poor; the one highly fanciful, the other full of a touching actuality, the very essence of a life such as that led by the listeners themselves. Unlike the novel which commends itself to the world's grown children, these narratives had by no means necessarily a happy ending; ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... unsatisfactory. In this science it would seem as if thought must be subordinate to what is given, to the realities of fact—that this is its basis and guide; while philosophy dwells in the region of self-produced ideas, without reference to actuality. Approaching history thus prepossessed, speculation might be supposed to treat it as a mere passive material, and, so far from leaving it in its native truth, to force it into conformity with a tyrannous idea, and to construe it, as the phrase ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... upon the lips of those who have died? They say they are looking upon the Future. Perhaps they look also upon the Past, and therefore smile in happiness, seeing again Youth, and Hope, and Faith, and Trust; which are tender and beautiful things. Life has no actuality of its own, and in material sense is only a continual change. But the shadows of thought and of remembrance do not change. It is only ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... in tone, but remember that my previous articles were written in England, while this was written on the spot.... The Diary was not my diary, though it was so very nearly what mine might have been that it is difficult to say what is fiction and what is actuality in it. With regard to the 'conversation' during the bombardment, it represents in its totality what I believe the ordinary soldier feels. He loathes the war, and the grandiloquent speeches of politicians irritate him by their failure to realize how loathesome ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... scientific air to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of actuality and ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... fantastic about this—sneaking in colonists from some place other than the watched Wisconsin farm, building up in actuality the nation they had claimed ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... observations which have been carefully collected and critically discussed for instance by Poulton[47] were thoroughly studied the arguments which are still frequently urged against mimicry would be found untenable; we can hardly hope to find more convincing proof of the actuality of the processes of selection than these cases put into our hands. The preliminary postulates of the theory of mimicry have been disputed, for instance, that diurnal butterflies are persecuted and eaten by birds, but observations specially directed towards this point in India, Africa, ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... action, it is natural that powerful emotions should be associated with it. Individuals become conscious of the kind of self they are and measure it favorably or unfavorably with the kind of self they would be. In so far as the actuality they conceive themselves to be measures up to the ideal self, to the fulfillment of which they have dedicated themselves, they have a feeling of self-satisfaction, of elation. They are jubilant or crestfallen, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... of the nations in glory and in art. It is true that, in making France great, he became great with her, and attached his name indissolubly to her grandeur. To him, living eternally in this thought, actuality disappeared in the future; wherever the hurricane of war may have swept him, France, above all things else, above all nations, filled his thoughts. "What will my Athenians think?" said Alexander, after Issus and Arbela. "I hope the French will be content ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... told, even facts thoroughly well known, changed with each repetition. A month after an occurrence one might search in vain for the actuality. It was more difficult to learn truthful details than anywhere I had been. The French are niggardly of publications concerning Tahiti. An almanac once a year contained a few figures and facts of interest, but with no newspapers ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Mrs. Birkett, who pitied the poor child, thought her tenacity too morbid, too dreadful; and the rector honestly held her as one possessed, and regretted in his own mind that the Church had no formula for efficient exorcism. Believing, as he did, in the actuality of Satan, the theory of demoniacal possession came easy as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... book. Thoughtful people will be fascinated by its actuality, its fearlessness, and the insight it gives into the influence of modern thought and literature upon the mind and morals of our most promising ...
— A Master of Mysteries • L. T. Meade
... motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... telling these stories may seem at first glance to be simple: short sentences, a sparse vocabulary, uncomplicated syntax. In actuality, Anderson developed an artful style in which, following Mark Twain and preceding Ernest Hemingway, he tried to use American speech as the base of a tensed rhythmic prose that has an economy and a shapeliness seldom found in ordinary speech or even oral narration. What Anderson employs ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... delight. These remembered pictures float past me in a sequence of contracts; following the same order always, and always whirling by and disappearing with the swiftness of a dream, leaving me with the sense that the actuality was the experience of an hour, at most, whereas it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... did not become an actuality, it was due to the weather rather than to any clemency on the part of Mr. Bangs. He seemed bent upon testing Quin's mettle, and required tasks of him that only a man used to the discipline of ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... told the truth. Instant visions of dazzling sopranos, of mezzos and contraltos, of angelic voices and of vast beauty and exquisite gowning, had flashed in appalling procession before her mental vision. The idea, in the face of the appalling actuality, was so rich that Bobby pursued it no further lest he spoil it, and talked about the weather and equally inane topics the rest ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... certainly be felt, and the rain, and the heat of the fire. From the descriptions he had amassed through his unwearied questioning, he had pieced out for himself a quaint little world of color and light,—how like or unlike the actuality no one could ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... charge that poetic is not real, Aristotle erects the distinction between the real and the actual, claiming a reality for poetic which is not the actuality of science or of practical affairs. It is thus that he distinguishes the poet from the historian: although the historian also uses images, he is restricted to relating what has happened—that is, to fact; ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... cast for a story of 373 pages; but you will hardly need to be told with what sympathetic and subtle skill she depicts them. Her art is, as always, extraordinarily minute and close. The two women especially are made to live before us with a great effect of actuality. She has wit, too, of a dry, rather grim, kind. I liked her comparison of Gregory's emotion on finding himself in love with Ora to that of a small boy despising himself for a second attack of measles before he discovers the later complaint to be scarlet fever. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... the various couples who, lovingly entwined, promenaded the green lanes, suddenly appearing and as suddenly disappearing behind the thick hedges, would recall him to actuality. He would then bethink him how odd it seemed that he himself cared so little about womenfolk, Now and then a pretty fresh girl would take his fancy, and he might have liked well enough to take her face between his hands and give her a hearty kiss; but he ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... a great tree was gone from the garden. An actuality had been converted into thought and emotion, and thought and emotion may be all that endure, and an actuality be unreal ... but an actuality is so warm ... ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... conception, not even in the instrumentation; which seems the more remarkable when we reflect that he was the originator of many new orchestral combinations, the beauty of which presented itself to his imagination before his ears had ever heard them in actuality. These new tone-colors, as Jahn remarks, existed intrinsically in the orchestra as a statue does in the marble; but it remained for the artist to bring them out; and that Mozart was bound to have them is shown by the anecdote of a musician who complained ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... of the existence of any God, of the actuality of all possible ideas of God. It denies that there is any Mind, Intelligence, or ENS, that is the Cause and Providence of the Universe, and of any Thing or any Existence, Soul, Spirit, or Being, that intentionally or intelligently produces the Order, Beauty, and Harmony thereof, and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... advantageously consulted, for honey is not the less sweet because it is gathered from many flowers; and I have freely availed myself of their various works, as far as they go, though I have adopted no term without holding myself responsible for its actuality. Such a vaunt may be considered to savour of the parturiunt montes apothegm, but the reader may confidently rest assured that whatever shortcomings he may detect they are not the result ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... eat, and her room at Madame Mardel's would come to three francs; she did not mean to occupy it any longer than she could pay for it. And then the morning would find her penniless in actuality. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... she would have thought she knew it. Everybody around her believed in enchantments; nobody had any doubts; to doubt that a castle could be turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have been the same as my doubting among Connecticut people the actuality of the telephone and its wonders,—and in both cases would be absolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy was sane; that must be admitted. If I also would be sane—to Sandy —I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Petrarch, to be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circumstance on which each piece turns, and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. History has in it that which can touch us more abidingly than any fiction. It is this actuality which distinguishes the sonnets of Milton from any other sonnets. Of this difference Wordsworth was conscious when he struck out the phrase, "In his hand the thing became a trumpet." Macaulay compared the sonnets in their majestic severity to the collects, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... animation of the scene was rather a matter of visual illusion than actuality. For Wild Bill, in his right of proprietorship, was lounging on his blanketed bunk, while Toby's inanimate form robbed him of the extreme foot of it. Sunny Oak was hugging to himself what comfort there was to be obtained ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... Terry might easily have expected it, but one of the limitations of an idealist is an insufficient knowledge of realities. To men of his temperament there is always a distinct shock envolved in coming face to face with an actuality. Truth is the element of the idealist, but an abstract truth into which concrete realities seldom fit. Terry did not, or tried not to, mind, at this time, this continued sexual freedom, or rather vagaries, of Marie's life; for that fitted into ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... one reads of it was difficult to realise the true meaning of his answers. I ought to have seen at once—but I did not; so difficult is it for our minds, remembering so much, instructed so much, informed of so much, to get in touch with the real actuality at our elbow. And with my head full of preconceived notions as to how a case of "cannibalism and suffering at sea" should be managed I said—"You were then so lucky ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... me, it would have been more exact to say that they entered upon or drove over. But I know now that it is no figure of speech when one says that he drives into the old Schmittheimer place. No other phrase could more exactly express an actuality. ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... legion; and I have come to believe that they are fully as trustworthy as similar witnesses have been in any age. The very keenness of their rivalry is some guarantee for truth. Doubtless competition for good "copy" occasionally leads to artful embroidering on humdrum actuality; but, after spending much time in scanning similar embroidery in the literature of the Napoleonic Era, I unhesitatingly place the work of Archibald Forbes, and that of several knights of the pen still living, far above the delusive ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... I feel the actuality of it all, that if this book should fall into the hands of the people to whom the vision refers, I will ask them to communicate with me. I have no idea what their past has been, but I know their characters well. The fact that they have no children is a sorrow ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... recurrent sense of actuality he thought of his three rooms in Bloomsbury and of the hundred and fifty pounds a year on which he lived, and with a wry smile he handed her the book, took stock of her rich clothes, bowed and turned away.... For his imagination it was enough to have met and loved her in that one moment. She ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... letting her husband know where she was, but Juliet, although, on both occasions, she had a moment before been talking as if Dorothy alone prevented her from returning to him, fell on her knees in wild distress, and entreated her to bear with her. At the smallest approach of the idea toward actuality, the recollection rushed scorching back—of how she had implored him, how she had humbled herself soul and body before him, how he had turned from her with loathing, would not put forth a hand to lift her ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... one last hoot at the unexpectedness of things, and indulged himself in a satirical comment of greeting, far from what he had intended. Poor Dick! he was always making sage resolutions on the chance of finding Raven and Nan together, but the actuality ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... of mad imagining, which he vainly endeavored to make clear to himself, threatened to distract his reason, and he groaned aloud; the sound of his own voice brought him back to actuality. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... acquaintance with the phraseology of cultivated society. If this be really assumed, the author has exhibited a delicate refinement in the art of writing not surpassed in any work of imagination known to us. Another ground for the seeming actuality of the story, to those who have any knowledge of the class to which its heroine belongs, is the cause to which she attributes her fall. This was not seduction; for she confesses, what hardly one in a thousand of her sisters in shame will fail to confess, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Fewer young men out of uniform were seen in the streets and neighbouring roads and lanes. Groups of wounded from the hospital in their uniform of deep blue jean with red ties and khaki caps gave a note of actuality to the streets. Otherwise, there were few signs of war. Even the troops who hitherto swarmed about the town had gradually been removed from billets to a vast camp of huts some miles away, and appeared only sporadically about the place. I missed them and the stimulus ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... he knew that it was made by a regiment marching to join the others. The spectacle, with all the somber aspects of war, softened by the distance, was inspiring. Harry drew a long breath and then another. It was in truth more like a spectacle than war's actuality. He counted five colonial houses, white and pillared, standing among green trees and shrubbery. Smoke was rising from their chimneys, as if the people who lived in them were going about ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... queer spiritual appeal Soames turned for relief to actuality. He snapped the brooch back into its case and put it in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... be rather mild and civil, as things go, and might even be regarded as complimentary. It is not our custom to be tender with any one who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not be bettered, especially in public affairs. We are apt to call such a one out of his name and to punish him for opinions he has never held. This may be a better reason than either given why authors do not take part in politics with us. They are a thin-skinned ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is inept," replied Fa Fai. "The buildings in question undoubtedly exist at the indicated position. If, therefore, the actuality is to be maintained, it is necessary either to raise their stature or to cut down the trees obscuring them. To this gentle-minded person the former alternative seemed the less drastic. As, however, it is regarded in a spirit ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... blood drop from the brow crowned with thorns, how hideous and insupportable the sight would be! The mind is conscious as it contemplates the picture that it is a representation, and not a fact. The mere force of actuality is, therefore, destroyed, and thought busies itself with the moral significance of the scene. In the same way, in the tragedy of "Othello", conscious that there is not the actual physical suffering which there ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... with facts, demonstrate their actuality, and classify them; that is, find their natural ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Smith and Hart Minor. The Head Master pointed out in his discourse that one might think at first sight that boys at a school might not have the opportunity to violate the tremendous Commandments; but, he said, this was not so. The Commandments were as much a living actuality in school life as they were in the larger world. Coming events cast their shadows before them; the child was the father of the man; what a boy was at school, such would he be in after life. Theft, the ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... his mistress in her death agony. The Taddeo of the comedy is the clown of the company, who in real life entertains a passion for Nedda, which is repulsed, whereupon he also carries his part into actuality and betrays Nedda's secret to Canio. It is in the ingenious interweaving of these threads—the weft of reality with the warp of simulation—that the chief dramatic value of Leoncavallo's ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel |
