"At bottom" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... B. Stuart, and taking two pieces of artillery and some prisoners, and forcing it to retreat across the Chickahominy. On the 12th Sheridan reached the second line of works around Richmond, then recrossed the Chickahominy, and after much hard fighting arrived at Bottom's Bridge the morning of the 13th. On the next day he was at Haxall's Landing on the James River, where he sent off his wounded and recruited his men and horses. On the 24th he rejoined the Army of the Potomac at Chesterfield, returning via ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... most nearly approximate the flavor of roasted ones. Break fresh eggs at the small ends, drain away the whites, break down the shells to deepish cups, each with a yolk at bottom, sprinkle yolks lightly with salt and pepper, add a bit of butter to each, then set shells upright, close over the bottom of a pan, pop the pan into a hot oven, bake twenty minutes, and serve piping hot. This Mammy gave us to keep from wasting yolks when wedding or Christmas cake demanded ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... circle, the outside perpendicular, the inner sloping, and throw earth sufficient into the middle to form a little hill, two or three feet higher than the level of the lawn; the rest must be carried away. Then lay down the turf on the hill, and beat it well to settle. The ditch at bottom should be about three feet wide, and three and a half deep, with two or three drains at the bottom, covered with an iron grate, or a stone with holes, to carry off the hasty rains, in order to keep the rabbits dry. In the outside bank ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... burst out almost angrily. "Not an atom, do you hear? Whatever I may appear on top, at bottom I am a great skulking coward, and nothing more. Why, I couldn't even stay and take my punishment the other day. I ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... to bed. The hours of sleep are those when the body most freely exhales the waste matter of the system, and all the pores should be properly freed from impediments to this healthful operation. For this purpose, a large tin wash-pan should be kept for children, just large enough, at bottom, for them to stand in, and flaring outward, so as to be very broad at top. A child can then be placed in it, standing, and washed with a sponge, without wetting the floor. Being small at bottom, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... you are, you Englishwomen!" he said, half frowning. "You run yourselves down—and at bottom there is a pride ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and he agreed with his friends, the Carlyles, who had found that it was only the incapable who could not get work. But it was the fault of the wealthy and educated that working people were not better trained; it was not the working-men's fault, at bottom. The modern architect used his workman as a mere tool; while the Gothic spirit set him free as an original designer, to gain—not more wages and higher social rank, but pleasure and instruction, the true happiness that lies in good work ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... my seriousness has gone off, whether from new company or some other new associations; but I still retain at bottom a conviction of the truth, and a certainty of the usefulness of religion. I will not pretend to more gravity or feeling than I at present possess; my intention is not to persuade you that any great alteration ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... anthropology. Germany, so childlike and so great, has outstripped France in this particular; in Germany they have professors of a science of far more use than a knowledge of the heterogeneous philosophies, which all come to the same thing at bottom. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... from the worldly voice, and its cries of adoration accompanied by the organ are only cries of carnal desire, its very pleadings in the most sombre liturgical hymns are only addressed to God from the lips outward, for at bottom a woman only mourns the mediocre ideal of earthly pleasure to which she cannot attain. Thus I thoroughly understand that the Church has rejected woman from her offices, and that the musical robe of her sequences may not be contaminated ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... meanwhile a war has been fought. Mr. Loeb says he wished to enter the army because he did not know what to do, could not foresee whether he would succeed or fail in life, and felt the army would give him "a living and a career." Now if this is at bottom your feeling I should advise you not to go in; I should say yes to some boys, but not to you; I believe in you too much, and have too ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... August, 1673, by the battle of the Texel. In it, as in others, were amply justified the words with which a modern French naval officer has stamped them: "United by momentary political interests, but at bottom divided to the verge of hatred, never following the same path in counsel or in action, they have never produced good results, or at least results proportioned to the efforts of the powers allied against ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... She loves to feel herself a power—all the more, I think, because of her anomalous position. It is very curious—at bottom very feminine and ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that division of her sex that claims as intuition an inability to master the processes of thought, and attributes to this faculty all fortunate conclusions, but none that is faulty. I thought, with some commiseration for him, that at bottom her manner showed some real leaning towards the lover she had discarded—that she felt the need of a pincushion, as it were, into which to stick the little points of her malevolence. I think I was inclined to ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... providential role assigned to Israel is the point at which the Italian romanticist meets Krochmal, wide apart though their starting-places are. At bottom both do but interpret the ancient notion of the Divine selection of Israel and of a "chosen people". But while Krochmal regards religion as a fleeting phase in the existence of the nation, for Luzzatto religion ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... pieces of ash (or beech, as being the lighter wood), each of about 5 ft. in length. With a plane or spokeshave round these up until they taper from 1 in. diameter at bottom to little less than 0.5 in. at top. Now saw each rod into four pieces of 15 in. long, or, for greater strength, but less portability, into three 20 in. pieces. Ferrule these in the manner of fishing-rods, so that each rod joins ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... merit for it, to say why it was the best possible way. If they had grouped him with other widely known writers in their admiration, he never imagined directing his correspondents to those others' methods; he said to himself that he did not understand them, and at bottom he felt that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to have left them out ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... see that the gauge cocks can be opened to try the water and closed, so steam and water would not come out into cab. Observe the water glass and note if water is moving up and down in the glass, see that the steam valve at the top and water valve at bottom of glass could be opened and closed, and allow water and steam to circulate freely through ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... and Olga had been allowed to sing, on the first encore, the refrain to All Alone, quite by herself. She'd gone up an octave on the end of it to a high A, which in its perfect clarity had sounded about a third higher and had brought down the house. Patricia had been furious, of course, but was at bottom too decent to show it much and had actually congratulated Olga when she came off. It looked as if she'd really got her foot ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Cornuberts. It passed regularly from father to son, and my uncle—his neighbours said—could not but be the possessor of a nice little fortune. Held in esteem by all, a Municipal Councillor, impressed by the importance and gravity of his office, short, fat, highly choleric and headstrong, but at bottom not in the least degree an unkind sort of man—such was my uncle Cornubert, my only living male relative, who, as soon as I left school, had elevated me to the dignity of chief and only clerk and shopman ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... with similar things in Scott. The book was not an historical romance, and the manners, sentiments, language, all were modern. Walpole knew little about the Middle Ages and was not in touch with their spirit. At bottom he was a trifler, a fribble; and his incurable superficiality, dilettantism, and want of seriousness, made all his real cleverness of no avail when applied to such a subject as ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... possessed, like the Norwegian Berserker, whose frenzy amounted to volcanic tumult. The genesis of misconceptions, however, is worth one's while to study; for in a majority of cases there is in the misconception a sufficient flavoring of truth to make the erroneous notion pass as true. At bottom, the human soul loves truth, nor willingly believes or receives a lie. Our intellectual sin is synecdoche, the putting a part truth for a whole truth. Generalization is dangerous intellectual exercise. Our premise is insufficient, and our conclusion is self-sufficient, like some strutting scion ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... Mandricardo for that play Were next; Rogero and Rodomont were third; Marphisa's lot and Mardricardo's lay At bottom; whence the dame was deeply stirred; Nor young Rogero seems a whit more gay: Who knows the prowess of those two preferred Will nothing in the listed combat leave For him or ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... quite approve of our proceeding, as he would rather we had spent the time in his bar; however, I have brought him up some of the proceeds of our sport to propitiate him, for he is an obliging, good-natured fellow, at bottom. I wish him ...
— The Log House by the Lake - A Tale of Canada • William H. G. Kingston
... miracle, he contrived to have none of the easy unction of the pushing man of holiness who realises that if he is to succeed in accomplishing what he wants accomplished, he must assume a certain cunning suavity of manner which is really foreign to his character. Hankey had no pose. He was at bottom what Walt Whitman calls a "natural and nonchalant" person, who happened to be made all through of sweetness and light, though never the superior person, and never, as it were, too good for this world. Not for one moment did you find in him the chill of sanctity. In the phrase of John Silver, ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... not weakened. The austere gloom of it chimed more nearly with his state of unrest. Then there are the galleries, the painted ceilings,—angels, saints, martyrs, holy families,—can art have been leashed through so many ages with a pleasant fiction? Is there not somewhere at bottom an earnest, vital truth, which men must needs cling by if they be healthful and earnest themselves? Even the meretricious adornments of the churches of Genoa afford new evidence of the way in which the heart ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... lately returned rich from New Zealand, and had offered to send him out as his agent, and to lend him money in the colony. Hope had declined, and his friend had taken the huff, and had not written to him since. But Hope knew he was settled in Hull, and too good-hearted at bottom to go from his word in his friend's present sad condition. So William Hope paid every debt he owed in Liverpool, took his child to her mother's tombstone, and prayed by it, and started to cross the island, and then leave it for many a ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... to reveal the immediate object of this mighty and chivalrous preparation, which had, in fact, the gratification of a royal pique at bottom. The severe lesson which Ferdinand had received from the veteran Ali Atar before the walls of Loxa, though it had been of great service in rendering him wary in his attacks upon fortified places, yet rankled sorely in his mind, and he had ever since held Loxa in peculiar odium. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... thought as thought to life, and life to being. Nay, Nicolas makes even bolder statements than these, when he calls the universe a sensuous and mutable God, man a human God or a humanly contracted infinity, the creation a created God or a limited infinity; thus hinting that God and the world are at bottom essentially alike, differing only in the form of their existence, that it is one and the same being and action which manifests itself absolutely in God, relatively and in a limited way in the system of creation. It was chiefly three modern ideas which led the Cusan ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... abroad. This part; it's a little world cut out on the pattern of the others," she adds, proudly, wagging her worn-out head. "There aren't many of them who've got the wherewithal and they're not of much account. Puppets, if you like, yes. That's according to how one sees it, because at bottom there's no puppets,—there's people that look after themselves, because each of us always deserves to be happy, my lad. And here, the same as everywhere, the two kinds of people that there are—the discontented and the respectable; ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... years before he had lavished on the Variations of the Protestant Churches. Yet this curious movement, bleak and squalid as it may seem to men nurtured in the venerable decorum of ecclesiastical tradition, was at bottom identical with the yearning for stronger spiritual emotions, and the cravings of religious zeal, that had in older times filled monasteries, manned the great orders, and sent wave upon wave of pilgrims and crusaders to holy places. 'It is really amazing,' as was ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... tiller makes a kind of litany of his instructions. The central part was passed, the three-quarters; the tension of that enduring effort had grown intolerable, and I doubted my ability to complete the task. Why? What could prevent me? I cannot say; it was all a bundle of imaginaries. Perhaps at bottom what I feared was ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... in his art to shine, A human head and horse's neck should join; From various creatures put the limbs together, Cover'd with plumes, from ev'ry bird a feather; And in a filthy tail the figure drop, A fish at bottom, a fair maid at top: Viewing a picture of this strange condition, Would you not laugh at such an exhibition? Trust me, my Pisos, wild as this may seem, The volume such, where, like a sick-man's dream, Fingentur species: ut nec pes, nec caput uni Reddatur ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... worship. The union of Church and State in Massachusetts was more intimate and intolerant than it had or ever has been in England; and their contests with England in claiming absolute and irresponsible powers under the Charter were at bottom, and in substance, contests for Congregational supremacy and exclusive and proscriptive rule in Church and State—facts so overlooked and misrepresented by New England historians. Yet under this denominational and virtually ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... an escapade of this period, connected with the last flogging my father gave me, but of which that was only the secondary cause, determining the moment but not the movement. It was a matter of conscience at bottom. My mother had, when I was about six years old, taken a little octoroon girl of three, the illegitimate daughter of a quadroon in our neighborhood, with the intention of bringing her up as a servant. The child ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... routine is more widespread than might be imagined; it is natural in its way, although we have just obtained it by an artificial process of reconstruction. One might say that it gives us the very quintessence of pedantry, which, at bottom, is nothing else than art ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... for Henry to do but to have a new date painted on the sign, and to draw on his reserve fund, but at bottom he was vastly perturbed. He had counted on a running start, and every week of delay was a vicious handicap. If he had remotely imagined how elastic a contractor's agreement could be, he would certainly have thought twice about ordering so many changes—he would have steered a middle course, and ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... finding he "understood German," he made the profound remark that the plums on the road were delicious. And now, hear how Heine draws the contrast between the Hellenic Teuton and himself, the Teutonic Hebrew: "At bottom Goethe and I are opposite natures and mutually repellent. He is essentially a man on whom life sits easily, who looks on enjoyment of life as the highest good, and though at times he has glimpses and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... border consisting of sheaves of wheat on the left and right, in the upper-center is an Arabic inscription of the Shahada (Muslim creed) below which are rays of the rising sun over the Takbir (Arabic expression meaning "God is great"), and at bottom center is a scroll bearing the ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... human progress depends at bottom upon labor, and it is becoming more and more doubtful whether the civilized races of mankind can be reckoned on to supply it for long on conditions akin to those which have in various forms prevailed ever ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... English, Prof. Huxley is without a peer, and his "collected essays" will always remain a precious heritage in English literature. For an example of the exact opposite, take the magazines and pamphlets of the so-called new thought, which at bottom is neither "new" nor "thought." In reality it is made up of words, words, and ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... are to be smaller at top than at bottom, were made in Imitation of the Boles or Trunks of Trees, and their use was taken from the Carpenters' Posts that are made to support the Building. The Architraves which are laid across many Pillars, represent Summers that join many Posts together. The Frises imitate ...
— An Abridgment of the Architecture of Vitruvius - Containing a System of the Whole Works of that Author • Vitruvius
... best privileges that a wife can enjoy. Let her at least not be a kept mistress. Let it be bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, if we are to live together in the married state. Between husband and wife a warm word now and then matters but little, if there be a thoroughly good understanding at bottom. But let there be that good understanding at bottom. What about this Protestant Church; and what about this tenant-right? Mr. Monk had been asking himself these questions for some time past. In regard to the Church, he had long made up his mind that the Establishment in Ireland ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... examples comes from no real, heart-felt demand, but only from a fancied or simulated demand,—from tradition, association; at second-hand in one shape or another. It is at bottom something of the same flunkeyism that in a more exaggerated form assumes heraldic bearings and puts its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of Cozumel the Spaniards found many hives of excellent honey; they found likewise considerable quantities of batatas, and swine having navels on their backs[1], by which articles of food they were much refreshed. They saw several temples, one of which was in form of a square tower, wide at bottom, and hollow at the top, having four large windows and galleries. In the hollow at the top, which was the chapel, there were several idols, behind which was a sort of vestry where the things used in the service of the temple were kept. At ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr
... to Evan's enthusiasm as he allowed himself to speculate on the future. Being "good stuff" at bottom, he forced himself, finally, on this May-day walk, to look at the sunlight on the lawns and trees; and when he doubled back to the boarding-house it was with a good imitation of his old football energy. At table he spoke blithely ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... proportions. No man can play the Deity to his fellow man with impunity—I mean, spiritual impunity, of course. For see: if I am at all satisfied with that relation, if it contents me to be in a position of generosity towards others, I must be remarkably indifferent at bottom to the gross social inequality which permits that position, and, instead of resenting the enforced humiliation of my fellow man to myself in the interests of humanity, I acquiesce in it for the sake ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... bit of the earth. All that men wear or eat or use; everything—shelter, food, tools, and toys comes from the land by labor. Even the capital used to make more of those things is taken from the land. The employer and the capitalist are, at bottom, only men who control the land or its products, who own rights of way, mining rights, or the fee of valuable lands. Thousands have "made" money by finding unexpected products in their land or of their ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... feel at bottom the loss of an old accomplice always amenable to the confidential whispers of a bargain; but in the first instance it cannot but rejoice at the fundamental weakening of a possible obstacle to its instincts of territorial expansion. There is a removal of that latent feeling of restraint which the ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... against those neighbors of theirs whose only crime it is, that they have charitably and humanely wished them to entertain more reasonable sentiments, and not always to sacrifice their interest to their passion. All this rage against unresisting dissent convinces me, that, at bottom, they are far from satisfied they are in the right. For what is it they would have? A war? They certainly have at this moment the blessing of something that is very like one; and if the war they enjoy at present be not sufficiently hot and ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... At bottom he was all right and a good-hearted giant, without any harm in him, for it is no harm to bark, if one stops there and does not bite, and it is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick. If ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... and sees it go! Not at all. Hence comes Atheism; come, as we say, many other isms; and as the sum of all comes vatetism, the reverse of heroism—sad root of all woes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man ever saw the above said wind element inclosed within its capsule, and finds it at bottom more deniable than conceivable; so too, he finds, in spite of Bridgewater bequests, your clockmaker Almighty an entirely questionable affair, a deniable affair; and accordingly denies it, and along with it so much ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... But as the slight coating of modesty with which every woman of the world is enveloped is hardly more than skin deep, they expanded under the influence of this equivocal adventure, enjoying themselves wildly at bottom, thoroughly in their element, dabbling in sensuality with the gusto of an epicurean cook preparing a toothsome delicacy ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... spelling; to contractions for convenience in daily speech; to differences in dialects; and to the fact that many of them come from different languages. Let us look at a few examples of each. At bottom, however, all these differences will be found to resolve themselves into differences of pronunciation. They are either differences in the pronunciation of the same word by different tribes, or by men in different counties, who speak different dialects; ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... tittle in order to attract him—nay, with a sort of bravado, she exaggerated those very traits which she knew he disliked. Yet all the time she had the highest appreciation of his most delicate refinements, while she felt also that he ought to see that at bottom she was just as refined as he, though her outward mask was not so elegant. I have no doubt whatever that, as Mrs. Winterbourne, she adapted herself to her new milieu with absolute success, and yet without loss of ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... through a rocky gorge formed by the rugged grey cliffs of Peyremale on the one bank and St. Julien on the other. The bare precipitous rocks rise up on either side like two cyclopean towers, flanking the gateway of the Cevennes. The gorge is so narrow at bottom that there is room only for the river running in its rocky bed below, and a roadway along either bank—that on the eastern side having been partly formed by blasting out the cliff which ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... than the vital strength that carries burdens. Grosswell says that children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth, and at the top of the intellectual scale it is the eternal type of research from sheer love of truth. Home, school, church, state, civilization, are measured in one supreme scale of values, viz., whether and how, for they aid in bringing youth ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... his philosophy of history rests entirely on "the great man theory." "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in the world," is for him "at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here." This conception, of course, brings him into sharp conflict with that scientific view of history which was already gaining ground when "Heroes and Hero-Worship" was written, and which since then has become even more popular ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... from the Vita Nuova. She had sat to him for a Sibylla Palmifera and a Madonna with the Lily. She had also sat to Andrea for a study of the head of Isabella in Boccaccio's story. Art therefore had conferred upon her the stamp of nobility. But, at bottom, she possessed no spiritual qualities whatsoever; she even became tiresome in the long-run by reason of that sentimental romanticism so often affected by English demi-mondaines which contrasts so strangely with the depravity ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... great question arose in this country which, though complicated with legal elements, was at bottom a human question, and nothing but a question of humanity. That was the slavery question. And is it not significant that it was then, and then for the first time, that women became prominent in politics in America? Not many women; those prominent in that day were so ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... his turn, but added, "Yet, I assure you, Sheffield, that Jennings, stiff and cold as he seems, is, I do believe, a very good fellow at bottom. He has before now spoken to me with a good deal of feeling, and has gone out of his way to do me favours. I see poor bodies coming to him for charity continually; and they say that his sermons at ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... his hands like fins, and letting the sea rock his long, skinny body. It was curious, but in spite of everything he was fond of Stanley Burnell. True, he had a fiendish desire to tease him sometimes, to poke fun at him, but at bottom he was sorry for the fellow. There was something pathetic in his determination to make a job of everything. You couldn't help feeling he'd be caught out one day, and then what an almighty cropper he'd come! At that moment an immense wave lifted Jonathan, rode past ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... That he was not an ancient debauchee, (Who like sour fruit, to stir their veins' salt tides, As acids rouse a dormant alkali,)[kf] Although ('t will happen as our planet guides) His youth was not the chastest that might be, There was the purest Platonism at bottom Of all his feelings—only he ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... understand about my art, 55 But you can hear at least when people speak: And that cartoon, the second from the door —It is the thing, Love! so such thing should be— Behold Madonna!—I am bold to say. I can do with my pencil what I know, 60 What I see, what at bottom of my heart I wish for, if I ever wish so deep— Do easily, too—when I say, perfectly, I do not boast, perhaps: yourself are judge, Who listened to the Legate's talk last week, 65 And just as much they used to say in France. At any rate 'tis easy, all of it! No sketches first, no studies, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... not wish the sense changed, or modified, to a hair's breadth—And you, not having studied the particular points so closely as I have, can not be quite sure that you do not change the sense when you do not intend it—For instance, in a note at bottom of first page, you propose to substitute "Democrats" for "Douglas"—But what I am saying there is true of Douglas, and is not true of "Democrats" generally; so that the proposed substitution would be ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... preposterous as to the NOBLESSE of France. Revenge, on the other hand, must have been as familiar to their habits of society as to those of the Cherokees or Mohawks. It is indeed, as described by Bacon, at bottom a kind of wild untutored justice; for the fear of retaliation must withhold the hands of the oppressor where there is no regular law to check daring violence. But though all this may be granted, and though we may allow that, such having been the case ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... We have now reviewed Mill's five Canons of Inductive Proof. At bottom, as he observes, there are only two, namely, Agreement and Difference: since the Double Method, Variations and Residues are only special forms of the other two. Indeed, in their function of proof, they are all reducible to one, namely, Difference; for the cogency ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... or truth to be vindicated he was in general safe from any further tokens of displeasure. In those cases Mr. Carleton was an adversary to be dreaded. As cool, as unwavering, as persevering there as in other things, he there as in other things no more failed of his end. And at bottom these characteristics remained the same; it was rather his humour than his temper that suffered a change. That grew more gloomy and less gentle. He was more easily irritated and would shew it more freely than in the old happy times ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... to the half-past six mass hadn't been the only occasion on which she ventured into the impious streets. She was frightened of the streets, but in a particular way, not as if of a danger but as if of a contamination. Yet she didn't fly back to her mountains because at bottom she had an indomitable character, a peasant tenacity of purpose, predatory ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... the innumerable flat asphalt bosses, which seem to have sprung up each from a separate centre, while the parting seams would be of much the same shape as those in the asphalt, broad and shallow atop, and rolling downward in a smooth curve, till they are at bottom mere cracks from two to ten feet deep. Whether these cracks actually close up below, and the two contiguous masses of pitch become one, cannot be seen. As far as the eye goes down, they are two, ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... Leader 200 feet long; brush from shore to low-water mark; remainder brush at bottom, netting at top. Head 60 feet long; outer pound 40 feet, middle pound 12 feet, inner pound 8 feet; brush below low-water line, netting above; plank floors in two ...
— The Salmon Fishery of Penobscot Bay and River in 1895-96 • Hugh M. Smith
... deficiencies, let us say. I felt myself at a disadvantage with him because he's such a remarkably virile young man and he constantly reminded you both of the West you love. It seemed fair to all of us to try him out—to find out whether at bottom he was a decent fellow or not. So I laid a little trap ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... at work the old interest in his subject might awake; but now he would work for the work's sake only, for the sake of the distraction it might afford him; and though through all his troubles he had preserved, at bottom, the quick humanity which had led him to choose medicine as his career, he was thinking less now of his old ambition to find a means of alleviation for one of the greatest ills of mankind than of ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... These intricate problems were solved at once, the machine constructed, and the system of accounts devised and put into operation; and so well were these difficult tasks performed that they still subsist, developing and growing with the nation, but at bottom the original arrangements of Hamilton. These complicated questions, answered so rapidly and yet so accurately in the first weeks of confusion incident to the establishment of a new government, show a familiarity and preparation, as well as a readiness of mind of a most unusual kind. Yet while ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... this or any other declaration; and what served to rivet their apprehensions, was a total removal of the whigs from all the employments, civil and military, which they had hitherto retained. These were now bestowed upon professed tories, some of whom were attached at bottom to the supposed heir of blood. At a time when the queen's views were maliciously misrepresented; when the wheels of her government were actually impeded, and her servants threatened with proscription by a powerful, turbulent, and implacable faction; no wonder that she discharged the partisans ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... however, so constituted that a man of this type mostly succeeds in hypnotizing his hearers into sharing his estimate of himself, and impressing upon them the conviction that he is a rare being instead of a commonplace mortal. He is not a bad sort of person at bottom, and ready to do one a friendly turn—if it does not entail too great inconvenience. In short, a good fellow, whose principal defect is the profound conviction that he was born superior to the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... followed him we did not and do not know. But we always followed him, whatever was the meaning of the fact, whatever was the nature of his mastery. And the strange thing was that we followed him the more completely the more nonsensical appeared the thing which he said. At bottom, I believe, if he had risen from our breakfast table and said: "I am going to find the Holy Pig with Ten Tails," we should have followed him to the end of ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... of philosophy. But there is another trait of the Mahayanists which distinguishes them from the Hinayanists from the philosophical point of view. The Mahayanists believed that all things were of a non-essential and indefinable character and void at bottom, whereas the Hinayanists only believed in the impermanence of all things, but did not ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... have just explained and now reiterate, I am convinced he was not bad at all, but good at bottom; so I contented myself ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... could the secrets of the heart be laid open, we cannot help believing, that those who have most earnestly endeavoured to reconcile the phenomena we know to exist, with the interpretation of scripture, from which they appear to vary, have been at bottom the least sincere in their ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... friends with the new masters; for Goethe and Schiller he abandoned Alfieri and Monti. "Yet if the Romantic School, by its name, its ties, its studies, its impressions, was allied to German traditions and French fashions, it was at bottom Italian in accent, aspiration, form, and motive.... Every one felt our hopes palpitating under the medieval robe; the least allusion, the remotest meanings, were caught by the public, which was in the closest accord with the writers. The middle ages were ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... from their violent gestures and distorted features, you would have concluded them to be bitter enemies; they were, however, nothing of the kind, but excellent friends all the time, and indeed very good-humoured fellows at bottom. Oh, the infirmities of human nature! When will man learn to become ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... question of the widest range of all was the decided attempt to alter the government and to overthrow the great minister, which gave perhaps the greatest employment to the assembly.[459] It was directed against the favourite personally, for he had now incurred universal hatred, but at bottom there also lay the definite intention of confirming the doctrine of ministerial responsibility by a ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... lined with excessively fine grass. In one or two nests very fine black fern-roots are intermingled with the grass lining. The nests vary a good deal in size, but are all extremely compact, and while some are decidedly massive, nearly an inch thick at bottom, others are scarcely a quarter of this in thickness beneath. In one the cavity is 2.5 inches broad by 3 long, and fully 2 deep; in another it is about 2.5 inches in diameter by scarcely 1.25 inches in depth. In one nest four fresh eggs were found; in another three fully incubated ones. ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... considerations of advantage—what is best for self, at the time being, or in the long run—in this world or the next. Why do this, that, or the other? because you will gain most by it, in the end. At bottom, the motive is taken for granted, whether openly admitted or more or less thinly ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... is good, we say, because the universe is good; and this goodness we expect to grasp in its entirety, not to-day, perhaps, nor to-morrow, but at least the day after. And so, like the proverbial ass, we are lured on by a wisp of hay. But being, at bottom, intelligent brutes, we begin, in time, to reflect; we put back our ears, and plant our feet stiff and rigid where we stand, and refuse to budge an inch till we have some further information as to the meaning of the journey into which we are being ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... no immediate alternative, being unable to form a majority either alone or with any other element than the Liberals, they should accept gladly anything that was offered, for example, a material reform like his Insurance bill—even though this measure is at bottom and in the long run purely ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... pounds more than it actually weighs; but unless a Strong Woman is really strong and no mistake, she might as well try to pass herself off as a Living Skeleton or a Two-Headed Girl at once. The fact is, the great majority of Freaks are genuine, and the business is a thoroughly honest one at bottom. Why, if you told the exact truth in the handbills about every Freak in my show, barring the Tattooed Girl and the Wild Man, they would still constitute a good drawing attraction ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... gives the right idea. 'The appetite,' or hunger, 'of the labourer labours for him' (that is, the need of food is the mainspring of work), and it lightens the work to which it impels. So hunger is a blessing. That is true in regard to the body. The manifold material industries of men are, at bottom, prompted by the need to earn something to eat. The craving which drives to such results is a thing to be thankful for. It is better to live where toil is needful to sustain life than in lazy lands where an hour's work will provide food for a week. But the saying reaches to ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... such it can be called, could hardly take a less objectionable form. Monime and Berenice, as ladies whose father was known as a merchant prince of colourless politics, were allowed free access to their friends at the palace. Young Ptolemaeus, who was a dark-eyed and, at bottom, dark-hearted youth, completely under the thumb of Pothinus, exerted himself, after a fashion, to be agreeable to his visitors; but he was too unfavourable a contrast to his gifted sister to win much grace in Cornelia's eyes. Agias, who was living with Cleomenes, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... before the rebellion, the year of his own death, he said that "Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or war; in all those points to be guided by her: and in a word, with her to live and to die." "At bottom," he added, "Ireland has no other choice; I mean no other rational choice." To a Parliamentary Union accompanied by emancipation Burke might have been brought by the rebellion. Protestant ascendency as understood ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... destined for stage presentation; for the poet will seek in vain for the mysterious excuse these crimes or passions demand. And yet, for all that, so deeply is this craving for mysterious excuse implanted within us, so satisfied are we that man is, at bottom, never as guilty as he may appear to be, that we are still fully content, when considering passions or crimes of this nature, to admit some kind of fatal intervention that at least may not seem too ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... have sent for me, Q., if it wasn't all right,' again argued the lady. 'She's stiff and hard and proud as pie-crust, but I think she's right at bottom.' Such was Mrs Quiverful's verdict about Mrs Proudie, to which in after times she always adhered. People when they get their income doubled usually think that those through whose instrumentality this little ceremony is performed are ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... the same time grows older, Feeling no joy in To-day, and full of care for To-morrow. Now look down from this height, and see how beauteous before us Lies the fair rich expanse, with vineyard and gardens at bottom; There are the stables and barns, and the rest of the property likewise; There I also descry the back of our house, in the gables Of the roof may be seen the window of my small apartment. When I remember the time when I used to look out for the moon there Half through the night, or perchance ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... considerations which judges most rarely mention, and always with an apology, are the secret root from which the law draws all the juices of life. I mean, of course, considerations of what is expedient for the community concerned. Every important principle which is developed by litigation is in fact and at bottom the result of more or less definitely understood views of public policy; most generally, to be sure, [36] under our practice and traditions, the unconscious result of instinctive preferences and inarticulate convictions, but none the less traceable ...
— The Common Law • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
... contention that our convictions on all the deeper subjects of thought are determined not by reason but by authority; whereby he provides us with an escape from the scepticism that menaces a philosopher who has proved all experience to be at bottom illusory. Mill, on the other hand, would make short work with authority wherever it checks or discourages the unlimited exercise of free individual inquiry; and in politics he would entrust the sovereign power to a representation of the entire aggregate of the community, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... of Rome. To take the case of the Roman Empire—the reader may possibly have been surprised to find the Roman Empire treated as the third act in the tragedy of Greece; yet when one studies the Empire one finds that it was essentially a Greek institution. Institutionally it was at bottom a federation of city-states, a solution of the political problem with which Greek society had been wrestling since the fifth century B. C. And even the non-municipal element, the centralized bureaucratic organization which Augustus spread like a fine, almost impalpable net ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... length, with a countenance of unusual severity, and a characteristic fierceness of manner and voice, he thus addressed me: "Young man, perhaps you are ignorant of the nature of the conduct you at present hold. May be, you do not know that where there is mystery, there is always something at bottom that will not bear the telling. Is this the way to obtain the favour of a man of consequence and respectability? To pretend to make a confidence, and then tell him a disjointed story that has ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... sunk Burr,—asking him how he liked to be "without a country." But it is clear from Burr's life, that nothing of the sort could have happened; and I mention this only as an illustration of the stories which get a-going where there is the least mystery at bottom. ...
— If, Yes and Perhaps - Four Possibilities and Six Exaggerations with Some Bits of Fact • Edward Everett Hale
... described as sanctimonious. God is not natural to the Caucasian; the Caucasian is not natural with God. The mere concept takes him into regions in which he feels uneasy. He may call his uneasiness reserve or reverence, or by some other dignified name; but at bottom it is neither more nor less than uneasiness. To minimise this distress he relegates God to special days, to special hours, to services and ceremonials. He can thus wear and bear his uncomfortable cloak of gravity for special times, after which he can be himself again. To appeal to God ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... mind a bit; it would be rather a pleasant change. Also, even if my father doesn't alter his mind, as he may, for he likes me at bottom because I resemble my dear mother, things ain't so very bad. I have got some money that she left me, L6,000 or L7,000, and I'll sell that 'Odontoglossum Pavo' for what it will fetch to Sir Joshua Tredgold—he was the man with the long beard who you ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... said, sir, 'What does he send me this damned stuff for?' but drinks, nevertheless." The Captain characterizes Percival as the roughest old devil that ever was in his manners, but a kind, good-hearted man at bottom. By and by comes in the steward. "Captain Percival is coming aboard of you, sir." "Well, ask him to walk down into the cabin"; and shortly down comes old Captain Percival, a white-haired, thin-visaged, weather-worn old gentleman, in a blue Quaker-cut coat, with tarnished lace ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Thou seest at bottom that I am not an abandoned fellow; and that there is a mixture of gravity in me. This, as I grow older, may increase; and when my active capacity begins to abate, I may sit down with the preacher, and resolve all my past life into vanity and vexation ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... (1) At bottom, of course, lay the natural restlessness and passions of men, the impatience of control, the longing for liberty, and the craving for self-expression. The combative instinct, pride, obstinacy, and notably the sex-instinct, were from earliest times spurring men on to a disregard ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... room, and it was because I drew away and went upstairs that he gave that look which filled Martha's soul with horror. She, it seems, meantime, was making it her business to watch him from the kitchen door. If Mr. Nicholls be a good man at bottom, it is a sad thing that nature has not given him the faculty to put goodness into a more attractive form. Into the bargain of all the rest he managed to get up a most pertinacious and needless dispute with the Inspector, in listening to which all my old unfavourable ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... electrical ships were far more effective for their purpose than the projectile cars used by the Martians. In fact, the principle upon which they were based was, at bottom, so simple that it seemed astonishing the Martians ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... boy at bottom, Felix, and mean well, and I am only sorry not to be able to hinder you from throwing yourself away for life by trying to do what is morally impossible, in a foolish spirit of independence. Do not ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by heart," explained Yekil, with the authority of a rabbi, "but we do know some Psalms, and these we recite on every holiday. For, at bottom, are mere words the main thing? Your real prayer is not what you say with your lips, but what you feel with the whole of your heart. As long as the words are in the holy tongue, it all depends on the feelings you wish to put into ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... her visit to her American relations. It is not exactly apparent why she should have termed this enterprise a failure, inasmuch as she had been treated with the highest distinction for which allowance had been made in American institutions. Her irritation came, at bottom, from the sense, which, always present, had suddenly grown acute, that the social soil on this big, vague continent was somehow not adapted for growing those plants whose fragrance she especially inclined to inhale and by which she liked to see ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... by luting on a small copper pot or vessel about 5 inches deep, 8 inches wide at mouth, and about 10 inches at bottom, ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... 4. Four CHIVES two long and two short. TIPS at first large, turgid, oval, touching at bottom, of a yellowish colour, and often spotted; lastly changing both their form and situation ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... at bottom owing to the proprietaries, our hereditary governors, who, when any expense was to be incurred for the defense of their province, with incredible meanness instructed their deputies to pass no act for levying the necessary taxes, unless ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... we see the nature of the human heart without faith and the knowledge of Christ; at bottom it is but the heart of a Cain, murderous toward its neighbor. Nor can anything better be expected from him who is not a Christian. The Scriptures repeatedly denounce such faithless hypocrites as bloodthirsty and ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... hand. The claims of morality to our allegiance, so far as its precepts are solidly established, rest on the same positive base as our faith in the truth of physical laws. Moral principles, when they are true, are at bottom only registered generalisations from experience. They record certain uniformities of antecedence and consequence in the region of human conduct Want of faith in the persistency of these uniformities is only a little less fatuous in the moral order than a corresponding want of ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the possibility of {6} infinite gain. Go, then, and take holy water, and have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,—Cela vous fera croire et vous abetira. Why should you not? At bottom, what ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... fortune of his children, if he approved of such books; and that, on the contrary, he would find favour by hurting me. We must therefore have recourse to Corcellius or Corvinus.' He elsewhere complains of the too great timidity of this old friend, who at bottom approved of Grotius's sentiments, but durst not own them publicly, because he was not so independent ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler |
