"Attribute" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... recording that Joseph Brandon immersed me, all excepting my head, in a quart pot. No one but a Joe Brandon, or a top sawyer, could have had so filthy an idea. I have never been told whether the pot contained any drainings, but I must attribute to this ill-advised act a most plebeian fondness that I have for strong beer, and which seems to be, even in these days of French manners and French ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... thoughts of seeing you again, and if you detect any heavy clouds lowering, do not attribute them to deliberate anger, for they will be wholly chased away by your promise to strive more earnestly after the true and pure happiness, based on active exertion. Something hovered before me in my last letter, which though perhaps ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... he claimed to date from Pythagoras and Philolaus. In this connection it is curious that he makes no mention of Aristarchus, who I think will be regarded by conservative historians as his only demonstrated predecessor. To the hold of the older ideas upon his mind we must attribute the fact that in constructing his system he took great pains to make as little change as possible ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... Revelation, highest, fullest, best, is the Self-unveiling of Deity in the kosmos, the revealing of attribute after attribute, power after power, beauty after beauty, in all the various forms which in their totality compose the universe. He shows His splendour in the sun, His infinity in the star-flecked fields of space, ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... the purposes of the planter best of all, with regard to the hardiness of the plant, the easiness of the culture, and the quantity of the produce. Of the quality there is some dispute not yet settled amongst the planters themselves; nor can they distinctly tell when they are to attribute the faults of their indigo to the nature of the plant, to the seasons, which have much influence upon it, or to some defect ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... list, I give prominence to the following letter, addressed by me to the Correspondent of October 28, 1865. Some of my paradoxers attribute to me articles in this or that journal; and others may think—I know some do think—they know me as the writer of reviews of some of the very books noticed here. The following remarks will explain the way in which ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... all things in God. But Mallebranche had already taught that God is the "sole vision" of all of us; and therefore, if that theory be correct, she has failed to assign to the poet of the Fall any distinctive attribute which distinguishes him from other men. "Cowley" is well characterized. "Burns" ought to have been better. "Byron" pleases us. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... secular affairs or to interfere in any way with the political concerns of the government in which they were laboring. That there were occasional instances of the disregard of this regulation by the enthusiastic members of the order may be supposed, but it will be unjust and unfounded to attribute to this society a settled policy of interference in the affairs of the nations where they were ...
— Japan • David Murray
... talking to an optimist, whose nerves have been getting shaky. We fancy that a straw vote of the rocking-chair fleet on a sanitarium porch would show a preponderance of optimists. What brought them there? Worry, which is brother to optimism. We attribute our good health and reasonable amount of hair to the fact that we never flirted with optimism, except for a period of about five years, during which time we lost more hair than in all the ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... light of the mind. This light penetrates to the bottom of matters; it remarks all that can be remarked, and perceives what appears imperceptible. Therefore we must agree that it is the extent of the light in the mind that produces all the effects which we attribute ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... how you prosper. Beaten and bruised as I am, I shall certainly manage to throw you out of time!" Sachs has unperturbedly let him spend himself. "My good friend, you are labouring under a delusion. You are free to attribute to me what actions you please... but I have not the least thought of competing." "Lies and deceit!" roars Beckmesser, "I know better!" Sachs quietly repeats his statement. "What else I have in mind is no affair of yours. But concerning the contest you are in error."—"Not in the contest? ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... known who first changed the ancient towers into bastions. Some attribute it to an Italian, and with considerable show of reason, for a bastion was built at Turin as early as 1461. Achmet Pacha, it is said, fortified Otranto in this way, in 1480, but whether the system was previously known among the Turks cannot be determined. Others attribute ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... sides of the question. His own opinions are not strictly to the point, but may as well be stated at once, so that the reader, if he finds or fancies a bias in the views to be expressed in the sequel, may know to what to attribute it. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... the insufficiency of our resources for the continuance of the war was understood to have been the principal objection urged against the two former Letters on the Proposals for Peace. In performing with reverential diffidence this duty of friendship, care has been taken not to attribute to Mr. Burke any sentiment which is not most explicitly known, from repeated conversations, and from much correspondence, to have been decidedly entertained by that illustrious man. One passage of nearly three pages, containing a censure of our defensive system, is borrowed from a private letter, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... comedy took to her bed. 'The Comic Muse, long sick, is now a- dying,' wrote Garrick in his prologue to She Stoops to Conquer, and she had not to apologise, like Charles the Second, for the unconscionable time she was about it. It is a little crude to attribute her demise to Jeremy Collier and his Short View—a block painted to look like a thunderbolt. It is not a matter of decency, of alteration or improvement in manners. A comedy might be wholly Congrevean without ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... consequences, the speeches of the characters are exaggerated, and therefore at every step the possibility of artistic impression is interfered with. Whatever people may say, however they may be enraptured by Shakespeare's works, whatever merits they may attribute to them, it is perfectly certain that he was not an artist and that his works are not artistic productions. Without the sense of measure, there never was nor can be an artist, as without the feeling of rhythm there can not be a musician. Shakespeare ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... Cassidy, was a combination of irresponsibility, humor, good nature, love of fighting, and nonchalance when face to face with danger. His most prominent attribute was that of always getting into trouble without any intention of so doing; in fact, he was much aggrieved and surprised when it came. It seemed as though when any "bad man" desired to add to his reputation he invariably selected Hopalong as the means (a fact due, ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... himself to a strictly objective presentation of results, it is clear from an unpublished manuscript (thesis for the Doctorate of Philosophy, deposited in the Library of Harvard University) that he would attribute to monkeys simple ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... use hellebore (dry powdered form), especially valuable in destroying the worms when berries are almost ready for market, and on which it is dangerous to use arsenical poisons. I never was troubled with the currant worm cane borer. I attribute the absence of this dreaded insect to my keeping all old wood cut out, which is generally infested ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... whatever one does not understand! "Law,"—how ready to explain away the inexplicable! Up to this point death had struck me as a most unfortunate phenomenon. Its personal disabilities I found it easy to attribute to some natural law with which my previous education had left me unfamiliar. Now, standing baffled there in that incredible manner half of tragedy, half of the absurd,—even the petty element of the undignified in the position adding to my distress,—a ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... four or five leagues in diameter. The mountainous lands that surround this basin are known only to the natives. There are found those great boa serpents known to the Chayma Indians by the name of guainas, and to which they fabulously attribute a sting under the tail. Descending the Sierra de Meapire to the west, we find at first a hollow ground (tierra hueca) which, during the great earthquakes of 1766, threw out asphaltum enveloped in viscous petroleum. Farther ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... debts, supposed they had protected the people against the evils of an excessive and irredeemable paper currency. They are not responsible for the existing anomaly that a Government endowed with the sovereign attribute of coining money and regulating the value thereof should have no power to prevent others from driving this coin out of the country and filling up the channels of circulation with paper which does ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... the concord ceased. Some little favouritism in the bestowal of a bone, or a dish of food, caused the outraged remainder to raise furious protests. I have heard some chroniclers attribute the discord to an affair of love and jealousy. At any rate, whatever the origin, the altercation speedily fired both hall and kitchen, and divided the company into partisans for this cat or ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... personal profit to the one who performs the miracle. They are for the good of others. The blind and deaf and lame are healed. The sick and dead are raised. Lepers are cured and sins forgiven. Moreover, those who perform the miracle claim no power of their own, but attribute it all to God and only perform the miracle ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... disaster? Why this man saved and that man lost? Who has arranged that my husband should live a few short happy years in the world, and the happiest days in those years with me these last few weeks, and then be taken from me?" I heard no one attribute all this to a Divine Power who ordains and arranges the lives of men, and as part of a definite scheme sends such calamity and misery in order to purify, to teach, to spiritualize. I do not say there were not people who thought and said they saw Divine Wisdom in it ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... continued the Professor "and the heartier they are the better; might even be convivially inclined—if so tempted—but prudent—in a degree," loiteringly concluded the speaker, as though unable to find the exact bump with which to bolster up the last named attribute. ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... the living world by barriers which have never yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution can endow any single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of life. Only by bending down into this dead world of some living form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality, without this preliminary contact with life they remain fixed in the inorganic sphere forever. It is a very mysterious Law which guards in this way the portals of ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... attribute the recent night stampede of sheep in the Midlands, when thousands of them jumped their hurdles, to the influence of a large number of people concentrating on a well-known remedy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... frontispieces of Siena, Pisa and Orvieto. We are met by a further difficulty in identifying the surviving statues from the fact that the contracts given to sculptors by the Chapter do not always specify the personage to be represented. Moreover, in many cases the statues have no symbol attribute or legend, which usually guide our interpretation of mediaeval art. Thus Donatello is paid pro parte solutionis unius figure marmoree;[3] or for figuram marmoream.[4] Even when an obvious and ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... the formation of mineral veins, to which I have alluded, are those of Prof. Von Groddek[1] and Dr. Sandberger,[2] who attribute the filling of veins to exudations of mineral solutions from the wall rocks (i.e., lateral secretions), and those of Mr. S.F. Emmons,[3] and Mr. G.F. Becker,[4] who have been studying, respectively, the ore deposits of Leadville and of the Comstock, by whom the ores are credited ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... drawn up in order and readiness, with their muskets in the rests, whatever might befal. This order was so strictly enforced, that no man was permitted to go forward to speak with the natives, except with special leave. I attribute our continuing in such amity and friendship with the natives to these precautions, for the Hollanders had lately five or six of their men slain by the treachery ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. The vague and illusive ideas thus aroused fall in so well with the dumb emotion we were already feeling, that we attribute this emotion to those ideas, and persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... work out our own salvation. It has been your lot to witness many disasters, but had these things occurred with other girls as the central figure, would you have attributed this hideous curse to their lives? Would you? Never. But you readily attribute it to your own. I am an old man my dear; older to-day, perhaps, by far than my years call for. I have seen so much of misery and trouble that sometimes I have thought that all life is just one long sea of disaster. But it isn't—unless we choose to make ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... believe him. Out o' de way, you trash! Eigh! me too much pleased like devil.' The one constant and spontaneous ejaculation was, 'Yah! Massa too muchy handsome! Garamighty! Buckra berry fat!' The latter attribute was the source of genuine admiration; but the object of it hardly appreciated its recognition, and waved off his subjects with a mixture ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... herewith agradable, agreeable, pleasant arpillera, bagging asegurar, to insure atribuir, to attribute el billar, billiards bola, ball calzado, footwear camas, armazones de cama, bedsteads carne seca, jerked beef chalecos, vests consignacion, consignment correas, belts, belting (machinery) corresponsal, correspondent egoista, selfish ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... air. Such facts must be considered, though they diminish the poetry which rhetoricians and sentimentalists have cast over the melancholy of Lincoln's temperament. Yet they fall far short of wholly accounting for a gloom which many have loved to attribute to the mysticism of a great destiny, as though the awful weight of his immense task was making itself felt in his strange, brooding nature long years before any human prophet could have forecast any part of that which ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... making comedy of his own honest bewilderment and his mingled relief and mortification when she at last refused him. We may take it as evidence of the natural want of perception and right instinctive judgment in minor matters which some who knew and loved him attribute to him. But, besides that, the man who found relief in this ill-conceived exercise of humour was one in whom the prospect of marriage caused some strange and ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... in love with some. Charles Hayter seemed aware of being slighted, and yet Henrietta had sometimes the air of being divided between them. Anne longed for the power of representing to them all what they were about, and of pointing out some of the evils they were exposing themselves to. She did not attribute guile to any. It was the highest satisfaction to her to believe Captain Wentworth not in the least aware of the pain he was occasioning. There was no triumph, no pitiful triumph in his manner. He had, probably, never heard, and never thought of any claims of Charles Hayter. He was ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... watch the astonishment, not unmixed with fear, reflected upon their faces as they listened to his tale. Clearly they could not understand how we had reached the lake and been found floating on it, and were inclined to attribute our presence to supernatural causes. Then the narrative proceeded, as I judged from the frequent appeals that our guide made to the girl, to the point where we had shot the hippopotami, and we at once ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... instruction in the Philippines was always and exclusively religious, and was directed by the Roman priests, the persistence of these old superstitions are evident proofs of the failure of religious education. As an excuse missionaries will perhaps attribute this to the invincible rudeness of the Filipinos, which we shall admit for courtesy's sake and to avoid discussions. But what is all-important is not that they were unable to take out something (of the superstitions), out of ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... attribute this outburst to her love we must not forget that, when it comes to the test in court, and she holds the Jew in her hand and might save her ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... composer, Purcell; though the eighteenth was adorned with meritorious writers of the stamp of Blow and Boyce; yet it is obvious that the art remained among us unprogressive, at a time when it was making gigantic strides in Italy and Germany. It is always dangerous to attribute the decline of art in a nation to any one cause. Yet I think it can scarcely be contested that the change of manners and of temperament wrought in England by the prevalence of Puritan opinion, had much to answer for in this premature decay of music. We may therefore ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... people is to attribute to the king what they do themselves. They fight. Whose the glory? The king's. They pay. Whose the generosity? The king's. Then the people love him for being so rich. The king receives a crown from the poor, and returns them a farthing. How generous he is! The colossus which is the pedestal ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... precedes matrimony, and of which I have spoken, was practised long before the conquest of these isles by the Spaniards. This would seem to prove the origin I attribute to the Tagalocs, whom I believe to be descended from the Malays, and these latter, being all Mussulmans, would naturally have preserved some of the ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... "We both of us know that things only are, to us, such as they picture themselves in the prepared mirror of our souls. I see grey, grey, and white, white, and have accustomed myself in my yearning after knowledge, not to attribute the smallest part to my own idiosyncrasy, if such indeed there be existing in my empty breast. You look straight onwards as I do, but in you each idea is transfigured, for in your soul invisible shaping powers are at work, which set the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Gladstone's were! I have considered that possibility too, and rejected it. I cannot cite all the stories about Caesar which seem to me to show that he was genuinely original; but let me at least point out that I have been careful to attribute nothing but originality to him. Originality gives a man an air of frankness, generosity, and magnanimity by enabling him to estimate the value of truth, money, or success in any particular instance quite independently of convention ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... so do some authors attribute generation and corruption to things that are contracted together and dissolved. But so far has he been from stirring and taking away that which is, or contradicting that which evidently appears, that he casts not so much as one single word out of the accustomed use; but taking away ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... I after him, and round to the left with the speed of lightning, but apparently not without the lightning's attribute of attracting attention to itself. There was a hullabaloo across the square behind us, and I looked round to see the crowd there breaking in our direction, as I rushed after Raffles under an arch and up the alley in ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... hissed out of existence, the better it will be for the cause of talent and the cause of morals; contempt of that is the condition of insight. He had no genius, it seems. O no! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and shining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can spout patriotic speeches, or some versifier, whose muse can "Hail Columbia," but not of the man who supported states on his arm, and carried America in his brain. The madcap Charles Townshend, the motion of whose pyrotechnic ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... that this girl, whom I had never thought of save as one might think of one's younger sister, suddenly I realised that she was a woman, and a radiantly, perhaps even a dangerously handsome woman. I saw suddenly that she was not merely an attribute, an aspect, of another, not merely Alfred Childe's daughter; she was a personage in herself, a ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... variations—which I thought excellent, and from which I gathered that he was impervious to a joke. His performance of other pianoforte music at a concert gave me less pleasure. I even thought it impertinent that the friends of this gentleman professed themselves unable to attribute anything beyond "extraordinary technical power" to "Liszt and his school," whilst the execution of Herr Brahms appeared so painfully dry, inflexible and wooden. I should have liked to see Herr Brahms' ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." See {vanilla}. 2. The attribute that causes something to be {flavorful}. Usually used in the phrase "yields additional flavor". "This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... aggregate wealth of Great Britain, or that of other nations? This is a question frequently asked by inquiring Congressmen, who imagine that an answer may readily be had from one of those gifted librarians who is invested with that apocryphal attribute, commonly called omniscience. But the inquirer is suddenly confronted by the fact (and a very stubborn fact it is) that not a single foreign nation has ever taken any census of wealth whatever. In Great Britain (about which country ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... authors—"the ladies and gentlewomen of England." With the instinct, almost, of a religious reformer, Lyly saw that to succeed he must enlist the ladies on his side. And the experiment was so successful that I am inclined to attribute the pre-eminence of Lyly among other euphuists to this fact alone. "Hatch the egges his friendes had laid" he certainly did, but he fed the chicks upon a patent food of his own invention. Mr Bond suggests that the general attention ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... close observation, strict economy, and the determination to give my employer the best that was in me, without regard to the compensation, these were my impelling motives in those early days, and to these I attribute all the prosperity with which Heaven has blessed me." This is what Mr. Carnegie says of himself, and his words are full of encouragement and inspiration to the young man who has the same ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... last illustration, Flacius declared: "Strigel, accordingly, holds that we have the faculty to desire and receive the food, i.e., the benefits of God. Forsooth, you thereby attribute to corrupt man a very great power with respect to spiritual things. Now, then, deny that this opinion is Pelagian." (209.) "Your statements agree with those of Pelagius, yet I do not simply say that you are a Pelagian; for a good man may fall into an error which he does not see." ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... inherent qualities, under her cunning and guarded instigation. Once set in action, his suspicion of Carmina passed beyond all limits. There could be no reason but a bad reason for that barefaced attempt to entrap him into a reconciliation. Every evil motive which it was possible to attribute to a girl of her age, no matter how monstrously improbable it might be, occurred to him when he recalled her words, her look, and her manner at their meeting on the stairs. His paltry little mind, at other times preoccupied in contemplating himself and his abilities, was now so completely ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... continue the race; while of those who did not fall, too many returned with tainted and weakened constitutions, to injure, it may be, generations yet unborn. The middle classes, being mostly engaged in peaceful pursuits, suffered less of this decimation of their finest young men; and to that fact I attribute much of their increasing preponderance, social, political, and intellectual, to this very day. One cannot walk the streets of any of our great commercial cities without seeing plenty of men, young and middle- aged, whose whole bearing and stature shows that the manly vigour of our middle ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Wring out their all-infecting malady, Too closely press the verge. Accurst be thou! Inveterate wolf! whose gorge ingluts more prey, Than every beast beside, yet is not fill'd! So bottomless thy maw!—Ye spheres of heaven! To whom there are, as seems, who attribute All change in mortal state, when is the day Of his appearing, for whom fate reserves To chase her hence?—With wary steps and slow We pass'd; and I attentive to the shades, Whom piteously ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... also believed that all individuals are sovereign prior to the formation of civil society. Yet very few, if any, of them believed that they remained sovereign after the adoption of the constitution; and we may attribute to their belief in the conventional origin of all government,—the almost universal belief of the time among political philosophers,—the little account which they made of the historical facts that prove that ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... from agricultural activity, often on a subsistence basis. The formal economy grew by an average of about 3% annually in 1995-97, but GDP declined slightly in 1998 and 1999. On a per capita basis, real income has stagnated at 1980 levels. Most observers attribute Paraguay's poor economic performance to political uncertainty, corruption, lack of progress on structural reform, substantial internal and external debt, and deficient infrastructure. ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the operatives. From two to four hundred persons are often confined in workshops six hundred feet long, with no means of ventilation except windows on one side only. The air is breathed and re-breathed, until the operatives complain of languor and headache, which they attribute to overwork. The real cause of the headache is the inhalation of foul air at every expansion of the lungs. If the proprietors would provide efficient means for ventilating their workshops, the cost of construction ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... see that it is in working order. We are sure to judge a woman in whose house we find ourselves for the first time, by her surroundings. We judge her temperament, her habits, her inclinations, by the interior of her home. We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture. We attribute vulgar qualities to those who are content to live in ugly surroundings. We endow with refinement and charm the person who welcomes us in a delightful room, where the colors blend and the proportions are as perfect as in ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... or might not have been liked by this person or that; but the world in general will adore her, because nature has made them to adore beauty and the sex, apart from prejudices right or wrong. Youth will attribute virtues to her, whether she has them or not; middle-age be unable to help gazing on her; old-age dote on her. She is womankind itself, in form and substance; and that is a stronger thing, for the most part, than all our figments about it. Two musical names, "Angelica ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... necessities that compass our chaotic sense when we ascend by continual abstraction to the absolute, without entangling ourselves vainly in those wildernesses that no created intellect can range or measure—even one sole attribute of God, His holiness, makes it as impossible for Him to proceed except by certain steps as it would be impossible for a man, though a free agent, and apparently master, as he feels and thinks, of his own life, to cut his throat while in a ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... had? "Without a memory, in what manner was this illustrious personage to recall her duties to her royal consort, her duties to her royal offspring, her duties to her royal self? Memory was peculiarly a royal attribute; and without its possession no one could properly be deemed of high and ancient lineage. Memory referred to the past, and the consideration due to royalty was scarcely ever a present consideration, but a consideration connected ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... where Mars would again be visible, but alas, I found it much too heavy. I felt keenly disappointed at the sudden termination of this strange phenomenon, but, upon reflection, I realized that it was only the simultaneous disappearance of Mars and the glow on the film that had caused me to attribute waves to that far source. The more I pondered upon the matter, the more impossible it seemed, yet, strange to say, the more convinced I became that the theory was correct. Light-waves, I argued, unlike the wireless waves in common use, could be received only when the two objects were in line of ...
— Zarlah the Martian • R. Norman Grisewood
... suppuration: but that God's good handiwork, called nature, triumphed at last; and that therefore it came to pass that the prince was out of danger within three days of the operation. But he was taught, it seems, to attribute his recovery to a very different source from that of a German knife. For on the morning of the 9th, when the Moor was gone, and Don Carlos lay seemingly lifeless, there descended into his chamber a Deus e machina, ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... made known to me. But I am more resigned than I was, and I am doing my best to set my worldly affairs in order. My one great anxiety is that Rachel should be kept in ignorance of the truth. If she knew it, she would at once attribute my broken health to anxiety about the Diamond, and would reproach herself bitterly, poor child, for what is in no sense her fault. Both the doctors agree that the mischief began two, if not three years since. I am sure you will keep my secret, Drusilla—for ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... and gave them a new interpretation. We are justified in believing that he accepted nothing but what was conformable to his nature; the Madonna represented his profoundest feeling and, like Dante (I attribute the greatest importance to this), he created a new deity, moulded in the shape of his first love, and placed it by the side of the universal Queen of Heaven, the Madonna of the Catholic ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the throne; also very commonly as "Monsieur") dancing in obedience to her manipulation of the wires. In this, as in all the previous matrimonial negotiations, not one of her ministers seems ever to have grasped her policy; the policy, that is, which modern historians attribute to her: a policy of which the successful issue really depended on its never being suspected; which was possible only to one who was entire mistress of all arts of dissimulation; which did in fact succeed completely every time she applied it; a policy however of which no statesman ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... into the porch of the vicarage. At Wykeham there is a very plain cross of uncertain age, and Ellerburne, Lastingham, Sinnington, Kirkdale, Kirby Misperton, and Middleton are all rich in carved crosses and incised slabs. Pickering church only possesses one fragment of stone work that we may safely attribute to a date prior to the Conquest. It seems to be part of the shaft or of an arm of a cross, and bears one of the usual types of dragon as well as knot or interlaced ornament. The font, which has been ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... American life and genius. To suggest that these were all the agents of a Jewish conspiracy, either consciously or unconsciously, is to invite and deserve ridicule. In truth, Socialism is as Anglo-Saxon as Magna Charta and as American as the Declaration of Independence, and we might as well attribute either or both of these to Jewish intrigue as Socialism. It is true that the organized Socialist movement in America has long spoken with a foreign accent and borne the imprint of an alien psychology, but that psychology, ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo
... yours, my dear Emmeline. Mine is so quiet that it does not deserve the name of enthusiasm," replied Ellen, laughing. "Nor could I have imagined you would have honoured me so far as to give me an attribute ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... untutored savages: and creditable ideas were not absent from the Eleusinia. But when we use the quotation, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," our meaning, though not very definite, is a meaning which it would be hazardous to attribute to a black boy,—or to Sophocles. The idea of the New Life appears to occur in Australian Mysteries: a tribesman is buried, and rises at a given signal. But here the New Life is rather that of the lad admitted to full ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... amid dead things: it is a chill at first, but it takes root, it warms, it expands, it lays hold of universal joys. So the man loves: so the God loves. Those who know this divine love are wise indeed. They love not one or another: they are love itself. Think well over this: power alone is not the attribute of the Gods; there are no such fearful spectres in that great companionship. And now, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... of the Brain to the Voice we have not only a physiological but a psychological problem to deal with. Since language is essentially a human attribute, we can only study the relation of the Brain to Speech by observations on human beings who during life have suffered from various speech defects, and then correlate these defects with the anatomical changes found in the brain ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... present race of Chippeways were induced to work so perseveringly to obtain it, why did not the children continue to work, at least enough to finish the jobs already commenced by their progenitors? We cannot consistently attribute the Herculean labor expended on these mines to the ancestors of the indolent race of North American Indians. We incline, rather, to the opinion that the miners were the mound-builders, who resided south of the mines, and ultimately found a home in Mexico. The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... consideration, and, as Dr. Perowne puts it in his valuable work on the Psalms, stand on a par with the subscriptions to the Epistles in the New Testament. Regarding them thus, and yet examining the psalms to which they are prefixed, there seem to be about forty-five which we may attribute with some confidence to David, and with these we shall be ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... organization and constitution of individual and private property, the traditions themselves attribute this to the second king of Rome, the real founder of Roman society, who divided the territory among the citizens, marking off the limits of individual shares and placing them under the protection of religion. In this way a religious charter was granted ...
— Public Lands and Agrarian Laws of the Roman Republic • Andrew Stephenson
... in connection with this Boer ammunition which shows once more how very easy it is to attribute all kinds of sins to one's enemy. Someone came running up to a little group of us with several packets of cartridges, ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... am not mistaken, time will show. Moreover, I would have you remark that the lady in question is not suffering at all, and that the 'untold agony of soul' you attribute to Isaacs is a wholesome medicine for one with such a soul as his. And now I am going, for you are not the sort of person with whom I can enjoy talking very long. You are violent and argumentative, though you are sometimes amusing. I am rarely violent, and I never ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... the presence of Monsieur and Madame Jules had a pair of feet so little covered by her shoes that only a slim black line was visible between the carpet and her white stockings. This peculiar foot-gear, which Parisian caricaturists have well-rendered, is a special attribute of the grisette of Paris; but she is even more distinctive to the eyes of an observer by the care with which her garments are made to adhere to her form, which they clearly define. On this occasion she was trigly dressed in a green gown, with a white ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... scandalised that any one should attribute the possibility of such wayward behaviour to the venerable Earl. In his agitation he ate another muffin. After all, if the nobleman did go jumping in the winter why should this young and horsey man ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... with that question. For some of them God is a number; some swear by dogs and geese and plane-trees. [Footnote: Socrates made a practice of substituting these for the names of Gods in his oaths.] Some again banish all other Gods, and attribute the control of the universe to a single one; I got rather depressed on learning how small the supply of divinity was. But I was comforted by the lavish souls who not only make many, but classify; there was a First God, and second ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... Somebody or Something which governed his going or staying? Was it not preordination? Was not fatalism, then, the cheapest sort of belief in an unchangeable Somebody or Something, representing purpose and law and will? Attribute to anything power, and there was God, whatever His qualities, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... into the domain of morality. He defines a state as a company of men united for the purpose of living well and happily; he thinks it arose from natural right and social contract. For the first time Bodin differentiates the state from the government, defining sovereignty (majestas) as the attribute of the former. He classifies governments in the usual three categories, and refuses to believe in mixed governments. Though England puzzles him, he regards her as an absolute monarchy. This is the form that he decidedly prefers, for he calls the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... follies—her wilful intimacy with Harriet Smith; but it was too tender a subject.—She could not enter on it.—Harriet was very seldom mentioned between them. This, on his side, might merely proceed from her not being thought of; but Emma was rather inclined to attribute it to delicacy, and a suspicion, from some appearances, that their friendship were declining. She was aware herself, that, parting under any other circumstances, they certainly should have corresponded more, and that her intelligence would ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... time, he had, among other things, managed to break up a gang of smugglers, track down a counterfeiting ring, and capture three kidnappers. For reasons which he could neither understand nor explain, no one seemed willing to attribute ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... is untrue," said he to the Jew. "You attribute injustice to God. He cannot love your nation above the rest. Nay rather, even if it be true that of old He favored the Israelites, it is now nineteen hundred years since they angered Him, and caused Him to destroy their nation and scatter them over the earth, so that their ...
— What Men Live By and Other Tales • Leo Tolstoy
... Mr. James's life—as we agree to understand events—may be told in a very few words. His race is Irish on his father's side and Scotch on his mother's, to which mingled strains the generalizer may attribute, if he likes, that union of vivid expression and dispassionate analysis which has characterized his work from the first. There are none of those early struggles with poverty, which render the lives of so many distinguished Americans monotonous reading, to record in his case: the cabin hearth-fire ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... for to will is to do. He was not a functionary; for the functionary acts and replies. The king did not reply. He was but a majestic inutility in the constitution. The functions destroyed, they left the functionary. He had but one attribute, the suspensive veto, which consisted of his right to suspend, for three years, the execution of the Assembly's decrees. He was an obstacle; legal, but impotent for the wishes of the nation. It was evident that the Constituent Assembly, perfectly convinced of ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... wrongs had been resented and resisted in the first instance the present war might have been avoided. One outrage, however, permitted to pass with impunity almost necessarily encouraged the perpetration of another, until at last Mexico seemed to attribute to weakness and indecision on our part a forbearance which was the offspring of magnanimity and of a sincere desire to preserve friendly relations with ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Polk • James Polk
... broken faith of May second, the day of the Madrid riots, may be attributed the turn of Napoleon's fortunes. How far he was responsible for each of Murat's successive acts cannot be known. With exaggerated conceptions of the Emperor's ubiquity, some attribute every detail in every step to the direct intervention of the master. This is unproved and highly improbable; but the spirit was his, and the use he made of each occasion as it arose is matter of history. The fires of rebellion were lighted thenceforth on every ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... free-love propaganda exists within their party, frequently argue that prostitution, now so prevalent throughout the world, will under Socialism no longer remain the dreadful menace to society that it is today. They attribute the prevalence of this vice principally to poverty, and argue that in the new state, all persons will be abundantly supplied with the goods of this world, and consequently no one will be obliged to indulge in this sin for obtaining ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... as no better than the rudest barbarians, dwelling in caves, subsisting on reptiles, herbs, and wild fruits, and strangers to the simplest arts of civilized life. Other and more reliable traditions, however, attribute to them a knowledge of agriculture, and some little acquaintance with navigation; while there is a strong probability that they were the authors of those huge structures commonly called Cyclopean, remains of which are still ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... unknown faculties in the soul. Such at least is my own impression. It seems to me that we cannot reasonably attribute the prevision of the future and mental sight to a nervous action of ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... times, lectured in nearly every city in the Union and has been associated with every important victory that equal suffrage has won of late years. She was in Colorado during the amendment campaign, and the women attribute their success to her more than to any other person from outside the State. She was in Idaho, where all four political parties put suffrage planks into their platforms and the amendment carried. She ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... their neglect of the warnings of the goddess they attribute all the reverses which have of late years befallen their sect. It is expressly forbidden, in the creed of the old Thugs, to murder women or cripples. The modern Thugs have become unscrupulous upon this point, murdering women, and even children, with ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... nobles were not generally speaking an intemperate race. While indulging themselves in the pleasures of the table, they aimed at delicacy, but avoided excess, and were apt to attribute gluttony and drunkenness to the vanquished Saxons, as vices peculiar to their inferior station. Prince John, indeed, and those who courted his pleasure by imitating his foibles, were apt to indulge to excess in the pleasures of the trencher and the goblet; and indeed it is well known that his death ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... side of human nature. All its disputes, all its ill-will and bad blood, rise up before you. You know from your experience of juries (I mean no disparagement to you, or them) how much depends upon effect; and you are apt to attribute to others, a desire to use, for purposes of deception and Self-interest, the very instruments which you, in pure honesty and honour of purpose, and with a laudable desire to do your utmost for your client, know the temper and worth of so well, from constantly ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... without the common hazard, of forgetting them with as much ease as we acquire them with difficulty, and to be master of them all in such a manner, as shall rellish nothing that is mean or not becomeing a Rationall man, is in one word, to attribute more to the judging and reflecting faculty then to the memory; for if the memory depend and relye only upon the reflexions of the judgement, we have no reason to expect much from its single Conduct, for however plausible it may appear, ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... eyes a little, and let us see, that no geometrical demonstration for the infinite divisibility of extension can have so much force as what we naturally attribute to every argument, which is supported by such magnificent pretensions. At the same time we may learn the reason, why geometry falls of evidence in this single point, while all its other reasonings command our fullest ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... Pragmatism and Bergson represent the more modern and revolutionary variety. But both these sorts of evolutionism have in common the emphasis on progress, that is, upon a continual change from the worse to the better, or from the simpler to the more complex. It would be unfair to attribute to Hegel any scientific motive or foundation, but all the other evolutionists, including Hegel's modern disciples, have derived their impetus very largely from the history of biological development. To a philosophy ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... Opposition. In office he proved a capable administrator of unimpeachable integrity, with a remarkable capacity for labour. It could not be said of him, however, that he possessed the essential qualities of a leader. Not only was he destitute of that mysterious personal attribute known as 'magnetism,' but he was disposed to be arbitrary and dictatorial. His political supporters respected and perhaps feared him, but it cannot be said that ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... wish to describe in the searchlight of truth in so undeniable a fashion that the illumination consequent upon this mental effort of our own shall throw up our meaning in immediate relief on the intelligences of those whom we address. This attribute is possessed by but few even among great writers—indeed, some historic sayings which have come down to us have not emanated from the writing fraternity at all, but from soldiers, sailors, statesmen, and other busy men of affairs. The quality which distinguishes a man of action ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... deeply mortified and annoyed at the discovery of its influence upon me. I first took myself severely to task about it, and then proceeded to seek for the cause of the trouble. I was at first disposed to attribute it to nerve-shock, induced by the occurrences of the preceding twenty-four hours, but a further analysis of my feelings convinced me that my nerves were still to be depended upon as implicitly as ever, and that the real source of my distress ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... ago?" "I have already told you, old woman," replied Antonio in the same low tones, and without turning round, "I have already told you, that I feel drawn towards you in a way that I can't explain to myself, but I don't attribute it to your ugly shrivelled face. Nay, when I look at your strange black glittering eyes and sharp nose, at your blue lips and long chin, and bristly grey hair, and when I hear your abominable chuckling and ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... of admiral and allowed to dress in silks as a nobleman. King Henry gave him 10 pounds, equal to $500 of modern money, and a pension of 20 pounds, equal to $1000 to-day. It is sometimes said that modern writers attribute an air of romance to these old pathfinders, {5} which they would have scorned; but "Zuan Cabot," as the people called him, wore the halo of glory with glee. To his barber he presented an island kingdom; to a poor monk he gave a bishopric. His son, Sebastian, ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... man of the most persistent perseverance, patience, and unflinching courage, coupled with that determination of character which has been the saving attribute of nearly all our famous mountaineers from the earliest days. His men, too, were all used to the privations and hardships that a life on the border demands, for Missouri, at the time of the expedition, was a wilderness ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... the causes that produce this auspicious result, we must acknowledge the excellence of the constitutional system and the wisdom of the legislative provisions; but we should be deficient in gratitude and justice did we not attribute a great portion of these advantages to the virtue, firmness, and talents of your Administration, which have been conspicuously displayed in the most trying time and on the most critical occasions. It is therefore with the sincerest regret ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 4) of Volume 1: George Washington • James D. Richardson
... fixed on the vast slaughter-grounds of Europe, I shall not spend much time describing Windhuk. It is a pretty, picturesque little town, built amongst brown and purple hills. In most ways it is highly finished; reflects the spirit of German thoroughness that is an admitted attribute of the race. As usual in South-West Africa, it has nothing of the colonial town about it; it might be another suburb of Berlin. Many of the houses are thoroughly built into the sides of the surrounding kopjes—perched like ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever; that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of Fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... been a decided increase in the amount of business within the last three years as compared with a number of years previously.' In Hanover, in 1845, there were 70 estates in operation. In 1860 there were only 29. The planters of this parish, however, do not lay the blame on the negroes, but attribute the decline to the mountainous character of the parish, which made it unprofitable to continue the estates after the great fall in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Black Bruin was climbing the mountainside on the way to his fastness when the wind brought him a new scent that he had sometimes smelled before, but what to attribute it to he had never known. The scent was very strong and Black Bruin knew that the intruder of his domain was near at hand. At last he made out a dim gray shape, near the trunk of a tree. Its color so blended with its surroundings ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes |
