"Desideratum" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which morphia bears to opium. I believe that, in collaboration with my friend Dr. Frank A. Schlitz (a young German chemist of remarkable ability and with a brilliant professional career before him), I have at last attained this desideratum. I have no room or right here to dwell upon this interesting discovery further than to say that we have obtained a substance we suppose to bear the analogy desired and to deserve the title of Cannabin. If further examination shall establish our result, we have in ...
— The Opium Habit • Horace B. Day
... both sides exhibited the most extraordinary artfulness, cunning and ingenuity in the discovery, adaptation and invention of "cover." The great desideratum, of course, was to hide where we could see without being seen, to shoot from where there was ...
— A Soldier's Sketches Under Fire • Harold Harvey
... considered, and either body or surface may determine the size of the book or the character of the type. A smooth surface may be an element of beauty, as with the paper employed by Baskerville, but it must not be a shiny surface. The great desideratum in modern paper from the point of view of the book-buyer is a paper that, while opaque and tough, shall be thin enough to give us our books in small compass, one more akin to the dainty and precious vellum than to the heavier and coarser parchment. ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... task. The time cannot be more profitably or pleasantly spent, and, as I am told you are somewhat of an aboriginal scholar, you can assist them with your advice and judgment. A perfect analysis of the language is a great desideratum. I pray you, in the spring, to let me have the fruits ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... yet fixed a time of return, but I think of the spring. I shall have been away a year in April next. You never mention Rogers, nor Hodgson, your clerical neighbour, who has lately got a living near you. Has he also got a child yet?—his desideratum, when I saw ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... are in the habit of "putting barley-meal into the 'wine-strainers' through which we pass our wines, that they may be refined, purified, and drawn the sooner." The information conveyed to our readers by Pliny, may be made of great practical use and benefit by mariners, to whom sweet water is such a desideratum; and is as important to those who traverse the arid deserts of Africa, where sweet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... years, the great desideratum has been a perfectly hardy blackberry, and this want has at last been met in part by the Snyder, a Western variety that seems able to endure, without the slightest injury, the extremes of temperature common in the Northwestern ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... his academy at Whitefriars and Bethnal Green, would furnish matter for a very amusing volume. The general biography, however, to which he would be most appropriately remitted, and which is still a desideratum in literature, is that which is proposed by Dr. Johnson, in ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... The endeavour to determine with a like degree of precision the physiological conditions of the pleasurable effects of colours and their combinations by E. W. Brucke, Ewald Hering and more recent investigators, has so far failed to realize the desideratum laid down by Herbart, that there should be a theory of colour-relations equal in completeness and exactness to that of tone-relations. The experimental inquiry into simple aesthetically pleasing forms was begun by G. T. Fechner in seeking to test the soundness of Adolf ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the future. I believe the human race is improving, despite the disadvantageous surroundings and conditions which hamper honest effort and stultify truth. A higher efficiency is the goal, and the intention is to obtain this desideratum by fair and by just means. There is an awakening, an unrest, a groping for knowledge in almost every field of human endeavor, and there is none in which the yearning for fact, for truth, for instruction, is stronger and keener, ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... the coasts and currents which have wrecked their ships, for their shipwrecks brought them shame. There was no pilot, no compass for those pilgrims of marriage. This work is intended to supply the desideratum. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... fair to presume that it has dropped into the level of common grade cattle, no systematic and continued effort has come to our knowledge. Consequently such as may be deemed absolutely the best is a thing of the future; they do not yet exist—and there is no probability that the desideratum will soon be attained. We Yankees are an impatient people; we dislike to wait, for any thing, or to invest where five, ten, twenty or fifty years may be expected to elapse before satisfactory ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... delusions. He is a medical man of considerable eminence, and has spared no pains in his researches, giving a great number of facts and cases to illustrate his philosophy. The volume will be much sought for, as it is really a desideratum in the world of literature. We know of no work on this subject which lays the same just claim to public attention, or the study of the philosopher.—Christian Advocate ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... acquire a wider knowledge of diseases and their cure—and acquire it much more quickly—under some hard-working practitioner among the East-End poor of London; and that, as he very truly pointed out, was the great desideratum in such a case as Dick's, far outweighing the extra hard work and the sordid surroundings to which Mrs Maitland had at first so strenuously objected. Moreover, Dick agreed with the solicitor; and in the end the maternal objections were overcome, careful enquiries were instituted, and ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... of the advancement of learning in Turkey, the London Literary Gazette mentions, that when the department of the Ministry of Public Instruction was created four or five years ago in Constantinople, it became apparent that there existed a desideratum of Moslem civilization necessary to be supplied as soon as possible—a Turkish Vocabulary and a Turkish Grammar, compiled according to the development of modern philology. The Grammar has now been published, compiled ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... quite a desideratum," he reflected. "I want him first to give me a certificate that my uncle is dead, so that I may get the leather business; and then that he's alive—but here we are again at the incompatible interests!" And he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be able to give a clear explication and complete enumeration of all the ideas of reason, and of the necessary and universal principles or axioms which are grounded on these ideas. This is still the grand desideratum of metaphysical science. Its achievement will give us a primordial logic, which shall be as exact in its procedure and as certain in its conclusions as the mathematical sciences. Meantime, it may be affirmed that philosophic analysis, in the person ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... curious poem, long a desideratum in Scottish literature, and given up as irrecoverably lost, was lately brought to light by the researches of Dr Irvine of the Advocates' Library, and has been reprinted by ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... extensively consumed both in our home and foreign markets. But, notwithstanding its great commercial value, naturalists have failed to present us with any accurate account of its consecutive history from the ovum to the adult state. This desideratum we are now enabled to supply ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... The raw surfaces of the pine and the exposed end block are of course very absorbent and require an extra feed or two in order that the final glueing of the nut and place of reception may have a good holding. The nut, now squeezed into position, will not require the clamp, but if time is no desideratum an application of that useful tightener will ensure a firm hold, and moreover the superfluous glue is ...
— The Repairing & Restoration of Violins - 'The Strad' Library, No. XII. • Horace Petherick
... became a land of great estates and wealthy men, and the self-respecting peasantry were transformed into soldiers for foreign wars, or joined the rabble in the streets of Rome. [14] Wealth became the great desideratum, and the great avenue to this was through the public service, either as army commanders and governors, or as public men who could sway the multitude and command votes and influence. Manifestly the old type of education was not intended to meet such needs, and ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... line of steamers is supported by a grant from the United States government, double the amount of that paid to the British line, it is said that we are to be irrecoverably beaten in the passage of the 'ferry,' as Jonathan calls it, between Liverpool and New York. East sailing is no doubt an essential desideratum in these days—but what a price to pay for it! A quarter of a million on one side the Atlantic, and half a million on the other: as though there were not enterprise enough in either land to undertake the work—and do it well too—without ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various
... the marriage between William Ponsonby and Emily Percival, and the junction of the two estates, which formed together the great desideratum—five ...
— The Three Cutters • Captain Frederick Marryat
... innocence, of good and evil works, and their effect on man's salvation. He aired the theory, which roused approving murmurs in the listening circle, that to have a good intention was the chief desideratum for every son of Adam on his journey through the world, no matter though his works might turn ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... distant countries as is presupposed by advocates of imperial federation. Why establish control by cumbersome, superfluous machinery when the war has made it clear as the sun at high noon that the essential desideratum, British Union, exists now? All the notable communities of the King's realms have demonstrated that they are in the mind, the condition of a voluntary empire. What more can be desired save by such as desire old country domination of all the concerned countries, and who really long for a formal ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... from its matrix is a much more complicated process, and the problem how most effectively to obtain that great desideratum—a complete separating and saving operation—is one which taxes the skill and evokes the ingenuity of scientific men all over the world. The difficulty is that as scarcely any two gangues, or matrixes, are exactly alike, the treatment which is found most effective ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... conversation with Mr. Gladstone in 1887, he referred to the enormous power and responsibilities of the United States, and suggested that a desideratum was a new unity between our two countries. We had that of race and language, but we needed a moral unity of English-speaking people for the success ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... Convention. Danton was likewise a speaker of vast power, and from his towering figure, he seemed like a giant among pigmies. Marat might be termed the representative of the kennel. He was a low demagogue, flaunting in rags, dirty, and venomous: he was always calling out for more blood, as if the grand desideratum was the annihilation of mankind. Among the extreme men, Robespierre, by his eloquence, his artifice, and his bold counsels, contrived to maintain his position. This was no easy matter, for it was necessary to remain firm and unfaltering ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... the health and welfare of your troops. And you shall carefully study the country in general, and its water and food-products, so that you may inform yourself better, in order if possible, to preserve health, which is the principal desideratum. In order to guard the health of your men, I charge you specially that you take good care of your sick. You shall put a soldier of good temper in charge of them who shall minister to them. From whatever gold or other property of his Majesty's you may ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... short-sighted. To philosophers, however, this horizon, like every other, is a mere misunderstanding, a sort of slamming of the door in the face of the real beginning of their world,—their danger, their ideal, their desideratum.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} In more polite language: La philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lui ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche. |
