"Expressiveness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the mind, that is, of the lower animal—which is singleness. The simplicity, the integrity, the one thing at a time, of a good animal's eyes is a great beauty, and is apt to cause us to exaggerate our sense of their expressiveness. An animal's eyes, at their best, are very slightly expressive; languor or alertness, the quick expectation, even the aloofness of doubt they are able to show, but the showing is mechanical; the human sentiment of the spectator ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... double orchestra is composed of oboes, flutes, and stringed instruments. Drums and brass instruments are not used, the sentiment of the work, in Bach's estimation, not being fitted for them, sweetness and expressiveness of tone rather than power being required. As Spitta says, sorrow is the characteristic of the work. It has no choruses of rejoicing, no paeans of praise, not even a ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... Immediately above Reason is a region producing Pliability and Versatility, which greatly assists the reasoning faculty in mastering unfamiliar truth. Admiration, adjacent to Imagination, gives great power of appreciation and recognition of merit. Sincerity and Candor or Expressiveness also add much to the capacity for attaining truth; and Liberality, between Foresight and Benevolence, adds much to the expansion ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, November 1887 - Volume 1, Number 10 • Various
... pleased at Ethel's development—her abruptness softened into piquancy, and her countenance so embellished, that the irregularity only added to the expressiveness. There was no saying what Ethel would come to! She had not said that she would not go to the intended ball, and her grimaces at the mention of it were ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... the soul away to supernatural things while it is awake and occupied with sensible things would seem to be stronger than that which finds a man's soul asleep and withdrawn from objects of sense. Secondly the degrees of this prophecy are differentiated according to the expressiveness of the imaginary signs whereby the intelligible truth is conveyed. And since words are the most expressive signs of intelligible truth, it would seem to be a higher degree of prophecy when the prophet, whether awake or asleep, hears words expressive of an intelligible ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... concurrence of two such causes, impressed his imagination with such a stamp, and spirit of passion, he ever obeyed the impulse by a kind of natural dependency, and relaxed, or braced successively into all that fine expressiveness with which he painted what he spoke, without ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... Louis XIV. tutor to the Dauphin, and his wit and grace made him a great favourite at the Court, and even Madame de Maintenon for a time smiled upon the noble churchman, whose face was so remarkable for its expressiveness that, according to the Court chronicler Saint Simon, "it required an effort to cease looking at him." His Fables and Dialogues of the Dead were written for his royal pupil. It is well known that the Archbishop sympathised strongly with Madame Guyon and the French ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... which is generally composed of brass or iron. It has frequently a violent resemblance to the "human face divine," or the ravenous expressiveness of a beast of prey. It assumes a variety of phases under peculiar vinous influences. A gentleman, in whose veracity and experience we have the most unlimited confidence, for a series of years kept an account of the phenomena of his own knocker; and by his permission the following extracts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... whom she lived, her feelings were plainly legible. If anything was said in her presence which pained her, her distress was visible in a moment; and as a beautiful consequence of this transparent expressiveness, her gaiety was infectious and her affection shone out upon those ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... soon becomes an easy and a very precise tool, capable of great expressiveness in drawing. Bear in mind that both sides of a line are drawn by the knife. The special power of developing the expressive form of line on both sides is a resource tending to great development of drawing in designs for wood-block prints. The line ...
— Wood-Block Printing - A Description of the Craft of Woodcutting and Colour Printing Based on the Japanese Practice • F. Morley Fletcher
... apt allusion. Comparison adds force by giving the reader a mental picture of the unknown, by suggestions of similarity to familiar things. The language of the street, our conversational language, secures its color and expressiveness through figures of speech—the clever simile and the apt metaphor light up a sentence and lift ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... inadequate, or ill-composed, now that the paintings are advanced. I cannot tell myself often enough that it means an immense deal of labour to bring a work to the highest pitch of impressiveness of which it is capable. The oftener I revise it, the more it will gain in expressiveness.... Though the touch disappear, though the fire of execution be no longer the chief merit of the painting, there is no doubt about this; and again how often does it happen that after this intense labour, which ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... sonatas and symphonies are of this wonderfully varied form of writing. How full it can be of expressiveness you know from the Songs without Words by Mendelssohn, and the Nocturnes of Chopin; how full of flickering humor you hear in the Scherzo of a Beethoven symphony; how full of deep solemnity and grief one feels ...
— Music Talks with Children • Thomas Tapper
... instruments of this kind have been devised—one could not make works of art out of them; for a succession of such sensations would express nothing; they would still be utterly without meaning. The fundamental reason for the superiority of sights and sounds is their expressiveness, their connection with the life of feeling and thought. They take root in the total self; whereas the other elements remain, for the most ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... of Richmond. The usher giving intimation that the President would see his audience at once, all were ushered into the inner room. "Abraham Lincoln's countenance bore that open, benignant outline expected; but what struck us especially was its cheerful, wide-awake expressiveness, never met with in the pictures of our beloved chief. The secret may have been that Secretary Stanton—middle-aged, well-built, stern-visaged man—had brought in his budget good news from Grant." After saluting his little circle ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... particulars; but his questioner could not long attend to them. She soared away to loftier topics; so that the second interview, though it lasted two or three hours, was all occupied by her mystical, theological, transcendental, necromantical discourse, in which she displayed the expressiveness, if not the glowing ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... to question whether the substitution of a smattering of broken English for the flexibility and picturesque expressiveness of an indigenous tongue, thoroughly understood, carries with it any great intellectual gain, though to suggest such a doubt is treason to some minds. The time threatens when all the world will speak two or three ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... grandmother and followed Miss Clyde to the carriage. She wished Aunt Lucinda would grant her a little leeway in her mode of expression—it was so troublesome to always pick and choose words. Besides, she had her own opinion as to the expressiveness of slang. Grandmother was a duck, ...
— Blue Bonnet in Boston - or, Boarding-School Days at Miss North's • Caroline E. Jacobs
... therefore, wholly lacked the freedom which it now has, and the whole progress of this century was purely apprentice work in instrumental music, its value lying in its establishing the principle, first, that instrumental music might exist independently of vocal, and, second, that it might enhance the expressiveness of vocal music when associated with it. The groundwork of the two great forms of the period next ensuing, the fugue and the sonata, had been laid, and a certain amount of precedent established in favor of free composition in dance and fantasia form. Meanwhile the pianoforte ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews |
