"Imperfection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as they stand came into being. The records themselves represent an immense amount of care and effort. Will you believe we had to make over two thousand in order to secure the one hundred needed for the present series? The slightest imperfection is enough to render an otherwise perfect record useless. Even the artists themselves would sometimes become discouraged at the enormous difficulties. It is nerve-racking work, for one must be on tension ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... father had never seemed to love, or to take an interest in me. He had desired a son, and I think he never thoroughly forgave me my unfortunate sex. My having come into the world at all as his child, he regarded as a kind of fraudulent intrusion, and, as his antipathy to me had its origin in an imperfection of mine, too radical for removal, I never even hoped to stand high in his good graces. My mother was, I dare say, as fond of me as she was of any one; but she was a woman of a masculine and a worldly cast of mind. She had no tenderness or sympathy for the weaknesses, or even ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... her overall, which she was growing out of, fitted tightly on her over-thin shoulders and showed how their line was spoilt by the deep dip of the clavicle, and wondered why that imperfection should make her more real to him than she had been when he had thought her wholly beautiful. Again he became aware of her discontent with her surroundings, which had exerted on her personality nothing of the weakening effect of despair, since it sprang from ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... red men of any sort. Our forefathers, if called upon to justify themselves, would have replied that they were founding Christian states and diffusing the blessings of a higher civilization; and such, in spite of much alloy in the motives and imperfection in the performance, was certainly the case. Now if we would not lose or distort the historical perspective, we must bear in mind that the Spanish conquerors would have returned {227} exactly the same answer. If Cortes were to return to the world and pick up some history book in which he is ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... seas were utterly unknown, and feared by all, those who had tried to follow in Magellan's course having seldom succeeded, and then with much pain and loss, and little fruit of their voyage; that their vessels were of a class which is now hardly used for more than coasting service; and that the imperfection of instruments and observations laid them under disadvantages which are now removed by the ingenuity of our artists. Add to this, that as the Spaniards gave out that it was impossible to repass the Straits, there remained no known way to quit the hostile ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... largest success. We are indebted to no other living author for so much enjoyment, and by his proposed lectures he will not only add to our obligations, but furnish an opportunity to repair in some degree the wrong he has suffered from the imperfection and injustice of ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... himself to have invented a system wholly new admits of no doubt; but it is doubtful whether he ever definitely arranged this system in his own mind. And it is a curious and interesting fact, and one illustrative, at least, of the imperfection of Bacon's exposition of his own method, that Mr. Ellis and Mr. Spedding, the two most conscientious investigators of Bacon's thought, should have arrived at different conclusions in regard to the distinctive peculiarities of the Baconian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... 'tis not amiss, though it portrays But feebly her angelic loveliness. Aught less than perfect is depicted falsely, And fancy must supply the imperfection. ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... their several degrees, are in a similar predicament to myself. Perhaps they are; but if so, the moral evil with which I am directly acquainted is made all the blacker by the fact that it is thus but a drop in an infinite ocean of moral imperfection. When, therefore, Professor Flint goes on to say, "We ought to be content if we can show that what God has done is wise and right, and not perplex ourselves as to why He has not done an infinity of other things," I answer, Most certainly; but can we show that what God has done ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... recognised as right could never be other than right, it could never become wrong, any more than two and three could become interchangeable ideas. One may say now that this definite act is right, and a century later that it is wrong; but for all that, for all the imperfection, the limitation, of our intelligence, as much in the moral as in the mental spheres, one thing is certain, that the right does exist and is eternally dissevered from the wrong, and that this "quite infinite distinction" is the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... drawing the line sharply between good and evil, the high and the low, and it is well that we should; but here is a man who aims to take absolute ground, and to look at the world as God himself might look at it, without partiality or discriminating,—it is all good, and there is no failure or imperfection in the universe and ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... with the Lord. This we all believe; and may we never be moved away from this cheering, animating hope. Yet how little power has this belief and hope upon our feelings and conduct! for our Christian graces partake of the same imperfection which characterizes our whole nature; the soil is poor in which they grow; the seasons are short, the climate cold; they do not reach maturity. It is instructive to notice how men who have had the very best advantages, ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... the work Of Nature till she prove a shirk; 'Tis not by jumps that she advances, But wins her way by circumstances; Pray, wait awhile, until you know We're so contrived as not to grow; Let Nature take her own direction, And she'll absorb our imperfection; You mightn't like 'em to appear with, But we must have the things ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the eyes of sinful mortals must be opened to see every error they possess, and the way out of it; and they will "flee as a bird to your mountain," away from the enemy of sinning sense, stubborn will, and every imperfection in the land of Sodom, and find rescue and refuge in Truth ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... us that all is not and cannot be a failure. The ultimate result of the life of humanity will doubtless be found in symmetrical and harmonious individuals; and in a perfect Christianity we shall look to see an angelic love radiant from every face. But while there is disease and imperfection in any part of the human body, there cannot be perfect health in any other part; just so while there is disease and imperfection in humanity, of which the human body is an image, there cannot be perfect health in any individual. Perfect men and women are possible ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... able to assume that of a frail and peaceable mortal, whose spiritual calling and profession ought, indeed, to induce him to make his life an example to others; but whose conduct, nevertheless, such is the imperfection of our unassisted nature, sometimes rather presents us with a warning of what ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... hurt. Could they do so, they would not be in pure charity. They see not that they suffer their pains in consequence of their sins, nor can they for a moment entertain that thought, for should they do so it would be an active imperfection, and that cannot exist in a state where there is no longer the possibility of sin. At the moment of leaving this life, they see why they are sent to Purgatory, but never again; otherwise they would still retain something ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... Aware of the imperfection of everything devised by man, it was foreseen that, in the exercise of the functions intrusted to the General Government, experience might reveal the necessity of modification—i.e., amendment—and power was therefore given to amend, in a certain manner, the delegated trusts so as to make them ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to this method in our times, when men hope to produce more effect on the mind with soft, tender feelings, or high-flown, puffing-up pretensions, which rather wither the heart than strengthen it, than by a plain and earnest representation of duty, which is more suited to human imperfection and to progress in goodness. To set before children, as a pattern, actions that are called noble, magnanimous, meritorious, with the notion of captivating them by infusing enthusiasm for such actions, is to defeat our end. For as they are still so backward in the observance ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... errors; and so indulgent are we to its faults that we try secretly to hide them even from our own eyes, mostly with success; and where success is not perfect, we make a second effort to hide the imperfection. Repeated efforts of this kind, from which we but half turn away, are crowned in the end, and we soon forget what successful hypocrites we have been. Our numerous passions, the complexities of our desires, the tenacity of their grasp, and the pleasant ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... is perfect cannot be subject to error, for error is evil and perfection excludes evil. If God exists He is perfect. Allow one imperfection to enter into your notion of God, and you destroy that notion. When, therefore, God speaks He is an infallible authority. This is the ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... change; for he who disregards any part of institutions deemed sacred teaches his people to consider the whole as an imposture. Had he made a law ordaining that the Peruvians should be absolved from their allegiance to a prince who should violate the laws, it would have implied possible error and imperfection in those persons whom the people were ordered to regard as divinities; the reverence due to characters who made such high pretensions would have been weakened; and instead of rendering the constitution perfect, such a law would have been its greatest defect. Besides, it is probable the rupture ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the attention of all who are not blind the traces of human imperfection, of a kind and an extent which precludes any notion of a clean copy of a perfect script let ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... revelation he says: "The sender of the alleged message is not a sheer invention: there are grounds independent of the message itself for belief in His reality.... It is moreover much to the purpose to take notice that the very imperfection of the evidences which natural theology can produce of the divine attributes removes some of the chief stumbling-blocks to the belief of revelation." Here is the raison ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... coordinate department of the judiciary has expounded the Constitution and the laws, settling in harmonious coincidence with the legislative will numerous weighty questions of construction which the imperfection of human language had rendered unavoidable. The year of jubilee since the first formation of our Union has just elapsed; that of the declaration of our independence is at hand. The consummation of both ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... never having guessed wrongly, his patience never having been perturbed, immaculate in speech, in temper, in habits, do not marry him. Why? Because you would enact a swindle. What would you do with a perfect man who are not perfect yourself? And how dare you hitch your imperfection fast on such supernatural excellence? What a companion you would make for an angel! In other words, there are no perfect men. There never was but one perfect pair, and they slipped down the banks of paradise together. We occasionally ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... notion ever obtained lodgment in society than the common one that to "rise in the world" is necessarily to change the "condition." Let there be content with condition; discontent with individual ignorance and imperfection. "We want," says Emerson, "not a farmer, but a man on a farm." What a mischievous idea is that which has grown, even in the United States, that manual labor is discreditable! There is surely some defect in the theory of equality in our society which makes domestic service to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... mercy, and when we meet I will explain my reasons, respectfully kiss your fair hands, and repay my debt with gratitude. The celebration you mention in honour of my poor abilities touched me deeply, but still not so profoundly as if you had considered it more perfect. Perhaps I may supply this imperfection by another symphony which I will shortly send you; I say perhaps, because I (or rather my brain) am in truth weary. Providence alone can repair the deficiency in my powers, and to Him I daily pray for aid, for without His support I should indeed be a poor creature! And ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... she should be the daughter of free and freeborn parents, who had never been in slavery, and had never followed any menial or degrading occupation; and also that both her parents should be living. To be an orphan was considered, it seems, in some sense an imperfection. ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... now to do a new homage to Shakespeare, by refitting for the stage the play of "Troilus and Cressida," which the author left in a state of strange imperfection, resembling more a chronicle, or legend, than a dramatic piece. Yet it may be disputed whether Dryden has greatly improved it even in the particulars which he censures in his original. His plot, though more artificial, is at the same time more trite than that of Shakespeare. ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... of special creation is not only a mere specious mask for our ignorance; its existence in Biology marks the youth and imperfection of the science. For what is the history of every science but the history of the elimination of the notion of creative, or other interferences, with the natural order of the phaenomena which are the subject-matter of that science? When Astronomy was young "the morning stars ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... all explanation with yours. I might have spied in their glittering, motionless surface the rocks and quicksands that awaited me below! We do not feel quite at ease in the company or friendship of those who have any natural obliquity or imperfection of person. The reason is, they are not on the best terms with themselves, and are sometimes apt to play off on others the tricks that nature has played them. This, however, is a remark that, perhaps, ought ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... Almighty and infinitely wise, with his spirit and his laws, and his promises. If they are faithful,—if from the first they realize their responsibility, and the advantages of their position, can the result be doubtful? But they will not be faithful; imperfection is stamped on all earthly character, and they will fail in this as in all other duties. What then? Blessed be God, the Gospel has a provision for erring parents. If Sinai thunders, Calvary whispers peace. For men, as sinners, the righteousness ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... that, in proportion as an individual advances in religion and the character of his piety becomes more pure, the whole religious world will more and more appear to him as an indivisible whole. The spirit of separation, in proportion as it insists upon a rigid division, is a proof of imperfection; the highest and most cultivated minds always perceive a universal connection, and, for the very reason that they perceive it, they also establish it. Since every one comes in contact only with his immediate neighbor, but, at the same time, has an immediate neighbor on all sides and in every ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... within the bounds of orthodoxy; it was in connection with the Devil that he professed peculiar opinions. He held the Devil to be wicked, but not absolutely wicked, and considered that the fiend's innate imperfection must always bar him from attaining to the perfection of evil. He believed he discerned some symptoms of goodness in the obscure manifestations of Satan's activity, and without venturing to put it in so many words, augured from these the final redemption ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... in man, as well as around him, to which the like justice is done. Such are Special Character, Natural Degree and Vocation, Moral Imperfection, and Limitation of Self-Knowledge. Each of these plays a part of vast importance in life; each is portrayed and used in Goethe's picture. But, though with reluctance, I must merely name and pass them by. Enough to say here, that he sees them and sees through them. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... by a woman whose incomparable beauty is without imperfection. But, my dear master, if he consents to lend her to you, at least you must ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... sorrow and anguish into exulting and triumphant joy; and curses into blessings. Where it meets with a barren and heathy desert, it transmutes it into a paradise of delights; yea, it changeth evil into good, and all imperfection into perfection. It restores that which is fallen and degenerated to its primary beauty, excellence and perfection. It is the Divine Stone, the White Stone with the name written upon it, which no one knows but he that hath it. [Cf. Rev. II, 17. 'He that hath an ear, let him hear what ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... because it had been observed that the pianoforte is not the most convenient, appropriate, or effective vehicle for its publication—a pity for the pianoforte, for therein would lie an exemplification of its imperfection. So, too, it would be a pity if the opinion should gain ground that music which had been clearly designed to meet the nature of the instrument was for that reason good pianoforte music, i.e., "idiomatic" music, irrespective of ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... in their flesh or in their spirit. The ideal may be far from being realised at any moment, but it is at the peril of the whole sincerity and peacefulness of their lives if they, in the smallest degree, lower the perfection of their ideal in deference to the imperfection of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... whenever a wrong judgment is rendered, property is taken when it should not have been; yet whatever the ground may be, if the mistake is not so gross as to be impossible in a rational administration of justice, it is no more than the imperfection of man, not a denial of constitutional rights.[1003] In conclusion, the decision of a State court upon a question of local law, however wrong, is not an infraction of the Fourteenth Amendment merely because it is wrong. It ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... own feelings, or from the less suspicious test of the observations of others, I had been made aware of any literary testiness or jealousy; I trust, that I should have been, however, neither silly nor arrogant enough to have burthened the imperfection on genius. But an experience—(and I should not need documents in abundance to prove my words, if I added)—a tried experience of twenty years, has taught me, that the original sin of my character consists in a careless indifference to public opinion, and to the attacks of those who influence ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... great achievement. For all great purposes have to be spread over time, have to overcome obstacles, and these must be met with courage and patience. Impatience is fussiness, fretfulness and a prime breeder of neurasthenia. Patience is realistic, and though it may seek perfection it puts up with imperfection as a part of human life. But here I am drifting into an error against which I warned the reader,—of making an entity of a conception. People are patient or impatient, but not necessarily throughout. There are men and women who fuss and fume over trifles who never falter or fret when ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... ideas is found to be in complete harmony. Short of this extreme limit they tend to deviate from each other and to utter contradictory oracles. We may therefore lay it down as an unalterable law of their activity that when any one of these ideas contradicts another it does so because of a weakness and imperfection in its own intensity or in the intensity ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... journal is wanting, as he is also wanting who should have finished it. But, alas! this is the imperfection of man's best perfections; death lying in ambush to entrap those whom by open force he could not devour. He dying in this voyage, and following his son, hath left this glorious act, memoriae sacrum, the memorable epitaph of his worth, savouring of a true heroic ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... and to true penitence its best consolations; which restrains even the least approaches to guilt, and yet makes those allowances for the infirmities of our nature which the stoic pride denied to it, but which its real imperfection and the goodness of its infinitely benevolent Creator so ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... Father,—I have your favors of the 21st of March, in which you both seem concerned lest I have imbibed some erroneous opinions. Doubtless I have my share, and when the natural weakness and imperfection of human understanding is considered, the unavoidable influence of education, custom, books, and company, upon our ways of thinking, I imagine a man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... there a fiber that appears to be in a state of change. In the course of my examinations of the wild fleeces mentioned above, three fibers were found that were wool at one end and hair at the other. This, however, does not necessarily imply imperfection, or any process of change similar to that caused by human culture. Water lilies contain parts variously developed into stamens at one end, petals at the other, as the constant and normal condition. These half wool, half ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... ears of corn ripen for the harvest, they bow their heads nearer to the ground. So it is with believers: they then see more than ever of their own imperfection, and often express their sense of it in strong language; yet they repose with a growing confidence on the love of God through Christ Jesus. The nearer they advance to their eternal rest, the more humble they become, but not the less useful in their sphere. They feel anxiously desirous ...
— The Annals of the Poor • Legh Richmond
... dependent upon the acceptance as good of such persons as our very religion itself enables us to pronounce evil. My aim was to show that our faith is not built upon such a foundation of impurity—of imperfection. The spirit which prevails nowadays—the modern spirit—it is the result of the development of science. This scientific spirit necessitates the consideration of all the elements of our faith ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... a concert hall or opera house is no more than a baroque parody upon the thing the composer imagined. In an orchestra of eighty men there is inevitably at least one man with a sore thumb, or bad kidneys, or a brutal wife, or katzenjammer—and one is enough. Some day the natural clumsiness and imperfection of fingers, lips and larynxes will be overcome by mechanical devices, and we shall have Beethoven and Mozart and Schubert in such wonderful and perfect beauty that it will be almost unbearable. If half ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... history of his native country. 'In Holland the air is good for me,' he writes elsewhere, 'but the extravagant carousals annoy me; add to this the vulgar uncultured character of the people, the violent contempt of study, no fruit of learning, the most egregious envy.' And excusing the imperfection of his juvenilia, he says: 'At that time I wrote not for Italians, but for Hollanders, that is to say, for the dullest ears'. And, in another place, 'eloquence is demanded from a Dutchman, that is, from a more hopeless person than a B[oe]otian'. And again, 'If the story is not ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... as an evidence of what diversified materials an army is composed, and that the instruments of military despotism are not necessarily endowed with personal courage, the discipline of the mass compensating for individual imperfection. It also gives evidence that luck has much to do in the fortunes of this world, and that many a man who "bears his blushing honors thick upon him" would as poorly stand a scrutiny as to the means by which they were acquired, as our friend, the drummer, had he been enabled to strut about, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... The product of the specific heat of an element by its atomic weight. The product is approximately the same for all the elements, and varies as determined between 5.39 and 6.87. The variations are by some attributed principally to imperfection of the work in determining them. The atomic heat represents the number of gram calories required to raise the temperature of a gram atom (a number of grams equal numerically to the atomic weight) one ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... appearance would not be found in this cruel position. Depend on our authority to protect thee, should the danger thou seemest to apprehend really occur. Still the laws must be respected, though not always of the rigid impartiality that we might wish. Thou hast owned the imperfection of human nature, and it is not wonderful that ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... what we shall come to, and never broach the subject to him. I finished the geological evidence chapters yesterday; they are very fine and very striking, but I cannot see they are such forcible objections as you still hold them to be. I would say that you still in your secret soul underrate the imperfection of the Geological Record, though no language can be stronger or arguments fairer and sounder against it. Of course I am influenced by Botany, and the conviction that we have not in a fossilised condition a fraction of the plants that have existed, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... profane. All who unite in it must have the same motives, and contemplate the same ultimate end. All must have the same sentiments of a Covenant God, and harmonize in their views of the means to be employed in order to the attainment of that end. There is no church so free from imperfection as not to need an enlargement or correction of its views. Yet no body of professing Christians are warranted in uniting in covenant with those who hold not the truth. The unity of the Spirit is necessary ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... dinner upstairs—a first course of mutton chops and potatoes, cooked to a degree of imperfection only attained in an English kitchen. The sour French wine was still on the good woman's mind. "What would you choose to drink, sir?" she asked. Mr. Mountjoy seemed to feel no interest in what he might have to drink. "We have some French ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... conscription in England, we should find, as in other countries, that a large fraction of the men who earn their living by sedentary occupations are unfit for military service. Our human civilised stock is far more weakly through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animals, whether wild ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... Anne had been drawn much nearer together by a common interest. The door between their rooms having some imperfection in the latch swung open as they were preparing for bed, and Anne was aware of a sound of sobbing, and saw one of the white- capped, short-petticoated femmes de chambre kneeling at Naomi's feet, ejaculating, "Oh, take me! take me, mademoiselle! Madame is an angel of goodness, but ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two comparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called the hope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of "Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully the idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other words, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, there is something about his appearance which ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... who believes in the inborn tendency of mankind to variation and imperfection, and holds up to us, as shining examples of mathematical accuracy, the work of certain insects, and who—since Professor Wyman has shown that the hexagonal form of the bee's cell is not of original ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... justice and mercy should have been in a state of antagonism down to A.M. 4034, when Jesus died, is an incredible supposition. No event taking place in time and space can be the condition sine qua non of divine perfection. And any struggle or conflict like that supposed implies imperfection. ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... form of the society is more perfect. They also illustrated the fact from the marriage of good and truth, in that the more distinguishably two these are, the more perfectly do they make a one; similarly, of love and wisdom. The indistinguishable is confusion, they said, whence comes imperfection of form. ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... throne of grace, conscious of sin and imperfection, how little can we trust ourselves. We realize that we come empty-handed before God. With the poet, each ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... distinction against that last foe. If even at this moment an English statesman who had learnt the secret agreement of Tilsit might have looked without fear to the future of his country, it was not from any imperfection in the structure of Continental tyranny. The fleets of Denmark and Portugal might be of little real avail against English seamen; the homes of the English people might still be as secure from foreign invasion ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... works His inventions of tools required for lock-making His invention of the leathern collar in the hydraulic press Leaves Bramah's service and begins business for himself His first smithy in Wells Street His first job Invention of the slide-lathe Resume of the history of the turning-lathe Imperfection of tools about the middle of last century The hand-lathe Great advantages of the slide rest First extensively used in constructing Brunel's Block Machinery Memoir of Brunel Manufacture of ships' blocks Sir S. Bentham's specifications Introduction of Brunel to Maudslay The block-machinery ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... very sincerely protested that Stella and imperfection could not be named together, except as contrasts, for he truly thought so. She sighed, and then smiled, and the colonel cantering up cut short the interesting conversation—interesting to the two ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... Therefore we must conclude that, being reconciled by faith, we are accounted righteous for Christ's sake, not for the sake of the Law or our works, but that this inchoate fulfilling of the Law pleases on account of faith, and that, on account of faith, there is no imputation of the imperfection of the fulfilling of the Law, even though the sight of our impurity terrifies us. Now, if justification is to be sought elsewhere, our love and works do not therefore justify. Far above our purity, yea, far above the Law itself ought to be ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... organic life. David Frederick Strauss, in his Alter und Neuer Glaube, considers it a great achievement of our day that we no longer think that a perfect organic being is a miracle issuing from nothing. We understand its perfection when we are able to explain it as a development from imperfection. The structure of an ape is no longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors to have been primitive fishes which have been gradually transformed. Let us at least submit to accept as reasonable in the domain of spirit ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... more highly illuminating gases there is even greater diversity of conditions. Hence figures such as those quoted above for the enrichment value of acetylene inevitably show a certain want of harmony which is in reality due to the imperfection or incompleteness of the modes of testing employed. Relatively to another, one gas appears advantageously merely in virtue of the conditions of assessing illuminating power having been more favourable to it. Therefore enrichment values, such as those given, must always ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings, which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... inconstancy, the consequent imperfection of human weakness. Shall I meet with a friendship that defies years of absence, and the chances and changes of fortune? Perhaps "such things are;" one honest man[65a] I have great hopes from that way: ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Instead, Mr. Goodenough omits these optional rhymes in the first stanza and in the first half of the third and fourth stanzas; elsewhere employing them. The result, while not flagrantly inharmonious, nevertheless gives an impression of imperfection, and tends to alienate the fastidious critic. Mr. Goodenough possesses so great a degree of inspiration, and so wide an array of allusions and imagery; that he owes it to himself to complete the excellence of his vivid work ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... central trusses of flowers. Whether in the highly improved varieties the departure of the central trusses from their proper type is due to reversion, I do not know. Mr. Dombrain insists that, whatever may be the commonest kind of imperfection in each variety, this is generally exaggerated in the central truss. Thus one variety "sometimes has the fault of producing a little green floret in the centre of the flower," and in central blooms these become excessive in size. In some central blooms, sent ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... Constitution to bestow the implied powers. "Man and his language," said he, "are both defective. We cannot foresee and provide specifically for all contingencies. If you amend the constitution a thousand times, the same imperfection of our nature and our language will ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... hero as a being destroyed simply and solely by external forces is quite alien to him; and not less so is the idea of the hero as contributing to his destruction only by acts in which we see no flaw. But the fatal imperfection or error, which is never absent, is of different kinds and degrees. At one extreme stands the excess and precipitancy of Romeo, which scarcely, if at all, diminish our regard for him; at the other the murderous ambition of Richard ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... is evil in existence is the same as why there is imperfection, or, in other words, why there is creation at all. We must take it for granted that it could not be otherwise; that creation must be imperfect, must be gradual, and that it is futile to ask ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... recognise it," said the other quietly. "It's open and shut, Sammy. That little imperfection in the plate's got ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... Inclination to love one another at the first sight Indocile liberty of this member Insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us Live at the expense of life itself. Much better to offend him once than myself every day Nature, who left us in such a state of imperfection Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell No man more certain than another of to-morrow.—Seneca No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried Not certain to live till I came home Not melancholic, but meditative ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... transcendental analogy between things not before suspected of resemblance, discovered by the "spiritual insight" of the moral seer, is in fact no more than a grave clench,—a solemn quibble,—a conceit; arising not from the perfection of mind, but the imperfection of language. Those conceptions, fabricated by Fancy out of the materials that Fancy deals in, and colored by the rays of a poetic sentiment, wear the same relation to truths, that the prismatic hues of the spray of a fountain in the sunshine bear to the gems which ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... I think the distinction has arisen entirely from confusing a transitory imperfection with an essential character. So long as our information concerning them is imperfect, we class all objects together according to resemblances which we feel, but cannot define; we group them round ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... and Bank Note Bill question of design of new twenty-shilling and ten-shilling notes came up. Some disrespectful things said of it. CHANCELLOR OF EXCHEQUER admitted its imperfection but pleaded that in the hurried circumstances of the day it was the best that could be done. Exception especially taken on score that the design made forgery easy. Here ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 2nd, 1914 • Various
... all that is said to be imperfect is so termed for the want it hath of perfection. Whence it followeth that if in any kind we find something imperfect, there must needs be something perfect also in the same kind. For if we take away perfection we cannot so much as devise how there should be any imperfection. For the nature of things began not from that which is defective and not complete, but, proceeding from entire and absolute, falleth into that which is extreme and enfeebled. But if, as we showed before, there be a certain imperfect felicity ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... every evening to take a nap at a coffee-house. Thus their meeting had the importance of an adventure. They were at once drawn together by secret fibres. Besides, how can we explain sympathies? Why does a certain peculiarity, a certain imperfection, indifferent or hateful in one person, prove a fascination in another? That which we call the thunderbolt is true ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... hero. He was—well, he considered himself a young man, so we will consider him so too. He was not perfect; but in these days the taste in heroes is for a good deal of imperfection, not to say wickedness. He was not an only son. On the contrary, he had a great many brothers and sisters, and found them quite as objectionable as my friend ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... would seem that a man cannot sin first of all against the Holy Ghost, without having previously committed other sins. For the natural order requires that one should be moved to perfection from imperfection. This is evident as regards good things, according to Prov. 4:18: "The path of the just, as a shining light, goeth forwards and increases even to perfect day." Now, in evil things, the perfect is the greatest evil, as ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... mortified with contemplating an unlucky imperfection in the very framing and construction of my soul; namely, a blundering inaccuracy of her olfactory organs in hitting the scent of craft or design in my fellow-creatures. I do not mean any compliment to my ingenuousness, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... are the most addicted to this vice; and a little reflexion will teach us that it is incompatible with true understanding. Accordingly we see that, while the wisest of men have constantly lamented the imbecility and imperfection of their own nature, the meanest and weakest have been trumpeting forth their own excellencies and ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... les corps diaphanes, tels que les miroirs, les cuvettes remplies d'eau et les liquides; ceux qui inspectent les coeurs, les foies et les os des animaux, ... tous ces gens-la appartiennent aussi a la categorie des devins, mais, a cause de l'imperfection de leur nature, ils y occupent un rang inferieur. Pour ecarter le voile des sens, le vrai devin n'a pas besoin de grands efforts; quant aux autres, ils tachent d'arriver au but en essayant de concentrer en un seul sens toutes leurs perceptions. Comme la vue est le sens le plus noble, ils lui ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... and implanted recollection of the godlike," says Schlegel, "remains ever dark and mysterious; for man is surrounded by the sensible world, which being in itself changeable and imperfect, encircles him with images of imperfection, changeableness, corruption, and error, and thus casts perpetual obscurity over that light which is within him. Wherever, in the sensible and natural world, he perceives any thing which bears a resemblance to the attributes of the God-head, which can serve as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... it seems that if we consider the use and end of sight, together with the present state and circumstances of our being, we shall not find any great cause to complain of any defect or imperfection in it, or easily conceive how it could be mended. With such admirable wisdom is that faculty contrived, both for the pleasure and ...
— An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision • George Berkeley
... she said tenderly, "when it is to that very imperfection of our enjoyment that we are indebted for its continuance? I loved thee a few minutes since, now I love thee a thousand times more, and perhaps I should love thee less if thou hadst carried my enjoyment ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe's lines—written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... This imperfection was a necessity, inseparable from Rousseau's tenacity in keeping society in the background of the picture of life which he opened to his pupil. He said, indeed, "We must study society by men, and men by society; those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand anything about ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... points in the story, and may assist the pupils by calling attention to some pertinent passage, or by removing difficulties by means of questions or explanations. In all cases, it is well to accept a partially correct answer by the pupils, and to try to improve its imperfection by questioning, until a fairly complete and substantial statement has been given. Every answer which contains even a fragment of sound thought should receive due recognition. In some cases it is sufficient, at the outset, to take an imperfect statement ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... minds. But what about an antagonism deeper still? Between Christ and the world, say!—Christ and the flesh!—or about that so very ancient antagonism between good and evil. Was there any place really left for imperfection, moral or otherwise, in a world, wherein the minutest atom, the lightest thought, could not escape from God's presence? Who should note the crime, the sin, [160] the mistake, in the operation of that eternal ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... occasion, what you must have observed many men to do: we not only endeavour to impose on the world, but even on ourselves; we disguise our weakness, and work up in our minds an opinion that the measure which we fall into by the natural or habitual imperfection of our character is the effect of a principle of prudence or of some other virtue. Thus the Regent, who saw the Duke of Ormond because he could not resist the importunity of Olive Trant, and who gave hopes to the duke because ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... the court. In reply to Prescott's last observations, he said that imperfection of evidence was a good ground for commutation of sentence, but none for releasing the prisoner altogether. This was, of course, a reminder to the judges of the Home Secretary's decision, announced that morning. Then he proceeded to argue the ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... Churches, instead of avoiding, or scolding, or abusing one another, to study each other lovingly, with a view to find how much of truth and goodness they could find in each other, that they could not find in themselves, and how much of error and imperfection they could find in themselves, that they did not find in others. I saw that no Church had got all the truth, or all the goodness, and that no Church was free from anti-christian errors and defects. I saw that to make a perfect Christian creed, we should have to take something ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... Newland has laid aside his dress. I quarrel with no creed—every one has a right to choose for himself, and Mr Newland has perhaps not chosen badly, in embracing your tenets. Let him continue steadfast in them. But, fair young lady, there is no creed which is perfect, and, even in yours, we find imperfection. Our religion preaches humility, and therefore we do object to his wearing the ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... hermaphrodite flowers are said never to produce fruit, and therefore probably act as males. Moreover in Stellaria graminea, as Babington remarks 'British Botany' 1851 page 51, "shorter and longer petals accompany an imperfection of ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... second; a classical, representing an equilibrium between idea and form; a romantic, representing a new disequilibrium between idea and form, with prevalence of the idea. There are also the divisions into oriental art, representing imperfection of form; classical, perfection of form; romantic or modern, perfection of content and of form. Thus classic and romantic have also received, among their many other meanings, that of progressive or regressive periods, in respect to the ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Jehovah our God is whensoever we call upon him?" Yet all who came out of Egypt and had witnessed the mighty wonders God wrought among themselves and among their enemies, fell and glaringly sinned; not according to the measure of the mere weakness and imperfection of human nature, but they sinned disobediently and in willful contempt of God. Hardened in unbelief unto insensibility, they brought ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... or into an elaborately constructed organ; secondly the subject of instinct, or the mental powers of animals; thirdly, hybridism, or the infertility of species and the fertility of varieties when intercrossed; and fourthly, the imperfection of the geological record. In the next chapter I shall consider the geological succession of organic beings throughout time; in the twelfth and thirteenth, their geographical distribution throughout space; in the fourteenth, their classification or mutual ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... show she was awake, pressed her mother's hand and looked up in her face, but Mary, though returning the glance and the pressure, did not send her away, while Melville recommended strongly that the Queen should continue to insist on the imperfection of the evidence adduced against her, which he said might so touch some of the lawyers, or the nobles, that Burghley and Walsingham might be afraid to proceed. If this failed her, she must allow her knowledge of the plot ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... themselves occurred. In writing the narratives, the author has endeavored to avail himself of the best sources of information which this country affords; and though, of course, there must be in these volumes, as in all historical narratives, more or less of imperfection and error, there is no intentional embellishment. Nothing is stated, not even the most minute and apparently imaginary details, without what was deemed good historical authority. The readers, therefore, may rely upon the record as the truth, and nothing but the truth, so far as ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... as a physician has been supplemented by extensive study and observations along the lines of the powers of the interior forces, are of special significance and value in this connection: "We can never gain health by contemplating disease, any more than we can reach perfection by dwelling upon imperfection, or harmony through discord. We should keep a high ideal of health and harmony constantly before ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... let your Plough goe without a plough-slip, till the plough-head be so much worne, that it take no more but an ordinary furrow, and then you shall set on your Plough-slips and Plough clouts also: but I write this in case there be imperfection in the Plough, which if it be otherwise, then this obseruation ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham
... essential agreement of their will. A faint resemblance of this unity of action may be discovered in the societies of men, and even of animals. The causes which disturb their harmony, proceed only from the imperfection and inequality of their faculties; but the omnipotence which is guided by infinite wisdom and goodness, cannot fail of choosing the same means for the accomplishment of the same ends. III. Three beings, who, by the self-derived necessity of their existence, possess all the divine attributes in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... work Of Nature till she prove a shirk; 'Tis not by jumps that she advances, But wins her way by circumstances; Pray, wait awhile, until you know We're so contrived as not to grow; Let Nature take her own direction, And she'll absorb our imperfection; You mightn't like 'em to appear with, But we must have the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... study, involving, as the only means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature, the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe, drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide and combined study of philology, history, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... octave, with power to excite the human eye. In reality, we stand, in the midst of a luminous ocean, almost blind! The little that we can see is nothing, compared to the vastness of that which we cannot. But it may be said that out of the very imperfection of his senses man has been able, in science, to build for himself a raft of thought by which to make daring adventure on the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... increased when we recollect that the two-gilled cephalopods have not yet been found below the lias, where they at once abound; whereas the four-gilled cephalopods are Silurian forms. Moreover, the absence is in this case significant in spite of the imperfection of the geological record, because when we consider how many individuals of various kinds of four-gilled cephalopods have been found, it is fair to infer that at the least a certain small percentage of dibranchs would also have left traces of their presence had they existed. Thus it is probable ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... heaven, between the ideal and the real, between the aim set before man and a world condemned to anathema by the fall, and incapable, through the imperfection of its finite elements, of affording him the means of realizing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... that invoked it had it so completely under control—voluntary control as yet—that it did not swamp her sense; her spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves towards the measureless immensity of music at its source. To reach that centre without a circle,—that perfection which imperfection shadows not,—that unborn, undying principle, which art tries humbly, falteringly, to illustrate,—was never given to man on earth; and tries he to attain it, some fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at once the symbol and the warning, fastens ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... city, because he could not rule his spirit. Democracy was inscribed upon his banner, sympathy for the disenfranchised bound him to it, but not that charity which seeketh not her own, nor the loyalty that abides the day when imperfection shall become perfection. Sarcasm was his weapon, ridicule his plan of campaign, and destruction his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... joining them in stealthy review, I found the C and the CH; then something of an A just following; and then a terminal Y. Here was also the whole name spelt out to me; it seemed familiar, too; and yet for some time I could not bridge the imperfection. Then I came upon another stamp, in which an L was legible before the Y, and in a moment the word leaped up complete. Chailly, that was the name; Chailly-en-Biere, the post town of Barbizon—ah, there was the very ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... expedient to consider one by one, I shall begin by inquiring what light international statistics are capable of throwing on the relations between poverty and crime. At the outset of this inquiry we are at once met by the old difficulty respecting the value of international criminal statistics. The imperfection of those statistics is a matter it is always important to bear in mind, but in spite of this circumstance the light which they shed on the problem of poverty and crime is not to be ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... numerous, and have been more dreadful, and of longer continuance, than those which have been occasioned by election. All the civil wars in France arose from the hereditary system; they were either produced by hereditary claims, or by the imperfection of the hereditary form, which admits of regencies or monarchy at nurse. With respect to England, its history is full of the same misfortunes. The contests for succession between the houses of York and Lancaster lasted a whole century; and others of a similar nature have renewed themselves ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... a permanence and completeness of records such as is never found. We do not find even that all recently extinct plants have left memorials of their existence in the crust of the earth; and ancient archives are certainly extremely defective. To one who is aware of the extreme imperfection of the geological record, the discovery of one or two missing links is a fact of small significance; but each new form rescued from oblivion is an earnest of the former existence of hundreds of species, the greater part of which ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of the horizon. But, unquestionably, the progress which has already been made in this direction affords a strong presumption in favor of the idea, that the apparent nebulosity of those masses which still appear, even to our best telescopes, as cloud-like vapors, is to be ascribed rather to the imperfection of our instruments than to any difference between them and such as have been already resolved. Sir John Herschell, a high authority in such a case, tells us that "we have every reason to believe, at least in the generality of cases, that ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... examine, in detail, the precepts of this religion, as they affect nations, we shall see, that it interdicts every thing which can make a nation flourishing. We have seen already the notion of imperfection which Christianity attaches to marriage, and the esteem and preference it holds out to celibacy. These ideas certainly do not favour population, which is, without contradiction, the first source ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... possible. The most loving and indulgent parents are now and again ill-tempered, fretful, or nervous. The fathers were men subject to all the limitations of other men. Granting these limitations and making due allowance for human imperfection, the rule of the fathers must still be admired for its wisdom and commended ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... mutual guaranty of the State governments is another capital imperfection in the federal plan. There is nothing of this kind declared in the articles that compose it; and to imply a tacit guaranty from considerations of utility, would be a still more flagrant departure from the clause which has been mentioned, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... thing to have my monitress so very good!—I protest I know not how to look up at her! Now, as I am thinking, if I could pull her down a little nearer to my own level; that is to say, could prevail upon her to do something that would argue imperfection, something to repent of; we should jog on much more equally, and be better able to comprehend one another: and so the comfort would be mutual, and the remorse not ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... clearly see that the mistake is to judge boys by the standard of grown-ups, to forget that a child is quick and mobile like a running stream; and that, in the case of such, any touch of imperfection need cause no great alarm, for the speed of the flow is itself the best corrective. When stagnation sets in then comes the danger. So it is for the teacher, more than the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... spontaneously chosen from within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a spectacle with less evil in it.[9] Its perfection is represented as the source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection is the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience. In whatever sense the word 'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend that the impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representing things is altogether rational. Theologians have felt ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... most a Kanaka advantages himself by a three-years course in civilization in Queensland, is a necklace and an umbrella and a showy imperfection in the art of swearing, it must be that all the profit of the traffic goes to the white man. This could be twisted into a plausible argument that the traffic ought to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... besides the immediate pleasure attending such an occupation, philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodised and corrected. But they will never be tempted to go beyond common life, so long as they consider the imperfection of those faculties which they employ, their narrow reach, and their inaccurate operations. While we cannot give a satisfactory reason why we believe, after a thousand experiments, that a stone will fall or fire burn; can we ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... the man of candour and of true understanding is never hasty to condemn. He can censure an imperfection, or even a vice, without rage against the guilty party. In a word, they are the same folly, the same childishness, the same ill-breeding, and the same ill-nature, which raise all the clamours and uproars both in life and on the stage. The worst ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... feel about you. From the tilling of the vineyards, or the dressing of a beggar's sores, to the loftiest and most complicated intellectual labour imposed on him, each brother knows that his daily task is part of a great scheme of action, working ever from imperfection to perfection, from human incompleteness to the divine completion. This sense of being, not straws on a blind wind of chance, but units in an ordered force, gives to the humblest Christian an individual security and dignity which kings on their ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... elsewhere, 'but the extravagant carousals annoy me; add to this the vulgar uncultured character of the people, the violent contempt of study, no fruit of learning, the most egregious envy.' And excusing the imperfection of his juvenilia, he says: 'At that time I wrote not for Italians, but for Hollanders, that is to say, for the dullest ears'. And, in another place, 'eloquence is demanded from a Dutchman, that is, from a more hopeless ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... intent on mere living that of its own motion it would never heed, is the work of the passionate few whose enthusiasms and protestations never allow the common crowd completely to forget, and keep forever alive in it the uneasy sense of imperfection. That Horace was preserved for hundreds of years by monastery and school, that the fact of acquaintance with him is due to his place in modern systems of education, are not mere statements empty ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... router, whose business it is to cut out all the metal between ornaments and lettering to the proper depth. This done, the engraver, who in former years practically dug out the entire plate with his hand tools, comes in to give the finishing touches and correct any slight imperfection that may remain. It is of the utmost importance, of course, that the dies should be clear-cut and deep, to avoid clogging up in printing, particularly in the plates used for stamping in inks. The experienced and watchful ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... dangerous. Certain poets, especially among the moderns, may be said to choose imperfect rimes deliberately, both as a fresh means of securing variety and avoiding the monotony of hackneyed rimes, and also as a means of subtly suggesting the imperfection and futility of life. A few famous examples, defensible and indefensible, are: Wordsworth's robin: sobbing, sullen: pulling; Tennyson's with her: together, valleys: lilies; Keats's youths: soothe, pulse: culls; Swinburne's lose him: bosom: blossom. Keats and Rossetti ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... of life, and do not demand here more than a passing reference. The essence of religion lies in the subordination of the finite self to the infinite; and worship is the conscious outgoing of the man in his weakness and imperfection to his Maker, and it attains its fullest exercise in (a) reverence, humility, and devotion. The feeling of dependence and sense of need, together with the consciousness of utter demerit and inability which man realises as he gazes upon the majesty ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... that are spoken of in the story, but to take away all trust in created beings, by revealing the trouble to which these are liable, and this to the end that we may fix and rest our hope on Him alone who is perfect, and without whom every man is only imperfection." ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. IV. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... are, and captains of men-of-war are not exempted from this human imperfection! How much, also, drops between the cup and the lip! There chanced to be on board of the same trader two very pretty Irish girls of the better sort of bourgeoisie; they were going to join their friends at Philadelphia: the name of the one was Judy, and of the other Maria. No sooner were the ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the natural attitude of the sexes, designed by an all-wise Creator; but designed for a condition of ideal perfection. No perfect law could be framed for imperfection. Therefore, if the working out prove often a failure, the fault lies in the imperfection of the workers, not in the perfection of the law. In those rare cases where the love is ideal, the man's "I take" and the woman's "I give" blend into an ideal union, each completing and modifying the other. ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... began to reveal himself to her by the most watchful observance of her conduct. At all times and in all places, by day and by night, her slightest faults were noticed and punished by this still invisible, but now evidently present monitor. At the least imperfection in her conduct, before she had time to accuse and to condemn herself, she felt the blow of a mysterious hand, the warning of an ever-attentive guardian; and the sound of that mystical chastisement was audible to others also. Great was the astonishment of those who could thus discern ...
— The Life of St. Frances of Rome, and Others • Georgiana Fullerton
... into these holes, whence they are easily dislodged and taken. The natives always pitch on a part of a tree for this purpose, which has been perforated by a worm, which indicates that the wood is in an unsound state, and will readily yield to their efforts. If the rudeness and imperfection of the tools with which they work be considered, it must be confessed to be an operation ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench
... who in other points have shown so much artistic taste, should have selected this uniform and unsatisfactory shape for their state apartments, unless they were forcibly held to it by some insuperable imperfection in the means at their disposal. That they knew how to use proportions more pleasing in their general effect, we see from the inner open courts, of which there were several in every palace, and which, in shape and dimensions are ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... the queen. "In truth, I have not observed it; but to take notice of an imperfection so very trifling, would make ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... minuteness of the bacteria, the impossibility of studying any one of them for more than a few moments at a time —only so long, in fact, as it can be followed under a microscope; when we remember, too, the imperfection of the compound microscopes which made high powers practical impossibilities; and, above all, when we appreciate the looseness of the ideas which pervaded all scientists as to the necessity of accurate observation in distinction from inference, it is not strange ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... history, which could not be fitted into the scheme of the modern historian, has proved to be part of a larger story which the clay books of Babylonia are gradually unfolding before our eyes. It is no longer safe to reject a narrative as "unhistorical" simply on the ground of the imperfection of ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... his own private purposes. In modern terms, it is a simple, rough-and-ready attempt to solve that constant problem of politics, how efficient government is to be combined with popular control. This problem arises from the imperfection of human nature, apparent in rulers as well as in ruled, and if the principle which attempts to solve it be admitted as a principle of importance in the formation of the best constitution, then the starting-point of politics will be man's actual imperfection, not his ideal nature. Instead, then, ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... became the object of ten times the ridicule which he had endeavoured to inflict upon those who had a natural impediment. What was pitied in them as a misfortune, was despised in him as an ill-acquired and consequently a vicious imperfection; and therefore every one was willing to increase the mortifying smart of it, and keep alive the conscious shame he felt of wearing a fool's cap which was entirely of his own making. This vexatious, and in some degree, vindictive ridicule to which he was daily ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... darted my gaze down the crater; the immediate vicinity was discernible, till, lower down, obscurity gradually terminated in total darkness. Such figures exemplify many truths revealed in the Bible. We pursue them, until, from the imperfection of our faculties, we are lost in impenetrable night. All truths, however, that are essential to faith, honestly interpreted; all that are important to human conduct, under every diversity of circumstance, are manifest as a blazing star. The ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... aeroplanes, tightening a flying wire here, loosening a landing wire there, testing controls; in fact, doing all that scientific knowledge and care can do to reduce the chance of accident from mechanical imperfection. And upon these patriotic, scientific mechanics, working for their country and their ideals and recompensed from a pecuniary point of view with a shilling or two a day, rested to a large extent, the lives of the aviators and the success of their ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... a thing to be expected at all among mankind, that all laws should be right, or "just and equal." Human legislation must be expected to bear the marks of an imperfection, which attaches itself to everything human. If obedience to government were obligatory, only on the condition that all the laws of that government are just; then, such obedience would mean nothing at all, and every man would ...
— The Religious Duty of Obedience to Law • Ichabod S. Spencer
... our succeeding in becoming acquainted with the whole of duration. It is something, however, to be aware of the flaw, even if we cannot wholly remedy it, and the wider the acquaintance the less is the imperfection in the ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... the wife of Bath sath in Chaucer by her husband, we owe them not a word. If we should die tomorrow; I hope her Majesty will find by our writings that the honour of the cause, in the opinion of the world, must be with her Majesty; and that her commissioners are, neither of such imperfection in their reasons, or so barbarous in language, as they who fail not, almost in every line, of some barbarism not to be borne in a grammar-school, although in subtleness and impudent affirming of untruths ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... odd moments; and then they only ask whether that healthy human life is suited to our streets and trades. Perfection may be attainable or unattainable as an end. It may or may not be possible to talk of imperfection as a means to perfection. But surely it passes toleration to talk of perfection as a means to imperfection. The New Jerusalem may be a reality. It may be a dream. But surely it is too outrageous to say that the New Jerusalem is a reality on ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton |
