"Intangible" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... visits to the painter's lodgings? what possible reason could she have for going there? Miss Granger's suspicions were shapeless and intangible as yet, but she did suspect. More than once—many times, in fact—during the painting of the portrait, she had seen, or had imagined she could see, signs and tokens of a closer intimacy between the painter and her father's wife than was warranted by ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... career than from their instructors. Nothing is so pervasive as an atmospheric influence, and, in its way, nothing is so important. It is significant that foreign students rarely speak of Oxford without commenting on its atmosphere; something in the air of the old town which, although intangible in its operation, is a positive factor in the educational result. Specific courses of instruction are less numerous than in many other places, and such instruction as is offered is often defective in methods and spirit; but the life of the place ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... adaptations of nature. From being a mere ear of corn it becomes a revelation of design and beauty. No change has taken place in the ear of corn, but a most important change has been wrought in the boy. Such a change is so subtle, so delicate, and so intangible that it cannot be measured in terms of per cents; but it is no less real for all that. It is a spiritual process and, therefore, aptly illustrates the accepted definition of education. Though it defies analysis and the rule of ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... sudden silence. Gaunt felt the intangible calm that hung about this man: this woman saw beneath it flashes of some depth of passion, shown reluctant even to her, the slow heat of the gloomy soul below. It frightened her, but she yielded: her will, her purpose slept, died into its languor. She loved, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... human soul (jivatma) as a part of the Supreme Soul. This theory adds small comfort or dignity to it when we remember that this whole of which it is declared a part is an intangible, unattractive Being—devoid of all qualities (nirguna). If the soul existed from eternity as a part of the divine Soul and will ultimately resume that interrupted existence, what value, ethical or otherwise, can be attached to that bondage of manhood ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... this party is felt everywhere in the republic. It is known by no particular name, and has assumed no definite shape; but its branches reach far and wide in the church and in the state. This shapeless and nameless party is not intangible in other and more important respects. That party, sir, has determined upon a fixed, definite, and comprehensive policy toward the whole colored population of the United States. What that policy is, it becomes us as abolitionists, and especially does it become ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... questions. He looked at Jan from his cot, and watched the boy silently as he undressed and went to bed; and in the morning the whole incident passed from his mind. The intangible holds but little fascination for the simple folk who live under the Arctic Circle. Their struggle is with life, their joys are in its achievement, in their constant struggle to keep life running strong and red within them. Such ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... concerned, was never mentioned. At first this was a relief to Lois, but by and by came a feeling too negative to be called pique, or even mortification at having been forgotten; it was rather an intangible soreness in ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... was said on the subject, and as they rode along in silence, each was thinking of the curious web of emotions that was moulding their lives and making definite objects grow from intangible impulses. He was hardly conscious yet what a motive force in his plans Liddy was destined to be; and she was filled with a new and sweet consciousness of a woman's power to shape a man's plans in life. When her home was reached, ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... given point, he leans toward the stem leading to that point. This silken web which you have admired, is a sensitive electric telegraph. It is composed of the elements of mind; in the world you have lately inhabited it would be intangible, but it has a subtle connection with the human brain, and spirit thoughts directed through it go with the promptness of electricity to their destination. Thought is electric, but its power of transmitting ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... and secret confessions of his own heart—were a delight to him. He began to taste the transport, the intoxication of an author. And, oh, what a luxury is there in that first love of the Muse! that process by which we give palpable form to the long-intangible visions which have flitted across us;—the beautiful ghost of the Ideal within us, which we invoke in the Gadara of our still closets, with the wand ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... great principles of nature are a vacuum, and a plenum. The plenum is body, or tangible nature; the vacuum is space, or intangible nature. "We know by the evidences of the senses (which are our only rule of reasoning) that bodies have a real existence, and we infer from the evidence of the senses that the vacuum has a real existence; for if space have no real existence, ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... music: which, as I conceive, is neither to be an agent for expressing material things; nor to utter pretty sounds to amuse the ear; nor a sensuous excitant to fire the blood, or a sedative to lull the senses: it is a language, but a language of the intangible, a kind of soul-language. It appeals directly to the Seelenzustaende it springs from, for it is the natural expression of it, rather than, like words, a translation of it into set stereotyped symbols which may ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... fault in his official capacity, a purely administrative tribunal is empowered to punish him; and, if the affair is important or urgent, the judge supplies the omission of the functionary. *z Lastly, if the same individual is guilty of one of those intangible offences of which human justice has no cognizance, he annually appears before a tribunal from which there is no appeal, which can at once reduce him to insignificance and deprive him of his charge. This system ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... but something warm within her gave the lie to this cold disposition of their friendship. She did not want to let him go his way. She had no intention of letting him go. She could not express it, but in some intangible way he belonged to her. As a brother might, she told herself; not because Blister Haines had married them when they had gone to him in their hurry to solve a difficulty. Not for that reason at all, but because from the first hour of meeting, their spirits had gone out ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... being destined to perpetuate the race, but the strange and mysterious product of all our complicated desires which have been accumulating in us for centuries but which have been turned aside from their primitive and divine object and have wandered after a mystic, imperfectly perceived and intangible beauty. There are some women like that, who blossom only for our dreams, adorned with every poetical attribute of civilization, with that ideal luxury, coquetry and esthetic charm which surround woman, a living statue that brightens ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... blue—cobalt-blue, and painted in with a sure brush—against the porcelain-blue of the sky. What did the washed-out tints of the foliage matter, when, wherever you turned, you could count on getting these marvellous soft distances, on always finding a range of blue-veiled hills, lovely and intangible as a dream? ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... red, orange, and yellow. The reds, when seen with a glass, reach to violet or dark purple. With a glass, there come out other colors: very decided greens, very delicate blues, browns, grays, and white. If these colors are almost intangible at best, they are rendered more so by the variations of the atmosphere, of the eye, and of the glass. But after these are all accounted for, there is still a real difference. Two stars of the class known as double stars, that is, so little separated that considerable optical ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... fanatical fury. Why should he think of her in this hour? Six months back he would have looked with jealous eyes upon the right to lead the Vigilantes, but this change that had mastered him—what was it? Not cowardice, nor caution. No. Yet, being intangible, it was none the less marked, as his friends had shown ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... four thousand, spread over a large territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins and strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they saw no justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny tax on their tobacco exports to New England—though they paid it nevertheless. They particularly objected to the interference of Governor Berkeley, for they knew him well. And when the free election of their assembly was attacked, they sent emissaries ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... knowledge of that far-off land. Into the woof of an Eastern rug is woven the soul of a woman. Into the glisten of a scarab is polished the prophecy of a life. Into the whole charming romance of the book is woven the thread of an intangible, "creepy," mysterious force. What is it? Is it a ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... by the principle of life in which its individuality consists, which is to make it a new being, instead of a fellow-cell with those that build up the body of the parent animal and remain component parts of it. This intangible something is the subtile element that eludes our closest analysis; it is the germ of the immaterial principle according to which the new being is to develop. The physical germ we see; the spiritual germ we cannot see, though we may ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... think I shall be able, hereafter, to explain; but it is not to be reduced to line and rule—not to be measured by angles or described by compasses—not to be chipped out by the geologist, or equated by the mathematician. It is intangible, incalculable—a thing to be felt, not understood—to be loved, not comprehended—a music of the eyes, a melody of the heart, whose truth is ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... words, the vision began to disappear. AEneas endeavored to clasp the beloved image in his arms to retain it, but it was intangible and evanescent, and, before he could speak to it, it was gone, and he was left standing in the desolate and gloomy street alone. He turned at length slowly away; and solitary, thoughtful and sad, he went back to the gate of the city, and thence out to the valley where he had concealed ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... mouth inseparate words, And with blind lips and fingers wrung my breast Hard, and thrust out with foolish hands and feet, Murmuring; but those grey women with bound hair Who fright the gods frighted not him; he laughed Seeing them, and pushed out hands to feel and haul Distaff and thread, intangible; but they Passed, and I hid the brand, and in my heart Laughed likewise, having all my will of heaven. But now I know not if to left or right The gods have drawn us hither; for again I dreamt, and saw the ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... detected a change of tone, and thereafter took flight whenever she heard his step at the kitchen door. So Monday forenoon passed; Caleb brought water for her tubs and put out her clothes-line, but they had hardly spoken. The intangible monster of a misunderstanding had crept between them. But when at noon he asked as usual, though without looking at her, "Goin' to Sudleigh with the butter to-day?" Amanda had reached the limit of her endurance. It seemed to her that she could no ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... sky, as he had come on her sometimes. Poor Alicia! And once he had been within an ace of marrying her! A life spoiled! By what, if not by love of beauty! But who would have ever thought that the intangible could wreck a woman, deprive her of love, marriage, motherhood, of fame, of wealth, of health! And yet—by ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... not as yet been so clearly observed. The laws governing our social life are not so clearly understood as to permit of a clear generalization. Still, the opinions, pleas, and judgments of society serve as boundaries which are none the less real for being intangible. When men or women err—that is, pass out from the sphere in which they are accustomed to move—it is not as if the bird had intruded itself into the water, or the wild animal into the haunts of man. Annihilation ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... reader. The fact was, that as I had recovered strength, I had become more troubled and restless about Miss Oldcastle. I could not see how I was to make any progress towards her favour. There seemed a barrier as insurmountable as intangible between her and me. The will of one woman came between and parted us, and that will was as the magic line over which no effort of will or strength could enable the enchanted knight to make a single stride. ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... it was because of some wordless, intangible reason, that only lovers know, which made Diana seem more beautiful, more pure, her touch more sacred, and Enoch stronger, ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... something were done to end it, the neophytes would most certainly rise in rebellion, and slay their masters. Fortunately all danger was removed, a few days after Diego's tragic end, by the arrival of a messenger with letters from Santa Barbara. The news they contained was most grave. The vague, intangible anxiety, so long experienced, had culminated at last in the uprising of the Indians at Mission Purezima. On the Sabbath morning previous, they had made a sudden assault on the mission, and had burned many of the buildings, almost ruined the church, and, after much fighting, had driven the Mexicans ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... daily their bounteous, beauteous yield of daintiness and comfort, and paying for themselves many times over by the atmosphere of nicety and refinement which they create. For it is these touches, unobtrusive by their very delicacy, which introduce that intangible but very essential quality known as tone ...
— The Complete Home • Various
... the hope of immortality mingles a dread of utter oblivion here. Will it not be consoling, standing close by the graves which have been prepared for us, to leave the world some little legacy of wisdom sedulously gleaned from the fields of the fading past,—some intangible, but honest wealth, the not altogether worthless accumulation of an humble, but earnest life,—something which may lighten the load of a sad experience, illuminate the dark hours which as they have come to all must come to all through all the ages, or at least divert without debauching ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... clearness and obscurity. It is inexplicably uneven, as if the writer were perpetually playing on the boundary line that divides sanity of thought from intellectual chaos. There is method in the madness, but it is a method of intangible ideas. Nevertheless, there is genius written over a large portion of it, and to a musician the wealth of musical imagination is a living spring of thought"—Harold E. Gorst, in London Saturday Review ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... off the fright that had startled him. It was as if an unseen thing of gloom had passed him by, casting upon him the intangible shadow of its presence. He was aware of a feeling of foreboding. Something ominous was about to happen. Calamity hovered in the air. He gazed fixedly across the table at the other man. He could not understand. Was it that he had blundered and poisoned himself? ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... and inanimate. The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Tahkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, mysterious something of which they are only the embodiment, and that in such measure and degree as may accord with the individual fancy of the worshipper. Each one will worship some of these divinities, and neglect or despise others, but the great object of all their worship, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... was upon her to track down this intangible racial distinction, but she saw Runnion, whom she could not bear, coming towards them, so thanked Stark hurriedly and went ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... possesses certain influences over us?—a something which is utterly unrepresented to us by the senses. And now this word "substance," which formerly expressed a thing so well known, and every moment handled and looked at, is transformed to an invisible, intangible, imperceptible substratum—an unknown upholder of certain qualities, or, in more exact language, an unseen power clothing itself in our attributes—an existence far more resembling what is popularly understood by spirit than by matter. At length, even this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... young people who had carved their own Fate in the very rock which now had shattered their lives, seemed to be searching for something vague, unavowed and mysterious which instinct told them was there, but which was so elusive, so intangible that the soul of each recoiled, even whilst it ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... and I, and George. It was only two miles away across the fields. I was quite proud to be seen in the company of so stately a gentleman as Major Strickland, who was dressed this afternoon as for a visit of ceremony. He had on a blue frock-coat, tightly buttoned, to which the builder had imparted an intangible something that smacked undeniably of the old soldier. He wore a hat rather wide in the brim; a high stiff checked cravat; a white vest; and lacquered military boots, over which his tightly-strapped trousers fell ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 2, February, 1891 • Various
... perhaps in the intangible things that go to the making of national character that the Scottish contribution to the making of America has been most notable. In 1801, the population of the whole of Scotland was but little over a million and a half, and behind that there were ...
— Scotland's Mark on America • George Fraser Black
... the intangible shadow of pomp and luxury, while the substance was actual penury. But her inborn fertility of invention, her abundant resources, her tact in accommodating herself to circumstances, and her inexhaustible energy, had endowed her with the faculty of making the best of her contradictory ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... form in houses, yachts, and other things. Now twenty years of my life—to me—is worth more than a million dollars. I simply can't afford to sell it for that. I prefer to invest it, as somebody or other has said, unearned in life. I've always had a liking for intangible properties." ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... straight leaves. Trees, with erect stems as tall as Nelson's Column, strain upward to the light. Butterflies in numbers flutter noiselessly about. The air is absolutely still and of a feel like satin. Clouds of intangible softness and clean and white as snow float around, appear, dissolve, and reappear. Through the parting in the overhanging trees the intense blue sky is seen in glimpses. The sun here and there pierces through the arching foliage, and the greens of the foliage glisten brighter ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... Earthman pitted his mighty sinews against the force he could not understand. Here was an intangible thing, yet it was a power that challenged his own brute strength, and he exerted himself to the limit in accepting the challenge. With legs spread wide and with sweat oozing from every pore, he heaved himself ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... analysis; but in the coup-d'oeil of that white face that dazzled me in darkness, and haunted my daily reveries with a faded light, there was an intangible character of the ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... of it. This power of three men to get together, steal the privilege from the people, and by their joint action to produce a fourth body (corpus), behind which they hide and push their schemes—an intangible something which outlives them all—that is the power that is undermining this government. It's against the Constitution. Old Chief Justice Marshall in his verdict (which ushered in the reign of corporations, in this country) distinctly said that it ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... gamblers" and "players of square games." The man who has been much about the world soon learns to understand that the really honest and "square" gambler is a creature of the imagination. The gambler makes his living by his wits, and he who lives by anything so intangible speedily finds the road to ...
— The Young Engineers in Arizona - Laying Tracks on the Man-killer Quicksand • H. Irving Hancock
... smooth, refined, proud, and reserved. They loved each other to the point of idolatry; and yet they parted ten days after marriage with these words of wroth and madness. Something had come between them. What was it? Another man? No. Another woman? Still no. What then? A ghost, an intangible, almost an invisible but very real and divorce-making ...
— Capt'n Davy's Honeymoon - 1893 • Hall Caine
... such a spell that this intangible, inaccessible, unearthly vision appeared to be the only reality in the world—and all else a mere dream. That I, that is to say, Srijut So-and-so, the eldest son of So-and-so of blessed memory, should be drawing a monthly salary of Rs. ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... Independence passed by the Continental Congress on the second day of July, 1776, when the people of the rebelling British colonies in America, by action of their representatives, assumed a free and independent position. But a motion is intangible. It is an act, of which the announcement is the visible result. "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind" prompted the Congress on July 4, 1776, to "declare the causes" which impelled it to separation. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... flirting on her part. Never had she given him the smallest ground to think her in love with him. On the contrary, she had maintained between them for all her gentleness, from beginning to end, that soft, intangible barrier which at ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to that horrible cousin of her father's. She seemed so intangible, remote and virginal, that her cousin and Miss Pinnegar both failed to make anything of her. She answered their questions simply, but did not talk. They talked to each other. And at last the cousin went away, with a profound dislike of ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... did not once allude to. They did not, and do not, propose to pay even a double money tax on account of expected exemption. Little as this would have availed to meet the actual situation, it would have shown their good will, and some comprehension of justice, while they talked of an absurd and intangible "right." ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's vested ideas,—blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private truth. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the Spirit of the Lord had departed from him. Who among us is not exposed to the assaults of that pestilence that walketh in darkness? and, alas! who among us can say that he has repelled the contagion? Subtly it creeps over us all, the stealthy intangible vapour, unfelt till it has quenched the lamp which alone lights the darkness of the mine, and clogged ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a village community, or a nation—is in last analysis an aggregate of human units and nothing besides. Its life consists of the combined activities of such components—and nothing else. Could we subtract the members one by one, there would be no intangible residuum after all the people and their lives had been taken away. When these simple facts are recognized, it is clear at once that the concerted activities performed by biological units cannot be anything but ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... was America's first ally. The king was the state, the king was the country, the king was all. There was one king, with power not derived from his people, and too high to be questioned; and the rest were all subjects, with no political right but obedience. All above was intangible power, all below quiet subjection. A recent occurrence in the French Chambers shows us how public opinion on these subjects is changed. A minister had spoken of the "king's subjects." "There are no subjects," ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... the highest courage; to shrink and quake, and yet stand at one's post, may be braver still. So of success. It lies less in the attainment of some external end than in holding yourself to your purposes and ideals; for out of high loyalty and effort comes that intangible thing called character, which is no mere symbol of success, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... providential and inexhaustible milch cow. So that the latest defender of the Padres, the learned Father Zephyrin Engelhardt, is probably justified in holding that their riches were all of unworldly metal, and consisted only in "their conscientiousness, industry, economy, and abstemiousness." Such intangible valuables, it may be remarked, if they could be recovered by delving, would certainly not have proved, in the estimation of the delvers, a ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... our idea would be inadequate, though we realized the full measure of every groan and heartache. Earth's most priceless treasures are still more intangible things, the treasures of justice and kindliness and love. In that higher realm the cost of war is most terrible and most deadly. The spirit of war in the soldier sets aside the moral law, makes human life seem valueless, human suffering a thing to be disregarded, human ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... governing a common copartnership. There is a fund of power to be exercised under the direction of the joint councils of the allied members, but that which has been reserved by the individual members is intangible by the common Government or the individual members composing it. To attempt it finds no support in ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... you stayed here?" I asked. She had now taken the chair fronting me. We were stiffly seated as if for a business interview. I had a desire to take the poor figure in my arms, but I felt as if she were as intangible as a spirit. When mental pain has devoured the body, as physical pain so often does, there is something thrice as ethereal about ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... room, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... in the euphemistic sense which the term has under the code duello governing "affairs of honour." It carries no connotation of honesty, veracity, equity, liberality, or unselfishness. This national honour is of the nature of an intangible or immaterial asset, of course; it is a matter of prestige, a sportsmanlike conception; but that fact must not be taken to mean that it is of any the less substantial effect for purposes of a casus belli than the material assets of the community. Quite the contrary: ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... demoralization. The death of Werner, the fact that he had been stricken down during the taking of a scene and on the very stage, had served to bring the tragedy home to the people. More, it was a second murder in four days, apparently by the same hand as the first. A sense of dread, a nameless, intangible fear, had taken form and found its way under the big blackened glass roofs and around and through the corridors, into the dressing rooms, and back even to the manufacturing and purely technical departments. The gateman eyed us with undisguised uneasiness as we drove through the archway into the ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... is something very intangible, and yet nothing is more actually felt—or missed. There are certain houses that seem to radiate warmth like an open wood fire, there are others that suggest an arrival by wireless at the North Pole, even though a much ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... resumed, shewing the absolute identity of the brain with a galvanic battery. Nor is this a very startling idea, when we reflect that electricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was supposed to be. It is a thing perfectly intangible, weightless. Metal may be magnetized, or heated to seven hundred of Fahrenheit, without becoming the hundredth part of a grain heavier. And yet electricity is a real thing, an actual existence in nature, as witness the effects of heat and light in vegetation—the power of the galvanic current ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... scornful smile flickered for a moment in the royal eyes. It was surely news enough for any man that she was a woman—beautiful still—possessing still that intangible and fatal gift of pleasing. The woman slowly faded from her eyes as they rested on the great soldier's face, and the Queen it was who, with a gracious gesture, bade him be seated. But the General remained standing. He ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... roaring past. In vain he cried to the wheelman to stop the wheel: there was no answer. Would those stars never cease blinking in and out, or the wind stop whipping the swift clouds past? So he went on, endless years, driving through space, some terrible intangible weight dragging at his heart, and all his body ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... south and southwestward of Mount Edgecumbe. Impenetrable woods lined the mountains to the very shore. Great trunks of uprooted trees swept past the ship continually. Even as the clouds cleared, leaving vast forests and mountain torrents and snowy peaks visible, a hazy film of intangible gloom seemed to settle over ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... was not to be found there or elsewhere. He could not enter again into the heritage of boyhood and the heart of youth. He could not find there the old dreams and hopes that had made life sweet. He understood that he could not bring back to the old valley what he had taken from it. He had lost that intangible, all-real wealth of faith and idealism and zest; he had bartered it away for the hard, yellow gold of the marketplace, and he realized at last how much poorer he was than when he had left that home valley. His was a name that stood for millions, but ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to be those of guilt in a girl too young to be happy in criminal deceit. With his experience of life, and with his usually just perceptions, he ought to have known better; but there is some quality in a few men or women, intangible and yet unmistakable, which makes us instinctively suspect present, or foretell future, moral evil; and poor Molly was one of these. What it was, on the other hand, which made her trust Sir Edmund and drew her to him, it would need a subtle analysis of natural affinities ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... anything, Mr. MacGentle fell, no one knew exactly how, into the presidential chair of the Beacon Hill Bank. As soon as he was there, everybody saw that there he belonged. His social position, his culture, his honorable, albeit intangible record, suited the old bank well. He had an air of subdued wisdom, and people were fond of appealing to his judgment and asking his advice,—- perhaps because he never seemed to expect them to follow it when given (as, indeed, they never ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... shoulders the burdens of the world. Evidence is hard to collect, for the witnesses disagree among themselves. Then there are other complications. Abundance stole things which you can see and touch, while Lotus's theft was only one of intangible thoughts. Furthermore, Abundance comes from a no-account family, quite "down and out," while Lotus is a pastor's daughter and as such entitled to due respect and deference. And still further, nobody likes Abundance, while ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the World War, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction—for ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... her dressing-table, smiling at what she was about to do. It seemed as though she were going to bribe the girl to love her, but she was only yielding to the pathetic human desire to give something tangible since the intangible was ignored. 'When I was twenty-one,' she said, 'your ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible." I was the phantom—invisible, intangible. The pair beside, the ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... The rocket noise was gone as the mind reached for it, like an occluded thought. The motors were silent; there wasn't a tremor of vibration. Yet somewhere a ghost engine was warming up, preparing a ghost ship for an intangible ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... can be seen or eaten or worn. But there never was a greater mistake. While men will haggle to the penny over the price of hay, or fight for a cent more to the bushel of oats, they will turn out their very pockets for strange, intangible joys, hopes, thoughts, or for a moment of peace in a feverish ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... women, the hawk-featured, turbaned men, the Jews, the Chaldeans, the Arabs, the Armenians, the stalwart Kurds, and through it all a leaven of khaki-clad Indians, purchasing for the regimental mess. All these and an ever-present exotic, intangible something are what the bazaar means. Close by the entrance stood a booth festooned with lamps and lanterns of every sort, with above it scrawled "Aladdin-Ibn-Said." My Arabic was not at that time sufficient ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... not to be undisturbed. Something awoke me. What! Was this night given over to ghosts and spirits intangible? Again the forms of men were gliding noiselessly about me. Above were the twinkling stars, around were busy men, and silence everywhere. With instinctive cautiousness I lay motionless, furtively noting the ...
— In The Ranks - From the Wilderness to Appomattox Court House • R. E. McBride
... literally, like those of Milton's heaven,—grated as horrible discords on my secret ear as the gates of Milton's other place. It was my gold that helped to make those hinges. And this I endured merely for the sake of enjoying the society, not of my dear newly-found cousins, but of two phantoms, intangible, unsatisfactory, unreal that hovered over their heads,—the phantom of wealth and the still more empty phantom of social position. But all this, understand, was before I rode ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... and now — father and friend were away from her, and she was alone. Yet still the sun shone — might it not again some time for her? Poor child, as she stood there the tears dropped fast, at that meeting of hope and sorrow; hope as intangible as the light, sorrow a thicker mantle than that of the cedar trees. And now the sunlight seemed to say 'Ask' — and the green glittering earth responded — "and ye shall receive." Elizabeth looked; — she heard them say ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... from a sight-seeing car turned their heads with a common accord, their attention arrested by something intangible. ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... degrees so subtle as almost to escape measurement—he had glided back to the forbidden and dangerous ground of the war. At first it was an intangible reference to something that occurred on such and such a date, the date in question being that of some sanguinary battle; then a swift sarcasm, veiled and softly shod; then a sarcasm that dropped its veil ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... himself and to that interior Master of whose stress and constraint upon him he grew more intimately conscious as he grew in years. The force of this inward pressure showed itself in many ways. Outwardly it made his manner undemonstrative, and fixed an intangible yet very real barrier between him and his kindred, even when the affection that existed was extremely close and tender. From infancy he exhibited that repugnance to touching or being touched by any one which ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... steady-eyed seriousness in which, too, she recognized the intangible quality that made him seem to her different from all the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... that had formerly been Moscow. But when we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches, shrines, riches, or houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in August. All was destroyed, except ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was his home, or the spot to which he is drawn by the memory of some unexpiated crime. It is as a vitalized corpse that he comes to trouble mankind, often subject to human appetites, constantly endowed ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... afterwards, I began to wonder; I allowed myself to guess. Men from the front came home. My surmisings circled ceaselessly around two—dear fellows, of whom I was really fond. At last I felt convinced I knew, by intangible yet unmistakable signs, which was he who had done it. I grew quite sure. And then—I hardly know how to tell you, Jim—of all impossible horrors! The man who had killed Michael wanted to marry me!—Oh, don't groan, darling; you make me so unhappy! But I do not wonder ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... conscience was of a piece with the rest of him. It was not, like Mr. Gladstone's, a salamander-conscience—an intangible, dangerous creature, that loved to live in the fire; nor was it, like Gordon's, a restless conscience; nor, like Sir Evelyn Baring's, a diplomatic conscience; it was a commonplace affair. Lord Hartington ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... direct communion with it, "united" with its reality. But this very recognition of the living growing plant does and must entail for you a consciousness of deeper realities, which, as yet, you have not touched: of the intangible things and forces which feed and support it; of the whole universe that touches you through its life. A mere cataloguing of all the plants— though this were far better than your old game of indexing your own poor photographs of them—will never ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... right; I know I am a little goose," sobbed she. (The words were mental, intangible, unspoken; the sobs physical, palpable, decided.) "I never did know anything, and I never shall,—and I don't care if I don't. I don't see any good in knowing so much. We don't have a great while to stay in the world any way, and I don't see why we can't be let alone and have a good time while ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... of them: Mantar Falusaine at Hesperidum, Pietro Corrallani at Mars City and Cheng I K'an at Ophir. Among them, by a vast intangible network of communication, they discussed strategy and the situation on which it ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... an unseen multitude was strange and terrifying in the extreme. It was as though, without perceiving them, their human faculties suddenly became aware of the spirits of the unnumbered dead, thronging, watching, following—there, but intangible; speaking without words, ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... to perceive the intangible price that is attached to the things of the spirit as well as to the material necessities of daily life. She was forced to surrender his love for her as the compensation for his sight, yet she was firmly resolved to keep, for him, the love that refused to reckon with the barrier ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... all probability, lay the secret of her ascendency over du Bruel; at any rate, he loved her with the love which use and wont at length makes indispensable to life. Every day adds another thread to the strong, irresistible, intangible web, which enmeshes the most delicate fancies, takes captive every most transient mood, and binding them together, holds a man captive hand and foot, ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... inordinately fond of him, his thoughts continually reverted to Salome, and that subtle sympathy which springs from the "fellow-being," that makes us "wondrous kind" to those whose pangs are fierce as ours, began faintly and shyly, but surely, to assert itself. A shadowy, intangible self-reproach brooded like a phantom over his generous heart, when, amidst the uncertainty that seemed to overhang the orphan's fate, he remembered the numberless manifestations of almost idolatrous affection ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature incapable of prolongation, and Wordsworth, in endeavouring it, falls more below himself, and is, more even than many poets his inferiors in ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... stood together as the aircar passed over the Kraggork Swamps—pleasantly close together, von Schlichten realized. For the moment, he could almost forget the queer, intangible tension that had been growing steadily, and the feeling that things were nearing a breaking ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... was always quietly dignified. It was the intangible good breeding that distinguished her from the ordinary country-folk. She had a small tin kettle in her hand, and her ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... many respects as in a painting. Thus you see, in a painting done on a flat surface, objects which appear in relief, and in the mirror—also a flat surface—they look the same. The picture has one plane surface and the same with the mirror. The picture is intangible, in so far as that which appears round and prominent cannot be grasped in the hands; and it is the same with the mirror. And since you can see that the mirror, by means of outlines, shadows and lights, makes objects appear in relief, you, who have in your colours ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... incomprehensibly and spiritually, and therefore it is to be accounted supernatural, even as two Lovers, their persons are visible, but their Love one to the other is invisible: Humane Bodies are tangible and natural, but Love is invisible, spiritual, intangible and supernatural, comparable to a Magnetick Attraction only; for the invisible Love which is attracted unto it spiritually by the Imagination is, accomplish'd by the desires and fruition. In like manner when the Heaven hath a love to the Earth, and the Earth hath a Love, Inclination, ...
— Of Natural and Supernatural Things • Basilius Valentinus
... to the apothecary's eyes as anything intangible could be, a load of suffering was lifted from the quadroon's mind, as this explanation was concluded. Yet he only sat in meditation before his tenant, who regarded him long and sadly. Then, seized with one of his ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... everyone of his listeners who had five thousand dollars in bonds to lose. I knew that it would be useless to try to head off the detective now, and I wisely kept silent. My mind was by no means at rest however; for an unknown reason I did not want a detective any more than Radnor. I had the intangible feeling that there was something in the air which might ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... years ago Torricelli discovered that the atmosphere, the space surrounding the earth, which seemed more intangible than a dream, had weight and substance, and invented the barometer, the tiny tube and drop of mercury by which it could be seized and held and weighed as accurately as a pound of lead. As soon as this invisible ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... to learn is what we owe for a kindness received. One says he owes the money which he got, another a consulship, another a province. These, however, are but the outward tokens of good services, not the services themselves. A benefit is to the hand something intangible; it is a process in the mind. There is a world of difference between the material of a benefit and the benefit itself. Hence the reality of a benefit lies not in gold, nor silver, but in the good will of the giver. The things which we hold ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... a whirl of thought myself. I had lost a pupil; my purse was leaner than ever, my responsibilities heavier; yet intangible joys were storming my old heart, and it was athrill with visions of youth and hope and love, although I saw them through windows doubly ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... to the value of the situation, she knew it, and would take Dixon's advice. The Trainer's opinion was borne out by the betting market; Lucretia stood a long way down in the list. Even Diablo, bad horse as he was supposed to be, was at a shorter price; the heavy outlay of his owner, and some intangible rumors having caused the bookmakers to feel inclined to hold him close up against their chests. His work since his trial with The Dutchman had been quite satisfactory. He looked upon Westley, the jockey, as a friend, ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... "and you have placed a problem before me, my boy, that I feel is as difficult to resolve. I am very, very glad that you have kept it in your own breast, Severn; and the more I think of it the more I feel that it is only an intangible vapour of the brain. But, all the same, the matter is so mysterious and so important that I should not be doing my duty if I did not ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... one can copy Corot. The work that he did after he attained freedom and swung away from Claude and Constable has an illusive, intangible, subtle and spiritual quality that no imitator can ever catch on his canvas. Corot could not even copy his own pictures—his work is born of the spirit. His effects are something beyond skill of hand, something beyond ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... fascinated attention. In point of fact, he did not notice that at all, until some time later. Denny Bolton's long, tanned face was entirely grave—even graver than usual. Just a hint of wistfulness that would never quite leave them showed in his eyes and lurked in the line of his lips—an intangible, fleeting suggestion of expectation that had waited patiently for something that had been very long in the coming. And the black felt hat and smooth black suit which he wore finished the picture and made the illusion complete. His face and ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... ghost be really a shadow, there must be some substance of which it is the shadow. These visible and intangible shadows, without substances to ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... inspiration; whereof the fame in their own day roused the emulous courage of every Spartan and of every Englishman, making them ready to face any odds, and chilling the blood of their foes. Vain deeds, when we count the cost and the tangible gain—but very far from vain when we take into account the intangible moral effect. ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... the greenwood hid thy gracious head? Veiled with what visions while the grey world grieves, Or muffled with what shadows of green leaves, What warm intangible green shadows spread To sweeten the sweet twilight for thy bed? What sleep enchants thee? what delight deceives? Where the deep dreamlike dew before the dawn Feels not the fingers of the sunlight yet Its ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... happened, felt this too, and something more. It was eight years since he had stood before an English lady, and he surmised that there could not be many to compare with this one, while after his grim lonely life an intangible something that seemed to emanate from her gracious serenity compelled his homage. Then as she smiled at him and held out her hand, he was for a moment sensible of an almost overwhelming confusion. It passed as suddenly, for this was a man of quick perceptions, and remembering that ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... little, but she did not remove her eyes from her mother's face. A great dread, however, had entered into them. A hot color leaped into her cheeks. Scarcely did she yet know what she dreaded; it was something intangible, too awful to be uttered—the terror ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... may define as physical or intangible power or influence to effect change in the material or immaterial world. Coercion is the use of either physical or intangible force to compel action contrary to the will or reasoned judgment of the individual ...
— Introduction to Non-Violence • Theodore Paullin
... sound that silenced the hunchback and brought him stiffly to attention, mouth open and eyes bulging with horror. One of those unbelievably white arms stretched forth, threateningly tense, and a jeweled finger leveled itself at the rash Ionian. From it there flashed an intangible something that leaped to bridge the distance with the speed of light, something that screeched as it flew and crashed like breaking glass when it struck Antazzo's horrified face. In an instant he was on the floor, screaming and writhing in ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... does not doubt that production will go on exactly as one would wish; he does not conceive it possible that any one can raise even a single difficulty in the way of what he calls his SYSTEM. And, in fact, what objection can be offered to a conception so radically null, so intangible as that of M. Blanc? The most curious part of his book is in the select collection which he has made of objections proposed by certain incredulous persons, which he answers, as may be imagined, triumphantly. These critics had not seen that, in discussing M. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... And when here and there they meet one whose acts are dominated by a pure, high spirit, whose faces reflect a sweet radiance amid all circumstances, and whose lives send out a rare fragrance of gladness and kindliness and controlling peace, they are quick to recognize that, to them, intangible something that makes such people different. The world—tired, hungry, keen and critical for mere sham, appreciative of the real thing—the world knows what kind of christians ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... tender souls appear to themselves when a poor rogue is sent to jail for having committed a theft! But what are all possessions which can be carried away, when compared with those that are intangible! ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... which, with the intensity of observation rendered necessary and inevitable by its narrow field, had noted, as he stepped out in the street, the intangible shifting of relations in his surroundings incident to the mere passage of time in the few days of his obliteration, now felt, as a blind man feels the mountain in his approach, or as the steersman in a Newfoundland fog apprehends the nearing of ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... The intangible and shapeless suspicions which Ethel had caught from Leonora took a misty form and substance, only to be immediately dispelled in that inconstant mind by the sudden refreshing sound of Milly's voice: 'We've called to take Ethel home, papa—oh, mother, here's ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... coming bring joy to him. Firmly though his feet were planted upon the ladder, it seemed to him then in that gloomy mood that every step must take him further away from any chance of that wonderful happiness, so intangible, yet so sweet an adjunct to life. For he was following like a doomed creature in the wake of Drexley, and Rice, and those others. Too late had come his warning. The woman of whom he never dared to think was surely a sorceress. She was only a woman—scarcely even beautiful, yet the world of ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... opening or shutting them, but he could see clearly the white hand that rested on the bed and the book that it held, and the polished table by the bedside reflecting the moonlight back to her face so that she seemed something as intangible and as ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... electricity sold must be measured just like gas or water, and he proceeded to develop a meter. There was infinite scepticism around him on the subject, and while other inventors were also giving the subject their thought, the public took it for granted that anything so utterly intangible as electricity, that could not be seen or weighed, and only gave secondary evidence of itself at the exact point of use, could not be brought to accurate registration. The general attitude of doubt was exemplified by the incident in Mr. J. P. Morgan's ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... regard to worth becomes aware of any marked superiority in a fellow creature,—an experience which in unhappy lives very seldom occurs,—a feeling of certainty usually accompanies it, which is as mysterious as the evidence upon which it is based is intangible and elusive. A man knows that he has met his superior, he knows too how far the superiority he recognises extends, and he is conscious of experiencing something exceptional, ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... pen.... He occupies a position in American literature entirely his own.... His is the literature of honest sentiment, pure and tender.... His heroes and his charming heroines are the product of the army, and it is pleasant to meet, even in this intangible way, women who can break their hearts and men who would die rather than sacrifice ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... The ship was as silent as the grave. There was no air anywhere, only the unutterably cold airlessness of space. Without pausing in his headlong rush, he pushed the bewildered girl through the open port, out into the overwhelming, intangible blackness. Nona's smothered cry of fear came to him as the next instant he stepped forward and left the solid footing to float in sudden weightlessness in a ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... afar off, inaccessible, almost intangible,—like the millionaire employer to his humble workman, covered with sweat and grime, at the bottom ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... barrier, and lavish their whole hearts on each other; but, in spite of these generous qualities, their common desires and their bitter suffering, some falsehood, some pride, some shyness, some suspicion, some chill, intangible phantom, is set fatally between them. In every community there are piteous tragedies of this sort, little dreamed of by those outside, but which the bleeding hearts concerned in them feel as a deadly drain, hastening them towards ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... On them he broods. His achievement is more complete than Melville's; his scope is less. When the physicists have resolved, as apparently they soon will do, this earthy matter where now with our implements and our machinery we are so much at home, into mysterious force as intangible as will and moral desire, some new transcendental novelist will assume Melville's task. The sea, earth, and sky, and the creatures moving therein again will become symbols, and the pursuit of Moby Dick be renewed. But now, for a while, science has ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... visionaries in existence; his spirit soars aloft from every-day matters, and delights in shadowy mysteries; a matter-of-fact is a gorgon to him; he abhors the palpable, and doats upon the occult and intangible; he loves to speculate on the doings of those in the dogstar, to discuss on immortal essences, to dispute with the disbeliever on gnomes—a paradox will be the darling of his bosom for a month, and a good chimera be his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 272, Saturday, September 8, 1827 • Various
... a third class of things on which the best civilisation does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible—caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice. A man must not be asked why he is talkative or silent, for the simple reason that he does not know. A man is not asked (even in Germany) why he walks ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... ignorance that there was such a book! Oh, I think it is even more extraordinary from the woman's point of view than from the man's. There is something almost terrifying about it. To have had such an influence on the destiny of someone you've never heard of! There's a kind of intangible sense of ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... capital, el cual se ha destinado a la explotacion de las minas, es intangible (cannot ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano
... Teutonic, whether they're Bocklin or my veterinary surgeon. 'Oh, Bocklin,' they say; 'he strains after beauty, he peoples Nature with gods too consciously.' Of course Bocklin strains, because he wants something—beauty and all the other intangible gifts that are floating about the world. So his landscapes don't come ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... by recalling the sprig of the same flower which Reine was twisting round her fingers at their last interview. This sweet breath of flowers in the night seemed like an emanation from the young girl herself, and was as fleeting and intangible as the remembrance of vanished happiness. Again and again did his morbid nature return to past events, and make his present position ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... given up my days for her? That is enough to keep her away. I am a poet; that is enough reason for her to slight me. Proud and aloof and cold as marble, what does Fame care for us? Yes, Dick is right. It's a poor game chasing illusions, hunting the intangible, pursuing dreams. Dreams? ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... his eye had brightened into a fierce joy; his twitching mouth was now grim and stern as a prison door. For days he had been fighting a dim intangible foe. Here at last was something human and definite. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... thieves break through and steal, in spite of bolts and bars and metropolitan constables; but at Boupari no native, however daring or however wicked, would ever venture to transgress the narrow line of white coral sand which protected the castaways like an intangible wall from all outer interference. Within this impalpable ring-fence they were absolutely safe from all rude intrusion, save that of the two Shadows, who waited upon them, day and night, with ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... lustre, Mr. Arbuton came down the attic stairway. He was not a man of quick fancies; but to one of even slower imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal, the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not wholly without some touch of the malign. In his heart he groaned over her beauty as if she were lost to him forever in this ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... in 1864 by the court of appeals in Kentucky, and again in 1869 under the same presiding Judge Robertson. But Chief Justice Williams rebukes this strange ruling in most emphatic language. He says: "In all the vague, uncertain, intangible, and undefined theories of the most impractical metaphysician in psychology or moral insanity, no court of last resort in England or America, so far as has been brought to our knowledge, ever before announced such a startling, irresponsible, ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens
... and feels primarily through his own immediate experiences. If this is interfered with he is left without his natural material for experimentation for he cannot yet experiment easily in the world of the intangible. Moreover to the child the familiar is the interesting. And it remains so I believe through that transition period,—somewhere about seven years,—when the child becomes poignantly aware of the world outside his own immediate experience,—of ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... unconsciously, uncalled for; mingled with other thoughts and disturbed them all. Whether at my desk, or in the courts; among men in the crowded mart, or in places simply where the idle and the thoughtless congregate, it was still my companion. It was, however, still a shadow only; a dull, intangible, half-formed image of the mind; the crude creature of a fear rather than a desire; for, of a truth, nothing could be more really terrible to me than the apparent necessity of taking the life of one so dear to me once, and still so dear to the only friends I had ever known. ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... trembled and tightened. "I am a woman, and I'll show him what a woman can do. He has lived among the Indians until he thinks he owns them. He is hard, and domineering, and uncompromising, and skeptical. And yet—" What gave her pause was so intangible, so chaotic, in her own mind as to form itself into ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx |
