"Profundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the movements have been produced. This is the sole method which we possess for the investigation of the masses of the planets; and though it may be difficult in its application—not only from the observations which are required, but also from the intricacy and the profundity of the calculations to which those observations must be submitted—yet, in the case of Jupiter at least, there is ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... and noble reticence distinguished her bray. It was one of which a less sagacious animal would have been foolishly vain or ostentatiously prodigal. It was a contralto of great compass and profundity—reaching from low G to high C—perhaps a trifle stronger in the lower register, and not altogether free from a nasal falsetto in the upper. Daring and brilliant as it was in the middle notes, it was perhaps more musically ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... the house twenty years?" he inquired in tones of such profundity that Feldman was obliged to ask him to repeat his question. At the second repetition Uncle Mosha said that it might be a ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... of information that excited her wonder and even, not a little, as she frankly let him know, her disdain. When she thought of the danger in which another pair of lovers rapturously lived she enquired of him anew why he could leave nothing to chance. Then she got for answer that this profundity was just his pride, and he pitted Ramsgate against Bournemouth and even Boulogne against Jersey—for he had great ideas—with all the mastery of detail that was some day, professionally, ...
— In the Cage • Henry James
... the traveller; he follows it at all adventures, it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside ...
— Preface to Shakespeare • Samuel Johnson
... Mr. Pike's profundity of passion, that he paused like a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... bushes; and, being noticed by the careless passer-by, who cannot see the deep infinity of waters of which it is the symbol, and knows not even whether they exist, is termed "a pretty stream of thought and fancy, but one that hath no profundity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... gem in a less brilliant setting might have failed to draw my admiration. I was the captive both of the spirit and the form. Soul and body had co-operated in producing my passion, and this may account for its suddenness and profundity. Why I loved her person, I knew—I was not ignorant of the laws of beauty—but why the spirit, I knew not. Certainly not from any idea I had formed of her high moral qualities; I had no evidence of these. Of her courage, even to daring, I had proof; ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... strange remark with a simplicity and wistfulness which were in striking contrast to the awful profundity of the suggestion, and all her auditors, including the half-tipsy Zouche, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... convents, turreted dwellings and sombre monuments, bathed in an atmosphere of orisons and melancholy, threaded by foul and ill-paved alleys, made for crime, intrigue, and mystery; where buried in the profundity of night love and wickedness both stalked forth; strange temples and niches lit by twinkling lamps before the images of saints; recollections of diabolical Inquisitorial rites—a romantic and fantastic shroud, dissipated now, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... all recorded talkers. The best of all is very possibly some obscure genius who caret vate sacro: but Johnson with the invaluable help of Boswell has beaten him and all the others. What is the essence of his superiority? Not wisdom or profundity certainly. There, of course, he would be immeasurably surpassed by many men of all nations, notably by Socrates, who is probably the most famous and certainly by far the most influential of talkers. Of course ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... it went it left something behind it which for a while performed the same office. Was this the tearful secret of which Mrs. Tristram had had a glimpse, and of which, as of her friend's reserve, her high-breeding, and her profundity, she had given a sketch of which the outlines were, perhaps, rather too heavy? Newman supposed so, but he found himself wondering less every day what Madame de Cintre's secrets might be, and more convinced that secrets were, in themselves, hateful things to her. She was ...
— The American • Henry James
... the people from the city a certain childishness, for which she had the indulgent smile of an elderly person; but at the same time she was touched and joyously surprised by their faith, the profundity of which she began to realize more and more clearly. Their visions of the triumph of justice captivated her and warmed her heart. As she listened to their recital of future victories, she involuntarily ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... Emerson was due rather to the fact that Alcott presented him with his own ideas served up in forms in which he no longer recognized them, and so appeared to Emerson as original. Such originality as he had was rather in oracular and often incomprehensible verbiage than in profundity of thought, but, as no one attempted to bring him to book, bewildered as his audience generally was by the novelty of the propositions he made or by their absurdity, he used to go on until suggestion, or breath, failed him. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... was caught up,—snatched out of that black profundity with inconceivable swiftness,—and when the ascending movement ceased, I found myself floating lightly like a wind-blown leaf through twining arches of amber mist, colored here and there with rays of living flame ... I ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Pharaoh shall hear the weeping.' Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... leave no welcome for even the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As regards "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret,"—the title which, for lack of a better, has been given to this Romance,—it can scarcely be pronounced deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... diameter. We were inclosed by a natural wall, rising steep on every side to a height which produced the idea of insurmountable confinement. The interception of all lateral light caused a dismal gloom. Round us was a perpendicular rock, above us the distant sky, and below an unknown profundity of water. If I had any malice against a walking spirit, instead of laying him in the Red-sea, I would condemn him to reside in the Buller ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... again to be afflicted by the madness of youths in their love of truth. "'To worship appearance,'" he often quoted; "'to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance!'" This particular excerpt he always concluded with, "'Those Greeks were superficial—OUT OF PROFUNDITY!'" ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus. ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... this effect of originality and profundity was produced by a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its decorative side, it ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men—not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian army, and to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... an extemporary apprenticeship; it wants no drilling; it never ranks in the awkward squad; it has no left hand, no deaf ear, no blind side. It puts on no look of wondrous wisdom, it has no air of profundity, but plays with the details of place as dexterously as a well-taught hand flourishes over the keys of the pianoforte. It has all the air of commonplace, and all the force and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... satisfactory way, even to Archie ordering a new suit of clothes. The youth came out temporarily from his usual profundity, and had a real, natural boyish talk with Ralph. The latter recited the incident of the adventure with Billy Bouncer's crowd ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... the most difficult as well as one of the most successful essays in psychological analysis ever attempted by an author; and in his wonderful portrait, which must be closely studied, and not epitomized or reproduced in extracts, we see glowing enthusiasm united to cabalistic profundity, and the most morbid tension of the intellectual powers united to clear and well-defined hopes. How has the author succeeded in making Mordecai so human and so true to nature? By mixing the gold with an alloy of commoner metal, and by giving the angelic likeness ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... their decisive command of the sea, and on the vast financial resources which secured their staying power, he maintained his ascendency until his death in the following year, though he had to submit to a fine. The events which followed his death only confirmed the profundity of his political judgment, and the accuracy with which he had gauged the capacities of the state. In that winter Potidaea was forced to capitulate to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Many buy books because they are written by great stylists, but few read for just that reason. They read because there is something in an author's work which attracts them to his style, and that something may be study of character, skill in narrative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only connoisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, furthermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as much from Cooper or Melville, but they have not gone ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to the store; and then in the walled garden that lay behind the house he beheld a woman's form. It was draped in white and it moved about rhythmically, bending slowly from side to side; and then with the graceful ethereal lightness it leapt and whirled in a dance. In the profundity of the distance all was lost but the grace of it, the fairy-like flitting to and fro; and, as Denver watched, the tears leapt to his eyes at the ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... sense of light, which makes him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have more colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is pre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This repression, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... scarcely see the two men shrouded there in the profundity of shadow, and she had almost walked into the one who was to die before she realized his ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... said the doctor, laying his hand kindly upon her shoulder; "you'll want something fresh again presently. What mine of profundity are you ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... He was a navigator of some renown, principally derived from a voyage of destruction against the Spaniards in 1592; but he was a vain and affected character, little calculated for decisive and manly action. Instructions were prepared, but the King, with his accustomed profundity of folly, directed that they should be sealed in a box, and not opened until the voyagers arrived upon the coasts of Virginia. In the vessels there embarked, beyond the regular crews, one hundred five persons, to form the settlement. And it does not seem extravagant to assert that Virginia ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... consoled that they forgot to wipe away their tears. They were bright but not clear—large and shimmering, as if reflected from some invisible sea, not immediately present to his eyes. The gulfs in which they floated were black blue with profundity. There was no moon, but the night was yet so far from dark, that it seemed conscious throughout of some distant light that illumined it without shine. And his heart felt like the night, as if it held a deeper life than he could ever ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... conception of events is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon more as happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childish conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The language reflects the fact. The few ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... easily pulled it out, and that one of his middle teeth in his lower jaw, broke out while he was at dinner." He sat (for the last time) for "a second picture to Mr. Ryley," p. 379. Ashmole's intimacy with Lilly was the foundation of the former's (supposed) profundity in alchemical and astrological studies. In this Diary we are carefully told that "Mr. Jonas Moore brought and acquainted him with Mr. William Lilly, on a Friday night, on the 20th of November," p. 302. Ashmole was then only 26 years of age; and it will ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... accompanies this characteristic is the sense of profundity, of mighty significance. And this feeling is not necessarily an illusion. The nature of our materials — be they words, colours, or plastic matter — imposes a limit and bias upon our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite rendered through these ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... of the membranes of the human stomach, in which they used words that were over a foot long by actual measurement. I have never heard such splendid words in my life; but such were their grandiloquent profundity, and their far-reaching lucidity, that I understood rather less about it when they had finished than ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... as somebody once said with equal truth and profundity, knows what a minute may bring forth, much less, therefore, does anybody know what an evening of say two hundred and forty minutes may produce. For instance, Harold Quaritch—though by this time he had gone so far as to freely ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... he in a most stately manner, "when I devote myself, it is to the death. I have the honour to salute you!"—he bowed over her hand and kissed it. "Monsieur." He bowed to me with the profundity of a hidalgo, and trotted ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... is a reading of it by a Unitarian—a reading, I venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times—a reading which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its profundity, is a message for the simple as ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... depth, judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, foresight, profundity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... stall, 'r' you," declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. "No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. 'N' I'm goin' ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... and the terror of life depends on our keeping these temples pure, or defiling them. Such are the solemn and profound beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, on which all the higher art of the world has based itself. All the profundity and solemnity of it is borrowed from these, and exists for us in exact proportion to the intensity with ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the letter accompanying the suppressed Dedication to Marino Faliero. "In the Appendix to an English Work, lately translated into German, and published at Leipzig, a judgment of yours upon English poetry is quoted as follows: 'That in English poetry great genius, universal power, a feeling of profundity, with sufficient tenderness and force are to be found, but that altogether these do not constitute poets,'" etc., etc. (see Poetical Works, 1901, v. 340, 341, and Letters, 1900, v. 100-103). The originals of the Dedication and Letters were conveyed to Goethe by John Murray ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... prejudices, and the judge who owes either his election or his appointment to the money or the favor of a great corporation, are alike unworthy to sit on the bench, are alike traitors to the people; and no profundity of legal learning, or correctness of abstract conviction on questions of public policy, can serve as an offset to such shortcomings. But it is also true that judges, like executives and legislators, should hold sound views on the questions of public policy which are ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirees, 2ieme entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... But the drama gave no opportunity for anything but passing allusions to scientific, philosophical, and religious matters, so that direct evidence is lacking as to how far Shakespeare was acquainted with what was being written in these fields. On the other hand, the profundity of his insight into human motive and behavior, the evidences of prolonged and severe meditation on human life and the ways of the world, and the richness of the philosophical generalizations that lie just below the surface of his greater plays, make ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... air of profundity convulsed me. I handed my father the letter addressed to the princess to entrust it to the charge of one of the domestics, thinking carelessly at the time that Ottilia now stood free to make appointments and receive communications, and moreover that I was too proud to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... To apply, even to a small extent, the principles we have been labouring to establish, would not only lead us much too far, but would constrain us to travel out of our proper subject and prescribed province. Our purpose has only been, to vindicate the profundity, or rather the fulness of Holy Writ[514]; and to shew that under the obvious and literal meaning of the words, there lies concealed a more recondite, and a profounder sense: call that sense mystical, or spiritual, or Christian, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... of Signor Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most disparagingly to his own merits. If the Signor's statements could be relied on, he was totally unworthy of an alliance ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... not forget the profundity of his main idea, that, exception made for the lower forms, the animal is essentially active, that it always reacts to the external world, is never passively acted upon. Let us not forget that he pointed out the essentially psychological moment ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... arrived at the profundity of the maxim. This inequality is, in a great measure, the result of abuses in the institutions of society. They do not speak of what exists, but of what ought to exist. Every one should be left at liberty to obtain all the advantages of society which he can compass, by the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... nor any circumscribed and scant oasis I seem to realize. A forest valley, with rocky sides and brown profundity of shade, formed by tree crowding on tree, descends deep before me. Here, indeed, dwell human beings, but so few, and in alleys so thick branched and overarched, they are neither heard nor seen. Are they savage? ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Smith to Dr. Eames, the Master of Brakespeare College, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of fooling and profundity filling the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the power and profundity of the male voice, but it was as subdued, as flawless and sympathetic as a distant, deep-toned bell. There was not even a breath of effort in it, nor an insincere expression, and it pursued a theme of little range and ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... poetry. The proudest triumphs of genius are in a realm which art can never approach, yet the wonders of art are still among the great triumphs of civilization. Zeuxis or Praxiteles may not have equaled Homer or Plato in profundity of genius, but it was only a great age which could have produced a Zeuxis or Praxiteles. I cannot place Raphael on so exalted a pinnacle as Luther, or Bacon, or Newton, and yet his fame will last as long as civilization shall exist. The creations of the chisel will ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... great deal more, with tipsy profundity and a serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs Sliderskew, who was unable to hear one word, Mr Squeers concluded by helping himself and passing the bottle: to which Peg ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... whispered, and the business of the day began. There were eight in all to read essays—nice looking girls, and much like the Lasells and Wellesleys we used to know. As for the essays—well, there was either a good deal of bosh in them, or a profundity of learning and thought to which Jack Harcourt never attained. But the people cheered like mad whenever one was ended, and sent up flowers, while I grew hotter and hotter, and when the seventh went up, and unfolded the 'Age ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its luminous profundity escapes one—so with Villon. Religion hangs there. Humility—fatally divorced from simplicity—pervades it. It laughs at itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad for business, he affirmed; but, in truth, this specimen of ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... heavens was extensive, if not profound. On any fair view of profundity, I am inclined to think that it was profound, though of the technique of astronomy he knew but little. He had all the constellations at his fingers' ends, and had given to many of them names of his own; he knew their seasons, their days, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself—and what is really his answer? "BY MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"—but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... flush of sunset (or sunrise—for no man can ever tell tother from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water). And there is such a grave analytical profundity in the faces of "The Connoisseurs;" and such pathos in the picture of the fawn suckling its dead mother, on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the top of the flood tide. It was not seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters of brilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars which detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void, sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of trembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering light did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travelling road—that chasm before me was ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or despise the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent fact which degrades him, or of a secret condition, or even of a coming revenge, ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... profundity of contempt in Veltman's voice; and a deeper bitterness when he snapped his teeth upon a word which sounded to Hal suspiciously like the Biblical characterization of ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the world-renowned Regent pictures set forth in chronological order. Drop the catalogue and use your own eyes. The first impression is profound; not that Hals was profound in the sense of Rembrandt's profundity, but because of the almost terrifying vitality of these portraits. Prosaic men and women, great trenchermen, devourers of huge pasties, mowers down of wine-bottles and beer-tankards, they live with such vitality on the canvases of Hals that you ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... bright. And, indeed, glory of the heavens so supreme as that is possible only far away from man, and all the works and habitations of man, and all his feeble efforts at the mitigation of the darkness. Nay, for fullest perception, it may be that it is necessary for a man to be not only alone in the profundity of Nature's night, but to be lifted somewhat out of himself and his natural darkness by extremity of joy, or still ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... often happens that glaciers encounter projecting points of rock, the sides of which become rounded, and around which funnel-like cavities are formed with more or less profundity. When glaciers diminish and retire, the blocks which have fallen into these funnels often remain perched upon the top of the projecting rocky point within it, in such a state of equilibrium that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... if Shakespeare himself had written the Novum Organum or the Principia, we should not have had Hamlet and Lear as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much. However, it is not so: she was an artist, with true artistic gifts. Her philosophic power ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... of any saying of his, such as might be recorded for its wisdom or profundity. Never a brilliant thought crystallized in a single sentence. His talk was especially characterized by its cordiality and rapid flow. The 'member of society' and the poet seemed to ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... example shows the profundity of these moral truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To have learned to know herself was at first a delight. The ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... classic and probably unsurpassed achievement. Though Lincoln had to deal with a single issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind. In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the Presidential election ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... men who have not acquired their hardiness of assertion from the profundity of their thinking, about the omnipotence of a majority, in such a dissolution of an ancient society as hath taken place in France. But amongst men so disbanded there can be no such thing as majority or minority, or power in any one person to bind another. The power of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life. Then she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table and my brain ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... all he was aware of the brittleness, the unpleasantness, the profundity of what was immediately before him, how to deal with poor Winny and her innocent enormity; the impropriety, as it had been presented ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... to the celebrated John Evelyn of the Sylva, one of the Society's founders. That I have seldom even read them is also a pitiful truth; for the mysterious nomenclature of modern chemistry, the incomprehensibility (to my ignorance) of the higher mathematics, the hopeless profundity of treatises on the tides, dynamics, electricity, and microscopic anatomicals, are, I am free to avow, worse to me than "heathen Greek," nay (for I can in some sort tackle that), more difficult than the clay tablets of Assyria or a papyrus of Rameses II. So I must confess ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... There is nothing which appeals to the aesthetic sense about this hypothesis of an "over-soul" from whose universal being the ideas of beauty and truth and goodness may be supposed to proceed. It is a clumsy and crude speculation, easy to be grasped by the superficial mind, and with an air of profundity which is entirely deceptive. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... satisfactorily account for his present confirmed love of solitude. The position to which he was so unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress, and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the picturesque, had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... equal anxiety a commonplace manner, and matter that is not commonplace. If ever he deviates into any originality of thought, he takes care that it shall be such as excites surprise for its acuteness, rather than admiration for its profundity. He takes care? say rather, that nature took care for him. It is impossible to detract from the merit of these Letters: they are suited to their purpose, and perfect in their kind. They impel to action, not thought. Had they been profound or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... hands upon his knees, watching me with an occasional approving nod of his big head. He looked so funny standing there on his little seven-by-nine world, like a clown on a performing ball, that, despite my terrible situation, I shook my sides with laughter. There was no echo in the profundity of empty space. ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest. He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that it marked a crisis—the complete, the acute consciousness of his personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular establishment the Schoppen were very tall and the beer was very good; and ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth in that self-conceit ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... for his Night Watch. Near by it hangs The Syndics of the Cloth Company, excelled, in this particular class of work, by no picture in the world; but it is by the portraits and the etchings that the sweep, profundity, and versatility of Rembrandt's genius is exemplified. Truly his ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... hushed, and all nature reposed under the eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... and appeared to be lost in the profundity of his thoughts, but I could easily enough see that he was only taking breath. The old man whose grief had given this turn to the conversation had fallen asleep and was roaring in the nose like a ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... to listen, as he generally listened, for anything she might find that would explain the situation. His fingers went from habit, as a man might play with his watch chain, to the symbol of his faith; her eyes followed them, and rested mutely on the cross. There was a profundity of feeling in them, wistful, acknowledging, deeply speculative. "You could not forget that?" she said, and shook her head as if she answered herself. He looked into her upturned face and saw ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... "Profundity" and "Simplicity"; the faculty of wonder; Browning's first conception of "Pippa Passes"; his residence in London; his country walks; his ways and habits, and his heart-episodes; debates whether to become a clergyman; is "Pippa Passes" a drama? estimate of the poem; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... very threadbare but clean; a bunch of seals depending from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. He held in his hand an old hat! He walked in a bent attitude, and the curve in his spine augmented the profundity of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Peter Bell, the Idiot Boy, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Simon Lee, and the Wagoner. But there are multitudes of Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern examples of pure, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such are (out of many) Ruth, Lucy, A Portrait, To a Highland Girl, The Reverie of Poor Susan, To the Cuckoo, The Reaper, We Are ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... over the repressed female's hand with an air of profundity and said, "There being a total absence of the mounts of Mercury and the Sun, a calm and even nature is indicated." (You're nearly always safe in saying this.) "Your sense of order and of the fitness of things would not allow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... Mortimer, 'with the irresponsible imbecility of a private individual, and not with the profundity of a professional adviser, I should say that if the circumstance of its being too much, weighs upon your mind, you have the haven of consolation open to you that you can easily make it less. And if you should be apprehensive of the trouble of doing so, there is the further haven of consolation ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of life, among statesmen, men of business, and artisans, exist noble examples of exceptional profundity and reality of knowledge, but in the great average of so-called educated people of our own generation, we find the majority possessing very fragmentary interest in any of the subjects which, as students, were supposed to engage their attention. What they would have been without the so-called ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... relative! He thought about Bedient every day; an old man's heart turned to the boy whose hands had suddenly fallen upon him with such amazing power. Occasionally in the letters, there was an obvious effort to cover this profundity of affection with a surface of humor, but it always broke through before a page was blotted.... Equatoria, and his really remarkable acquisitions there, were invariably matters for light touches. He had picked up big lands for almost nothing; and he found himself presently in strong favor with ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... a low guttural grating. No cub had a cavernous profundity of sound such as that. Still there was not the stir of a muscle, so far as his ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... and who received me very pleasantly when I begged the privilege of visiting him. Now, while making inquiries of him concerning antiquity, I did not conceal from him what delighted me among the moderns; when he spoke about such things with more calmness, but, what was still worse, with more profundity than Madame Boehme; and he thus opened my eyes, at first to my greatest chagrin, but afterwards to my surprise, and at last ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... not accuse me of undue prejudice in favor of slavish surrender of volition. I accept in a large measure the view advanced with breadth of learning and defended with profundity of thought by Hegel, that history is the unfolding and realization of freedom. The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... "and it is that which attaches me to you. By assuming your likeness yesterday, I became acquainted with your character, and was no less astonished at the profundity and range of your thoughts than at the heroic magnanimity with which these were combined. And now, in addition to these, you are dedicated to the great work of the Lord; for which reasons I have resolved to attach myself as ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... sallow-visaged, black-bearded speaker, who poured forth abundant venomous froth of denunciation. He had caught enough of the phraseology of the more philosophical Disciples, to impress the earnest ignorant with some show of profundity. I was glad when his stream dried up. Pendlam next arose and read a paper upon "Magnetisms and Organizations." After him, came forward a gentleman with a model, illustrating the design of a dwelling-house for the Associated Disciples. He showed, entirely to the satisfaction of himself at least, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... replied, "The profundity of your contempt I can only guess at. Whatever it is, I share it. We are ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... matter more closely. To physical science, one act is precisely the same as another; a mere matter of molecular movement or change. You raise your arm, you think with the energy and profundity of a Hegel; to the physicist it is all one and the same thing—a fresh distribution of matter and motion, muscular contraction, and rise and fall of the grey pulp called brain. A burglar shoots a policeman dead and the public ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... to our attention. It would be a mistake to insist too much upon them; Hawthorne was himself the first to recognise that. "These fitful sketches," he says in the preface to the Mosses from an Old Manse, "with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose—so reserved even while they sometimes seem so frank—often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image—such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation." This is very becomingly ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... apparently had set his heart: namely, that, after borrowing the whole substance of my philosophy from Hegel, I have been guilty of making "vast and extravagant pretensions" as to my own "novelty," "originality," and "profundity," not only with regard to my published books, but also with regard to my "still unpublished system of philosophy." His ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... to the reader's acuteness and yet save his labour, not often obscure, and never wearisome, an evident generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of profundity; they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the world, and must be read with some admiration by the philosopher . . . . yet they bear witness to the contracted observation and the precipitate inferences which an intercourse with a single class of society scarcely fails to generate." ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... great spirits, and thought this drive in the wet huge fun, again replied heartily, "Rather," and her mother congratulated herself on having done the right thing in bringing her to Germany, home of erudition and profundity, already evidently ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... the honourable reader, who is loathe to believe of any laborious provider for a great intellectual interest that he can deliberately have meant to deceive: the first point, and, separately by itself, an all-sufficient demur, is this—that, not in proportion to the learning and profundity brought to bear upon Herodotus, did the doubts and scruples upon his fidelity strengthen or multiply. Precisely in the opposite current was the movement of human opinion, as it applied itself to this patriarch of history. Exactly as critics and investigators arose like Larcher—just, reasonable, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the mighty sage, Yavakri, son of the ascetic Bharadwaja, acquire profundity in the Vedas? And how also did he perish? I am anxious to hear all this, just as it happened. I take delight in listening to the narration of the deeds of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and nearer, until, looking through the wonderfully transparent water, they caught sight of a vast precipice descending with frightful steepness, down and down, until all was lost in the profundity beneath. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... be the same after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying, "Was that thought ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... turned to Helen with an air of profundity. "I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility. That's why one pays one's cook more than ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... away from fairer pastures. There were mountains everywhere—huge, rugged mountains, erected in the igneous fury of world-making, long since calmed. Above them all the sky was almost incredibly blue—an intense ultramarine of extraordinary clearness and profundity. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... sat in several parliaments, and given bushels of votes. He is a man of that profundity in the matter of vote-giving, that you never know what he means. When he seems to be voting pure white, he may be in reality voting jet black. When he says Yes, it is just as likely as not - or rather more so - that he means No. This is the statesmanship ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... close kinship; and very similar reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written must have ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the record of a sentimental experience, guided by the caprice of a whimsical will. Whimsicality is a flower that defies transplanting; when once rooted in other soil it shoots up into obscurity, masquerading as profundity, or pure silliness without reason or a smile. The whimsies of one language become amazing contortions in another. The humor of Shandy, though deep-dyed in Sterne's own eccentricity, is still essentially British and demands for its appreciation ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... mechanically reproduce his mental and oral accents. Emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes.' Inferior writers have copied the tones of the oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that a platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a conundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate in the imitators ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... found; and, after she had found him, lectured him all the way for his temerity in presuming to be absent when Miss Walladmor condescended to want him. Tom's intellectual faculties were not of the most brilliant order: whether Tom had any latent and yet undiscovered profundity which qualified him for philosophic speculations, we cannot say: for the honor of the male sex, we heartily hope that he had some bright endowment in his brain which was deeply concealed from all men to balance his prodigious inferiority to Grace in all which was revealed. Indeed Tom had ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... his side Dolly's musical giggle as one of them struck her. A bird on a long twig balanced above them, and for a time a squirrel chattered at them in mock scolding from the top of a pine. Little by little Charles-Norton sank into a profundity of well-being. He could see ahead, now, his life stretching placid and colored, solved at last, with both Dolly and the wings, uniting love and freedom, the ecstasies of flight with ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... Nephew, Figaro, two or three hasty sketches of Crebillon the younger and Colle' (p. 258). Nothing living but this! But this is much and very much. We do not pretend to compare the authors of these admirable delineations with Moliere and La Bruyere in profundity of insight or in grasp and ethical mastery, but they are certainly altogether in a new vein even from those two great writers, when we speak of the familiar, the real, and the particular, as distinguished from old classic generality. And, we may add in passing, that the social life of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... not only to Jews, but also to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly, but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually increasing in profundity and truth. The Greek thinkers had approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his audiences beyond this to the transcendent-immanent ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... interested in the specific, obscure field, but by saturating himself in facts about it, he has developed an interest in it amounting to passionate absorption, which manifests itself in "absent-mindedness" of such profundity as to make him often an object of ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... of fortune had brought it here—here of all spots? what chance of chances? I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my back and know the profundity of despair. Escape was hopeless, out of the question. I thought of Maud, asleep there in the hut we had reared; I remembered her "Good-night, Humphrey"; "my woman, my mate," went ringing through my brain, but now, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... perfect of the AEons, the Abysm, reposed on the bosom of Profundity together with Thought. From their union sprang Intelligence, who had for his ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert |
