"Tacit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her beauty, were we judging her by the light of affection, instead of the colder light of reason? We couldn't approve of her behavior to Laurence, nor was it easy to refrain from disapproval of what appeared to be a tacit endurance of Inglesby's attention. She couldn't plead ignorance of what was open enough to be town talk—the man's shameless passion for herself, a passion he seemed to take delight in flaunting. And she made no effort ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... situation, and the danger we were really in, (as we expected every day to find ourselves drifted back among the ice) "clapped a stopper" upon all that. From saying—"when we get home"—we began insensibly to alter it to—"if we get home"—and at last the subject was dropped by a tacit consent. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... rate, use the return half of a round-trip ticket sold only for the original purchaser's use, or look unconcernedly out of the window if they think the conductor will pass them by without collecting fare. Certain forms of such oral or tacit lying are so common that people of looser standards adopt them with the excuse that "every one does it," or that "the company can afford to lose it." But in more public matters the prevalence of untruthfulness is much more shocking. Standards are low or unformulated, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... as came to the house. But when I was afterward alone with the same persons, I never undeceived them. I often heard such things said of me, before my friends, as were enough to make them entertain a bad opinion. My heart kept its habitation in the tacit consciousness of my own innocence, not concerning myself whether they thought well or ill of me; excluding all the world, all opinions or censures, out of my view, I minded nothing else ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... but failure for so preposterous an attempt? His breach of discipline would of course be reported at once to Mr. Gaines and Truscomb; and the manager, already jealous of his assistant's popularity with the hands, which was a tacit criticism of his own methods, would promptly seize the pretext to be rid of him. Amherst was aware that only his technical efficiency, and his knack of getting the maximum of work out of the operatives, had secured him from Truscomb's animosity. From the outset there had been small ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... By tacit consent, as he talked, they had walked more and more slowly, and at last they stopped and he took her hand. "Ah, Lord Warburton, how little you know me!" Isabel said very gently. Gently too she ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... at Iberville's request, they were all seated. Iberville had pretended not to notice the fingers which had fluttered towards him. As yet nothing had been said about the duel, as if by tacit consent. So far as Jessica was concerned it might never have happened. As for the men, the swords were there, wet with the blood they had drawn, but they made no sign. Iberville put meat and wine and fruit upon the table, and pressed Jessica ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of Rameses turned in the direction of the tacit challenge. Menes' black brows knitted at Siptah, but Kenkenes came to the rescue. A lyre, the inevitable instrument of ancient revels, was near him and he caught it up, sweeping his fingers strongly across ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... parabolic—that is to say, it is indistinguishable from an enormously long ellipse. But this circumstance could only be reconciled with the view that the bodies thus moving were casual visitors from outer space, by making, as Laplace did, the tacit assumption that the solar system was at rest. His reasoning was, indeed, thereby completely vitiated, as Gauss pointed out in 1815;[1364] and the objections then urged were reiterated by Schiaparelli,[1365] who demonstrated in 1871 that a large preponderance ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... instead of being a compliment to our guests, is nothing better than an indirect offence; it is a tacit insinuation, that it is absolutely necessary to provide such delicacies to bribe the depravity of their palates, when we desire the pleasure of their company; and that society now, must be purchased, at the same price SWIFT told POPE he was obliged to pay for it in Ireland. "I should ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... they would have been satisfied, had they not further points to carry by intimidating me. All this made it evident, as I mentioned above, that they themselves expected not my voluntary compliance; and was a tacit confession of the disagreeableness of the person ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... There had been a tacit understanding; but within a day or two Clifford appears to have received some mysterious ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... asked to be allowed to call again in the morning to thank them for a charming hour.... And they seemed to feel the same as we did about it. There was no 'hoping that we should meet again in London'—neither an au revoir nor a good-bye—just a tacit understanding that that hour should remain isolated, accepted like a good gift without looking the gift-horse in the mouth, single, unattached to any hours before or after—I don't know whether you see what I mean.... Give ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... earnestly watching him. She was a perfect nurse, Mark said, and Mackintosh would come back at ten. Our dinner wasn't very gay— with my host worried and absent; and his sister annoyed me by her constant tacit assumption, conveyed in the very way she nibbled her bread and sipped her wine, of having "told me so." I had had no disposition to deny anything she might have told me, and I couldn't see that her ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... The passion which, in her simple, shallow way, she had confided to the woods and waters reflected their outward variations; she thought of her lover less, and with less positive pleasure. The golden sands had run out. Perfect rest was over. Mrs. Ford's tacit protest began to be annoying. In a rather resentful spirit, Lizzie forbore to read any more letters aloud. These were as regular as ever. One of them contained a rough camp-photograph of Jack's newly bearded visage. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... lead the way, dart hither and thither in pursuit of game, and warn the main body of any danger that should threaten them ahead. It was manned by the two Indian guides, Oostesimow and Ma-istequan, and by Frank Morton, who being acknowledged one of the best shots of the party, was by tacit understanding regarded as commissary-general. It might have been said that Frank was the best shot, were it not for the fact that the aim of Dick Prince was perfect, and it is generally admitted ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... is your wood cellar below. We can surely construct some place of concealment there. Of course I will do the work, though the girls might help by bringing up baskets of earth and scattering them in the streets." Having received a tacit permission from his aunt, Ned went down into the wood cellar, which was some five feet wide by eight feet long. Like every place about a Dutch house it was whitewashed, and was half full of wood. Ned climbed over the wood to the ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... monarchial government, only he had wished that some grievances in the administration of our affairs might be rectified and reformed; but seeing he purged not himself of the rest of his libel, his silence as to these looked like a tacit confession and ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... centuries ere they burst forth in effects the more powerful from their long suppression, shaking the earth with the pent-up fury of ages—forgetting these things and arguing in the present instance from the few palpable facts found floating upon the surface of our society, by a tacit consent lay the burden of the war upon the present generation and its immediate predecessors. Herein lies the error which blinds the world as well to the warning of the past as to the momentous ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... evident. The newspapers made countless jokes at our expense, and there were significant smiles on the faces in the audience that awaited us the next night. When Miss Anthony walked upon the platform she at once proceeded to clear herself of the tacit charge against her. ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... in itself suffice to insure right doing? Socrates and Plato, with their indentification of knowledge and virtue, would appear to think so; the church has gone a long way, under humanistic pressure, in tacit acquiescence with their doctrine. Yet most of us, judging alike from internal and personal evidence and from external and social observation, would say that there was no sadder or more universal experience than that of the failure of right knowledge to secure right performance. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... story (notwithstanding all his precautions lest anything he may say should betray his friends to the vengeance of the authorities) than the way in which he has again and again been supported and encouraged by the devotion or by the tacit complicity of those with whom he came into contact. "Men of science, working men, rankers, and officers," he writes, "begged me to say what they did not dare to utter themselves." When he was arrested and when his book was seized, the manuscript was rescued and was smuggled into ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... other point of tacit antagonism between us may as well be noted. Margaret was always a most earnest, devoted champion of the Emancipation of Women, from their past and present condition of inferiority, to an independence on Men. She ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... face held, arrested, numbed me; I followed it. I forgot Morgan; a tacit truce held us all again. I stepped back till my eyes fastened on the broad paneled chimney-breast at the right of the hearth, and it was there now that the sound of footsteps in the wall was heard again; then it ceased ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... others speak, is one of those tacit obligations, annexed to the condition of living in society, which we are bound in conscience to fulfill, though we have never ratified them by any express promise; because, if they were disregarded, society would be impossible, and human happiness at an end."—See Murray's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... directly contrary to the duty of his office, directly contrary to the express and positive law of the Court of Directors, which law Parliament had bound upon him as his rule of action, not satisfied with his long tacit connivance, ventured, before he left his government, and among his last acts, to pass a general act of pardon and indemnity, and at once ordered the whole body of the prosecutions directed by his masters, the Company, ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... PATASSE's civilian government was plagued by unrest, and in March 2003 he was deposed in a military coup led by General Francois BOZIZE, who established a transitional government. Though the government has the tacit support of civil society groups and the main parties, a wide field of candidates contested the municipal, legislative, and presidential elections held in March and May of 2005 in which General BOZIZE was affirmed as president. The government still does not fully ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... pictures quite awake to the beauty manufactured by man, has in no way anticipated the modern discovery that nature is beautiful. To readers who have had enough of the pathetic fallacy, and of the second-rate novelist's local colour, Lucian's tacit assumption that there is nothing but man is refreshing. That he was a close enough observer of human nature, any one can satisfy himself by glancing at the Feast of Lapithae, the Dialogues of the Hetaerae, some of the Dialogues ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... passed, or a listless, tacit understanding, that every one must hold himself ready to go aboard so soon after daylight as the hostile boats should leave the river. "If," said Gilly to Rudolph, while they stood thinking under the stars, "if his boat ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... Mme. Petit found it useless to question their faces —they told her nothing. But she did not agree with Baptiste about M. Lecoq: she thought him good-humored, and rather silly. Though the party was less silent at the dinner-table, all avoided, as if by tacit consent, any allusion to the events of the day. No one would ever have thought that they had just been witnesses of, almost actors in, the Valfeuillu drama, they were so calm, and talked so glibly of indifferent things. From time to time, indeed, a question remained unanswered, ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... confidential friends, and others, suggested the fear of other proofs. As long as it was only communicated by private information, you were willing to submit to private censure. But when a charge, which originated from me, was made in the papers, it reduced you to the disagreeable alternative of a tacit confession, or the hazard of public proof. And in the present instance, if I am rightly informed, you was perfectly disposed to treat the publication signed Brutus, with that "silent contempt," which, you say, you have for ...
— Nuts for Future Historians to Crack • Various
... felt some satisfaction at having been able to abate the custom according to which the young men, with the tacit permission of their parents, had gone into the neighbouring town after harvest "to visit the immoral women." "They used to spend as much as 5 yen," said our headman. He had started worthier forms of after-harvest relaxation, and "the cost of ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... considered as the great council of the nation, was composed of the most distinguished of the Romans; and distinction of every kind soon became criminal. The possession of wealth stimulated the diligence of the informers; rigid virtue implied a tacit censure of the irregularities of Commodus; important services implied a dangerous superiority of merit; and the friendship of the father always insured the aversion of the son. Suspicion was equivalent to proof; trial to condemnation. The execution of a considerable senator was attended with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... in the prolonged negotiations and discussions which have taken place upon this question manhood suffrage has been demanded by one party and the voters' basis by the other, and there has been a tacit, though quite informal agreement that the one principle should balance the other. But that is not the position of his Majesty's Government in regard to either of these propositions. We defend both on their merits. We defend "one vote, one value," and we ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... he once mentioned—with an all-embracing flourish and not in the least in the tone of apology. When he appeared it was late in the evening and with an imperturbable air of being on the best of terms with every one and every thing which was peculiarly annoying if you happened to have a tacit quarrel with him. If he was an honest man he was an honest man somehow spoiled for confidence. Something he had, however, that his critic vaguely envied, something in his address, splendidly positive, a manner rounded and polished ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... have drawn his revolver and fired at Demetrios; but we had long since found it contrary to our natures to shoot at a fleeing man guilty of only a petty offence. Also a sort of tacit agreement seemed to have been reached between the patrolmen and the fishermen. If we did not shoot while they ran away, they, in turn, did not fight if we once laid hands on them. Thus Demetrios Contos ran away from us, and we did no more than try our ...
— Tales of the Fish Patrol • Jack London
... But what so natural (to one who had lived the life of Austen Vane) as that she should marry amongst those whose ways of life were her ways? In the brief time in which he had seen her and this other man, Austen's quickened perceptions had detected tacit understanding, community of interest, a habit of thought and manner,—in short, a common language, unknown to him, between the two. And, more than these, the Victoria of the blissful excursions he had known was changed as she had spoken to him—constrained, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... definitely rejected in favor of what Baron Banffy afterward defined as "national Chauvinism." Magyarization became the watchword of the State and persecution its means of action. Koloman Tisza concluded with the monarch a tacit pact under which the Magyar Government was to be left free to deal as it pleased with the non-Magyars as long as it supplied without wincing the recruits and the money required for the joint army. The Magyar Parliament became almost exclusively representative of the Magyar minority of the people. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... require a state to back them":[475] similarly every man's freedom of speech requires character behind it, and especially true is this in regard to those who censure and correct others. Thus Plato said that his life was a tacit rebuke to Speusippus: and doubtless Xenocrates by his mere presence in the schools, and by his earnest look at Polemo, made a changed man of him. Whereas a man of levity and bad character, if he ventures to rebuke anybody, is likely ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... was first heard at a little distance; and then, as the speakers drew nigher the sounds arose directly from beneath, within the very shadow of the tower. By a sort of tacit consent, Wilder and the barrister chose spots favourable to the execution of such a purpose; and each continued, during the time the visiters remained near the ruin, examining their persons, unseen themselves, ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... the Church;(388) and Quenstedt similarly specifies proto-canonical and deutero-canonical New Testament books, or those of the first and second order.(389) What are degrees or kinds of inspiration assumed by many, but a tacit acknowledgment of the fact that books vary in intrinsic value as they are more or less impregnated with divine truth or differ in the proportion of the eternal and temporal elements which commingle in every revealed religion? Doubtless the authors ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... and valor were supreme in primitive combats, so much so that when its heroes were killed, the nation was conquered. As a result of a mutual and tacit understanding, combatants often stopped fighting to watch with awe and anxiety two champions struggling. Whole peoples often placed their fate in the hands of the champions who took up the task and who alone fought. This was perfectly natural. They counted their champion a superman, ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... view. But the fate of Garrison, still more that of Ballou, in being completely unrecognized in spite of fifty years of obstinate and persistent work in the same direction, confirmed me in the idea that there exists a kind of tacit but steadfast conspiracy of silence about ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... wait for the long loose column to close up, so as to make an entirely orderly advance. More than this, there was a death struggle ahead, which must be met instantly. We advanced at a double-quick, cheering loudly, and entered the inner works. Whether by order or tacit understanding, we halted here, except the Twelfth Regiment, which was the right of the brigade. That moved at once to the outer line, and threw itself with its wanted impetuosity into the heart of the battle.... The brigade advanced upon the works. About ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... prolonged for twenty or thirty consecutive nights and the questions finally left open for future consideration. In cases of desperate emergency, when all other topics of conversation failed, we knew that we could return to Xerxes and the Flood; but these subjects had been dropped by the tacit consent of both parties soon after leaving Gizhiga, and were held in reserve as a "dernier ressort" for stormy nights in Korak yurts. One night as we were encamped on a great steppe north of Shestakova, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... the floor of the House, or shoot at one another with rifles? How, again, can government, or any joint concern, be carried on in a tolerable manner by people so envious that, if one among them seems likely to succeed in any thing, those who ought to cooperate with him form a tacit combination to make him fail? Whenever the general disposition of the people is such that each individual regards those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on, or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a state of things good government ...
— Considerations on Representative Government • John Stuart Mill
... may be those of a single establishment, or of a group of establishments in the same locality, or of a wider territory even national in extent. Accordingly, they are represented in the negotiations by trade-union officials with narrower or wider jurisdiction. Employers in some cases had tacit understandings with each other before laborers were organized. But in many cases the individual employer was at a marked disadvantage after the organization of his employees. The result has been the rapid spread of ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... acquaintance I should have esteemed possible. When I am ill at ease with myself, not thoroughly satisfied with my own conduct, I always like the society of fast people; their liberality of sentiment and general carelessness of demeanour convey no tacit reproach on my own want of restraint, and I feel more at home with them than with such severe moralists as Aunt Horsingham or hypocritical Cousin Amelia. So I drove and shopped and visited with Mrs. Lumley—nay, I was even ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... her head slowly, as though giving a tacit consent. But I do not think that she was quite prepared for what ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... becomes false only when it is referred to an object, whether this be the existence of a thing, or its true essence, or an idea of other things. Truth and error belong always to affirmations or negations, that is, to (it may be, tacit) propositions. Ideas uncombined, unrelated, apart from judgments, ideas, that is, as mere phenomena in the mind, are neither ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... audience assemble, pass him, and drift down the corridor toward the office and lounge. To his astonishment and anger they dropped shillings on the plate, and the young people sixpences and, great Heavens! even pennies; one half-crown, the tacit apology of the old gentleman who had left early, was the only respectable offering. Appleton took out a sovereign, and then was afraid to put it in the collection for fear of exciting the singer's curiosity, so he rummaged his pockets for ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... gained in the capture of Hill 60. Sir John French also sent out a message, but in his report he set forth that Hill 60 was held by the British. Because there had been similar conflict in official reports all too frequently, it seemed as if a tacit agreement was made among the neutrals to determine who was telling the truth. This resulted in making what was a comparatively unimportant engagement one of the most celebrated battles of the war. As soon as Duke Albrecht of Wuerttemberg discovered his mistake he did what he could ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 12) - Neuve Chapelle, Battle of Ypres, Przemysl, Mazurian Lakes • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... and her carriages. The satirical spirit in which her brothers and sisters sometimes received the claims avowed by Mademoiselle de Fontaine roused her to wrath that a perfect hailstorm of sharp sayings could hardly mitigate. So when the head of the family felt a slight chill in the King's tacit and precarious friendship, he trembled all the more because, as a result of her sisters' defiant mockery, his favorite daughter had ...
— The Ball at Sceaux • Honore de Balzac
... Malvine—but just there lay the difficulty. The girl was always kind and friendly to Paul, she took his homage without any coquetry or apparent disinclination; when they went out walking she took his arm quite unaffectedly; when they were invited to meet in society, by a tacit agreement he took her in to dinner, had the privilege of the greater part of the dances, and was her partner for the cotillion. But whether they were alone or in company, whether they danced or talked, whether he came or went, she showed a perfect unconcern and freedom of ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... little difficulty in foregoing my hundred petty elegancies and luxuries,—for to these, thank Heaven, I was not so indissolubly wedded that one wholesome shock could not loosen my bonds,—but that I manage more cleverly than I expected to stifle those innumerable tacit allusions which might serve effectually ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... sons were among the boys who were going away. We talked hard and strong on this theme, not having a very good grip on it ourselves, I am afraid. We simply harangued each other on the idleness of tears at stations. Every one of us had something to say; and when we parted, it was with the tacit understanding that there was an Anti-Tear League formed—the boys were leaving on an early train ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... but so elegantly and tastefully decorated with jewels and ornaments that even those of her enemies or rivals who refused her beauty, honour, and virtue, allowed her taste and dignity. She thought that even in the regards of Napoleon she read a tacit approbation. When all the troublesome bustle of the morning was gone through, and when Senators, legislators, tribunes, and prefects had complimented her as a model of female perfection, on a signal from her husband she accompanied ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... life which the moralist and educator justly contend should be carefully guarded. It is really a concession to environment, and a tacit argument against radical heredity as the foundation upon which rest the character and disposition of the adult, and which is the mainspring of his future moral conduct. It is impossible to philosophize ourselves out ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... long-legged Yankee parson from the West, who did not even know how to dance, would hang around the edges of the ballroom and take her from him. They were engaged after the child fashion of Southern girls and boys—always with the tacit understanding that if they saw anybody they liked better it could be broken ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... the reputation of cleverness by seeking to join the same society. Veronique also received three or four of the distinguished officers of the garrison and staff; but the freedom of mind displayed by her guests, and the tacit discretion enjoined by the manners of the best society, made her extremely cautious as to the admission of those who now vied with each other to ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... after that amnesty, obtained by concealing his third marriage from President Cleveland, he continued living with his three wives. His action in this matter has been notorious. He has publicly defended this kind of lawbreaking on the false pretense that there was a tacit understanding with the American Congress and people, when Utah was admitted, that these polygamists might continue to live ...
— Conditions in Utah - Speech of Hon. Thomas Kearns of Utah, in the Senate of the United States • Thomas Kearns
... back in the cushions, and for a moment closed her eyes, half in weariness, half in tacit obedience to him. "Oh, I have such horrible dreams," she said at length, "full of anxiety and fear for Morton and little Morton. I can't explain it. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... father, not desiring to own land contrary to his convictions. Now that he found himself the owner of vast estates, he was confronted by two alternatives: either to waive his ownership in favor of the peasants, as he did ten years ago with the two hundred acres, or, by tacit acquiescence, confess that all his former ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... peoples who never dreamed of national systems of education; there have been no great peoples without the art of producing healthy and vigorous children. The matter becomes of peculiar importance in great industrial states, like England, the United States and Germany, because in such states, a tacit conspiracy tends to grow up to subordinate national ends to individual ends, and practically to work for the ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... shattered by the second war and the Treaty of Bucharest, cannot help regarding her neighbors as the robbers of what she considers her national patrimony, and at the same time she does not forget that in all their proceedings against her, Greek, Servian, Rumanian, and Montenegrin acted with the tacit approval ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... Pinnegar. Far from it. Each of them would have found any suggestion of such a possibility repulsive in the extreme. It was simply an implicit correspondence between their two psyches, an immediacy of understanding which preceded all expression, tacit, wireless. ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... great pains to instruct them in the art of walking with me properly; never allowing them to tell me how to proceed, but to give me a tacit understanding of their movements in order to direct my own, and this system in my own experience has been reduced ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... under the social disqualification of being abnormal and peculiar. The standard, consequently, is not now an efficient standard; and it is frequently applied with some laxity to the members of the privileged classes. A tacit conspiracy naturally exists among people in such a position to make it easy for their associates, friends, and relatives. The props and chances offered to a boy born into this class make the very most of his probably ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... page are aware of the extent to which what I have been saying holds true. Let me only invite you to investigate the structure of the Bible under this aspect, and you will be astonished at the result. For you will find that the system of tacit quotation and allusive reference is so perpetual, that it is as if the design had been that the fibres should be incapable of being disentangled any more. Balaam's story for example in the Book of Numbers, is found alluded to in Deuteronomy, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... general in their nature, and if binding anywhere, must be binding everywhere. If then, a minority of States insist on their right of nullification, the federal government will be obliged either to admit that every act of Congress is without any force in a State until it has obtained the tacit approval of the people of that State, or else it will be driven to the necessity of obtaining the enforcement of the law by arms. Such employment of force would of course be but the prelude to secession. Indeed, South Carolina, in her Ordinance ...
— Government and Administration of the United States • Westel W. Willoughby and William F. Willoughby
... preface to Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Mann, provoked Coleridge to an angry remonstrance. "I venture to remark, first, that I do not believe that Lord Byron spoke sincerely; for I suspect that he made a tacit exception of himself at least.... Thirdly, that the Mysterious Mother is the most disgusting, vile, detestable composition that ever came from the hand of man. No one with a spark of true manliness, of which Horace Walpole had none, could have written it."—Table Talk, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... strangers, he would be left alone to face the vengeance of Montezuma. This consideration decided him: covering his face with his hands, he exclaimed that the gods would avenge their own wrongs. Taking advantage of this tacit consent, fifty soldiers rushed up the stairway of the temple, and dragging the great wooden idols from their places in the topmost tower, they rolled them down the steps of the pyramid amid the groans of the ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... being defeated; he is only half a merchant. I, in your position, would never have continued in business. What! be forced to blush before the men I had injured, to bear their suspicious looks and tacit reproaches? I can conceive of the guillotine—a moment, and all is over. But to have the head replaced, and daily cut off anew,—that is agony I could not have borne. Many men take up their business as if nothing had happened: so much the better for them; they are stronger than Claude-Joseph ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... ceremonious and bewildering circumlocution. It is thus double-natured. The organized public opinion that we see, hear, feel and obey is the costumed officialism of human nature, through ages of custom charged with enforcing upon individuals the demands of the many. The other is that tacit and nearly always unconscious understanding among men and women, which binds them in mysterious cohesion through a belief in or a dread of something that they can not understand, because they can not feel it with their hands, control it with their strength or disturb it with their ...
— On the Vice of Novel Reading. - Being a brief in appeal, pointing out errors of the lower tribunal. • Young E. Allison
... unless, unwilling as we are to come into collision with our mere civilised neighbours, we can push them forward into the interior. In almost all the contracts entered into by our Government with the Indians, large sums have been given for the lands ceded by the latter. This was at once, of course, a tacit and mutual revocation of any antecedent arrangements, and if instances have occurred wherein the sacredness of treaty has been violated, it has only been where the Indians have refused to part with their ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... Saxe-Coburg went once more with Prince Albert, in order to show that this was not a bridegroom come to plead his suit in person; this was a mere cousinly visit of which nothing need come. Indeed, the good king rather overdid his caution, for it seems he led the Prince to believe that the earlier tacit understanding between him and his cousin had come to an end, so that Prince Albert arrived more resolved to relinquish his claims than to urge his rights. In his honest pride there was hardly room for the thought of binding more closely and indissolubly the silken cord of love, which ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... would be a much greater one, especially if it were committed with the tacit sanction of the three greatest Powers in Europe," replied K. of K., quietly. "That is one of our chief reasons for asking for the surrender of the Flying Fishes. There is no telling what harm this wild Irishman of yours might do if he got on the loose, not only ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... shame would have to be explained to an innocent school-girl—what right could he have assumed to tell it? As the guardian who had never counseled or protected her? As an acquaintance of hardly an hour ago? Who would have such a right? A lover—on whose lips it would only seem a tacit appeal to her gratitude or her fears, and whom no sensitive girl could accept thereafter? No. A husband? Yes! He remembered, with a sudden start, what Pendleton had said to him. Good Heavens! Had Pendleton that idea in his mind? And ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... it seems that such a political state is about the vilest to which a man can descend. It amounts to a tacit abandonment of the struggle which men are making for political truth and political beneficence, in order that bread and meat may be eaten in peace during the score of years or so that are at the moment passing over us. The politicians of this class have decided for themselves ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... is fun of curious phenomena. I don't know that there is anything more noticeable than what we may call CONVENTIONAL REPUTATIONS. There is a tacit understanding in every community of men of letters that they will not disturb the popular fallacy respecting this or that electro-gilded celebrity. There are various reasons for this forbearance: ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... authentick information. Lord Bute told me, that Mr. Wedderburne, now Lord Loughborough, was the person who first mentioned this subject to him[1106]. Lord Loughborough told me, that the pension was granted to Johnson solely as the reward of his literary merit, without any stipulation whatever, or even tacit understanding that he should write for administration. His Lordship added, that he was confident the political tracts which Johnson afterwards did write, as they were entirely consonant with his own opinions, would have been written by him though no pension had ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... The bond of union among nations, in the room of being membership in one great ecclesiastical commonwealth, became political: it came to be membership in a loosely defined confederacy of nations, held together by treaties or by a tacit agreement in certain accepted rules of public law ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Chinese hold to be a cardinal virtue,—is based upon two considerations of policy. I have explained one of these considerations in my Ethics; the other is as follows:—Politeness is a tacit agreement that people's miserable defects, whether moral or intellectual, shall on either side be ignored and not made the subject of reproach; and since these defects are thus rendered somewhat less obtrusive, ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... over, it was accepted by tacit consent that farther search would be useless. Hetty was mourned as dead: in every home her name was tenderly and sorrowingly spoken; old memories of her gay and mirthful youth, of her cheery and busy womanhood, were revived and dwelt ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... exercised in the case of customers extended to his communion with Vona during the slack times of the business day. There seemed to be a tacit agreement between them to keep off the topic of what had happened the night before. Words could not have added to their understanding of their mutual feelings. That understanding had established for them the policy of waiting. Though Frank said but little to the girl ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... destruction of his Prussian allies, halted his troops upon the other side of the Vistula, and from his vast realms collected recruits. For a few weeks the storms of winter secured a tacit armistice. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... rejoinder, "that that was very much the proper thing. Whether or not he comes here too often is not for me to say—I have no opinion on the subject. But, to do him justice, he is about the last man to wait for a tacit dismissal, or to cause you and Julius to depart from what he knows to be your regular habit out of politeness to him. He is a person of too much delicacy and good breeding to stay when—if—that is to say—" She turned again to the window without completing ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... seated on one of two chairs partially concealed by a great mass of exotic shrubbery, in pots, which formed almost an alcove. She removed her long soft skirt, which she had thrown over the vacant seat, as he approached; and at this tacit invitation he ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... to unfold some new and untried masterpiece of skill on the other. Night and darkness at last put an end to the fight, before the fury of the combatants was exhausted; and the contest only ceased, when no one could any longer find an antagonist. Both armies separated, as if by tacit agreement; the trumpets sounded, and each party claiming ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... guaranty of the State governments is another capital imperfection in the federal plan. There is nothing of this kind declared in the articles that compose it; and to imply a tacit guaranty from considerations of utility, would be a still more flagrant departure from the clause which has been mentioned, than to imply a tacit power of coercion from the like considerations. The want of a guaranty, though it might in its consequences ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... squashy and squeezy enough to please the most particular and coolest of cranberry minds; and then each of us choosing a little special bed of bog, the tufts were deeply put in with every manner of tacit benediction, such as might befit a bog and a berry, and many an expressed thanksgiving to Susie and to the kind sender of the luxuriant plants. I have never had gift from you, dear Susie, more ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... matter, you will feel that the first and most literal application is just as necessary a one as any other—that the story does very specially mean what it says—plain money; and that the reason we don't at once believe it does so, is a sort of tacit idea that while thought, wit, and intellect, and all power of birth and position, are indeed given to us, and, therefore, to be laid out for the Giver—our wealth has not been given to us; but we have worked for it, and have a right to spend it as we choose. I think ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... discipline. His generation therefore soon found him an enemy, especially after Drusus's death seemed to leave neither doubt nor choice as to the successor of Augustus. From this contemporary attitude arises the tacit aversion in the midst of which, after the lapse of so many centuries, we still feel Tiberius living and working, an aversion which steadily grows even while he renders the most ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... on the same thing, and made rather a perverse use of it in several parts of his Reflections on the French Revolution; and Windham in one of his Speeches has clenched it into an aphorism—'There is nothing so true as habit.' Once more I would say, common sense is tacit reason. Conscience is the same tacit sense of right and wrong, or the impression of our moral experience and moral apprehensions on the mind, which, because it works unseen, yet certainly, we suppose to be an instinct, implanted in the mind; as we sometimes attribute ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... proposals for a moment. That endorsement is our only hope. If that fail us, our cause is lost in advance; for it will show the body of the party what the leaders think and feel on the subject, and be a tacit command to kill it. The hypocrisy of the whole business should not receive from women even a show of belief. What wonder men despise us as a shallow lot of simpletons, if we are deceived by so thin a pretense as this? I for one protest against it so strongly that if your committee agree ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... shallow practical considerations, lay the fact that such a reorganization would have been a tacit acknowledgment of defeat; not only an acknowledgment to the world, which he'd have liked to pretend didn't matter much, but an acknowledgment of defeat to himself. What he had been trying to do ever since his ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... from Eive's hand the pencil that had hitherto been used in absolute secrecy, and the consequent quarrel had been sharp enough to suggest, if not to prove, that the privilege was of practical as well as sentimental moment. Though aggravated by no rebuke, my tacit depreciation of her grievances irritated Eunane to an extreme of petulance unusual with her of late; which I bore so long as it was directed against myself, but which, turned at last on Eveena, wholly exhausted my patience. But no sooner had I dismissed the offender than Eveena herself interposed, ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... clear voice sounding 5 Through the silver twilight,— What is the lost secret Of the tacit earth? ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... Harry's private communication to me. In after days, when we met, by a great gentleness in her behaviour, and an uncommon respect and affection shown to my wife, Madam Esmond may have intended I should understand her tacit admission that she had been wrong; but she made no apology, nor did I ask one. Harry being provided for (whose welfare I could not grudge), all my mother's savings and economical schemes went to my ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the train, while all the Cameron boys and girls flew around, making ready at home. The plan had developed on the tacit understanding that since they all wished to, it was fairer for none of them to ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... by name. One man addressing another would merely say that he understood a certain person had left town or that he understood a certain person was still missing from town; the second man in all likelihood would merely nod understandingly and then by tacit agreement the subject would ...
— The Thunders of Silence • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... early as 18'72 the International Prison Congress meeting in London recommended a distinction in the treatment of political and common law criminals and the resolution of recommendation was "agreed upon by the representatives of all the Powers of Europe and America-with the tacit concurrence of British ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... tacit unspoken assent to that. Some men might have welcomed such a solution of an ugly family scandal, but not Robert Turold, with his fierce pride for the honour of the title which he ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... Middle Temple, and since engaged, by a very special Divine Providence, in the most sacred employment." He farther informs us, that "when it pleased God to discharge him from the civil service, his first business in public was a gentle and tacit admonition of the neglect of the most solemn and peculiar Christian worship of God in this nation; accompanied by such public acts in the very heart of the chief city, as made it a most remarkable witness and testimony against them who ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... confusedly, at the bottom of her heart, that she must not seem to set store on the Luxembourg garden, and that if this proved to be a matter of indifference to her, her father would take her thither once more. But days, weeks, months, elapsed. Jean Valjean had tacitly accepted Cosette's tacit consent. She regretted it. It was too late. So Marius had disappeared; all was over. The day on which she returned to the Luxembourg, Marius was no longer there. What was to be done? Should she ever find him again? She felt an anguish at her heart, which nothing relieved, and which augmented every ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... resolute in face of a furious conductor and a threatening crew—Shiner, presently backed by a sergeant of regulars and two of his men, who had come running over the foot-bridge at the stop of the train, and now silently ranged themselves in tacit support. What Cullin had demanded was how Shiner dared tamper with the signals—how, in fact, he had managed to, since they had been carefully locked—and who was he, anyhow. And Shiner had simply answered: "I've a boy shot and dying at Silver Shield. I only heard it late in the night. ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... according to the anthropologist, is defined as increase in complexity, with the tacit assumption that this somehow implies betterment, though it is left with the philosopher to justify such an assumption finally and fully. Whereas in most cases man would seem to have succeeded in the struggle for existence by growing more complex, though in some ...
— Progress and History • Various
... a law in the State of Pennsylvania, by which the acts of the anthracite-coal pool were declared illegal and punishable. Nominally, therefore, the pool is a thing of the past; but the practical fact is, that by secret or tacit agreement the various companies are not competing with each other any more now than in the days of the pool, and at points like New York or Buffalo, where two or more roads meet, the same prices are ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... strength, and made the rulers the de facto servants of the ceremonious inhabitants. In the Tartar city there are Yellow Lama temples, with hundreds of bare-pated lama priests, the results of Buddhist Concordats guaranteeing Thibetan semi-independence in return for a tacit acknowledgment of Chinese suzerainty. Near the Palace walls is a Mongolian Superintendency, where the Mongol hordes still grazing their herds and their flocks on the grassy plains of high Asia, as they have done for countless centuries, are divided ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... however within the time; nor is the grammarian of Holdgate the least positive of the claimants. This new purveyor for the public taste, dislikes the catering of his predecessor, who poached in the fields of Murray; and, with a tacit censure upon his productions, has honestly bought the rareties which he has served up. In this he has the advantage. He is a better writer too than some who make grammars; though no adept at composition, and a total stranger to method. To call his work a "system" ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... she resumed. "I owe you a declaration which will remove every possibility of a misunderstanding between us. A few days ago, when on the terrace of your house my hands rested in yours, I fully realized that, so far as you were concerned, a tacit engagement from that ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... who have a secret in common, and who, by a sort of tacit agreement, exchange not a word on the subject, are less ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... would have made such a magnificent lady of Wellwood—who was, in fact, asked to take the post before it was offered to the cousin—she came to spend Christmas under his roof while still a spinster, on the tacit understanding that neither was a subject for "nonsense" any more. Deb and Mrs Carey were close friends. Deb was the godmother of the heir. The homelikeness of Wellwood was intensified by her intercourse, ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... beforehand; and if anything goes wrong, say that his colleagues didn't back him up. All these lovely little experiments recoil on the District-Officer in the end,' said the Knight of the Drawn Sword with a truthful brutality that made the Head of the Red Provinces shudder. And on a tacit understanding of this kind the transfer was accomplished, as quietly as might be ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... They do their time of prison, come out quite untamed by prison discipline, and begin again their wild, free life. One doesn't quite understand the farmer who gives any shelter to such a bad lot, but I fancy there is a tacit understanding that his hares and ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... which reminded Lady Deyncourt of herself in her own brilliant youth, and inclined her to be lenient, when in her daughters' cases she would have been sarcastic. The old woman and the young one had been great friends, and not the less so, perhaps, because of a tacit understanding which existed between them that certain subjects should be avoided, upon which, each instinctively felt, they were not likely to agree. And if the shrewd old woman of the world ever suspected the existence of a strength of will and depth of character in Ruth ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... dead-lock, and sit looking into one another's faces; Daun in a more and more distressed mood, his provender becoming so uncertain, and the Winter season drawing nigh. The sentries are in mutual view: each Camp could cannonade the other; but what good were it? By a tacit understanding they don't. The sentries, outposts and vedettes forbear musketry; on the contrary, exchange tobaccoes sometimes, and have a snatch of conversation. Daun is growing more and more unhappy. To which of the gods, if not to Soltikof again, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... country, the conduct of a dog towards his master should be held up as an example for imitation; and I think that the banner of the Moslem should have borne the dog, instead of the crescent, as an emblem of blind fidelity and tacit submission." ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to this proposal and the little water remaining was poured into an empty gourd and placed where it would be safe from bullets. By tacit consent they agreed that their loss should be concealed from Charley, who had slept throughout the incident. They knew him well enough to be sure that he would not touch the little water remaining if he knew they were ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... have they not, in the end, to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... time. But Mahony was still hard at work. The job of winding up and getting in the money owed him was no light one. For the report had somehow got abroad that he was retiring from practice because he had made his fortune; and only too many people took this as a tacit permission to leave ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... way, the crowning peak of General O'Reilly's career, it was by no means the end of it. Both he and his coin were fast becoming settled tradition. He continued his normal military career, but with the tacit understanding he would have a few days' leave of absence whenever the Golden Judge ...
— The Golden Judge • Nathaniel Gordon
... successful deception in that kind to be very small indeed. Many in a congregation can tell, by a kind of instinct, whether a man be preaching his own sermons or not. But the worse evil appears to me to lie in the tacit understanding that a sermon must SEEM to be a man's own, although all in the congregation know, and the would-be preacher knows that they know, that ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of the moment when a business appointment, which you cannot fail to keep, detains you, in order to obtain your tacit permission to some meditated expedition; if in order to obtain that permission she displays all the witcheries of those cajoleries in which women excel and whose powerful influence you ought already to have known, well, well, the professor implores you to allow her to win you over, while at the ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... law being thus become the common rule of citizens, the law of nature no longer obtained but among the different societies, in which, under the name of the law of nations, it was qualified by some tacit conventions to render commerce possible, and supply the place of natural compassion, which, losing by degrees all that influence over societies which it originally had over individuals, no longer exists but in some great souls, who consider ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... their after-pretences, my dear—all of them serve but for tacit confessions of their vile usage of you. I will keep your aunt's secret, never fear. I would not, on any consideration, that my mother ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labor.... Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labor above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... foothills blew aslant the smokes of a thousand fires. Over the vast landscape passed many moving figures. Young Indian men, mostly Sioux, some Cheyennes, a few Gros Ventres of the Prairie, all peaceable under the tacit truce of the trading post, rode out from their villages to their pony herds. From the post came the occasional note of an inharmonic drum, struck without rhythm by a hand gone lax. The singers no longer knew they sang. The border feast had lasted long. ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... drawn somewhere, whereas both were willing to believe that it had never existed at all. Under any pressure of necessity she would have driven with him in a cab, but not in her own carriage. They both knew it, and by tacit consent never allowed such unknown possibilities to suggest themselves. But in the mornings, there was nothing to prevent their walking together as far as the Piazza di Spagna, or ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... might have ruined, being once subdued, preserved her from all after danger. The first meeting between Maltravers and Valerie was, it is true, one of some embarrassment and reserve: not so the second. They did but once, and that slightly, recur to the past, and from that moment, as by a tacit understanding, true friendship between them dated. Neither felt mortified to see that an illusion had passed away,—they were no longer the same in each other's eyes. Both might be improved, and were so; but the Valerie and the Ernest ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and respect of all who knew her—to find her linked mysteriously with an ill-omened man, alarmed at his appearance, and yet favouring his escape, was a discovery that pained as much as startled him. Her reliance on his secrecy, and his tacit acquiescence, increased his distress of mind. If he had spoken boldly, persisted in questioning her, detained her when she rose to leave the room, made any kind of protest, instead of silently compromising himself, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... absolute need of an effort in industry equal to, if not greater than, the effort made in the army. I thought it significant that in many of the speeches the importance of this effort was urged as the only possible means of retaining the support of the peasants. There was a tacit recognition that the Conference represented town workers only. Larin, who had belonged to the old school which had grown up with its eyes on the industrial countries of the West and believed that revolution could be ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... after that night, to explain his delinquency and deliver Young Denny's message to her. There seemed to him absolutely no need now to open a subject which was bound to be embarrassing to him. And then, too, a sort of tacit understanding appeared to have sprung up between them ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... of breathing charity and love, served only to fortify the obstinacy and influence of the zealots. The confessors scrutinized and alarmed the conscience of their votaries, and a rigorous penance was imposed on those who had received the communion from a priest who had given an express or tacit consent to the union. His service at the altar propagated the infection to the mute and simple spectators of the ceremony: they forfeited, by the impure spectacle, the virtue of the sacerdotal character; nor was it lawful, even in danger of sudden death, to invoke the assistance of their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... all and cling only to him. Changes came in the next two years—and trouble. Old Quimby married again. Almira's home-life became unhappy. Quarrels ensued between the new wife and the children. Reproaches fell from the lips of the failing widow because of Almira's tacit acceptance of the devotions of young Mr. Powlett, son of the resident physician of the sanitarium that was now bringing so many patients to Urbana. A handsome, dare-devil sort of boy was Powlett, who speedily cut out all the local beaux at the parties and picnics which filled ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... and tacit consent the subject was here dropped, and soon after Mrs. Birtwell retired. On gaining the street she stood with an air of indetermination for a little while, and then walked slowly away. Once or twice before reaching the end of the block she paused and went back a few steps, turned and ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... sort of tacit compromise, little Edward was permitted to pass the greater part of the year at the Hall, and appeared to stand in the same intimate relation to both families, although their mutual intercourse was otherwise limited to formal messages, and more formal ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... happened to upset a book with my elbow—a volume of Moreri. Hamilcar, who was washing himself, suddenly stopped, and looked angrily at me, with his paw over his ear. Was this the tumultuous existence he must expect under my roof? Had there not been a tacit understanding between us that we should live a peaceful life? I had broken ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... must have a lot of places," the Colonel concurred, while his view of her shining raiment had an invidious directness. Adela could read the tacit implication: "You're not in sorrow, ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... reigned in virtue of right divine is far removed from us: their rights are no longer founded on any thing but the formal or tacit consent of nations: the moment nations reject them, the contract is broken; the conditional oaths taken to them are annulled in law and in fact, without their intervention or consent being necessary; for, as the proclamations ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... now make inquiries after Mr. Coates and his party, of whom both we and Dick Turpin have for some time lost sight. With unabated ardor the vindictive man of law and his myrmidons pressed forward. A tacit compact seemed to have been entered into between the highwayman and his pursuers, that he was to fly while they were to follow. Like bloodhounds, they kept steadily upon his trail; nor were they so far behind ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... this simple confession, did not resent it, she was so much pleased with her daughter's evident excitement at the young man's having come. Without being conscious of it, perhaps, Alice prettily assumed the part of hostess from the moment of their meeting, and did the honours of the hotel with a tacit implication of knowing that he had come to see her there. They had only met twice, but now, the third time, meeting after a little separation, their manner toward each other was as if their acquaintance ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... through the presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church is now withdrawn in the withdrawal of the Spirit. His withdrawal is practically an answer to the tacit prayer both of world and Church. That prayer is being answered. The "One" who restraineth has been withdrawn. This it is that makes the tribulation on its negative side. The awful character of the demons ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... was undoubtedly by Morus, for copies of it signed by himself were still extant. So far, therefore, Milton was right in saying that Morus's denial of the authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was an equivocation, resting on a tacit distinction between the body of the book and the additional or editorial matter. In several passages Morus himself had betrayed this equivocation, but in none so remarkably as in a sentence to the peculiar phrasing of which we called attention in quoting it (ante p. 159). Protesting ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson |
