"Understandable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... operated together in favoring its pronounced and immediate success. Aknowledge of Sterne existed among the more intelligent lovers of English literature in Germany, the leaders of thought, whose voice compelled attention for the understandable, but was powerless to create appreciation for the unintelligible among the lower ranks of readers. This knowledge and appreciation of Yorick were immediately available for the furtherance of Sterne's fame as soon as a work ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely "understandable" world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... things sometimes, and then talked about them as if anyone would have done the same thing. I had complained about this oddity to Mr. Spardleton when I first came to work for him; I was used to inventions that were made in understandable ways. He had smiled and asked me to quote the last sentence of 35 U.S.C. 103, the statute that set forth the conditions for patentability. It was a good thing I had memorized the statute. I recited the last sentence, "Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner ...
— The Professional Approach • Charles Leonard Harness
... cigarette, grinning. There was no sense in picking a quarrel. No man likes to discover that a perfect stranger has overheard his intimate confessions. His annoyance was understandable. But he hadn't nice manners. He knocked the cigarette case out of my hand and kicked it across the room. So I got into one of the deep armchairs and laughed at him in self- defense, to preserve my own temper from boiling up over ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... high-minded gentleman whose diary Clare had read to him! It was inexplicable. Yet Stonor suddenly remembered Hooliam's curiosity concerning the reports that were in circulation about the White Medicine Man; this was understandable now. But how could Clare have so stooped——? Well, it must be left to ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... a simple and understandable policy—without complicated or misleading clauses. You know exactly what every word means—and every word means exactly what ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... the principal scenes in my history are as clear to me as if they happened yesterday. It is not that. The truth is I was never clever at putting things on paper, and somehow, while the facts are clear enough in my mind, I feel a great difficulty in relating those facts in a way that is clear and understandable. You see I have lived an open-air life, and have spent more hours with the bridle-reins in my hands than the pen, and although I had a fair amount of schooling I was never considered a ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... making his escape, as the house is surrounded with water. What weapon would he choose? You would say the most silent in the world. Then he could hope when the deed was done to slip quickly from the window, to wade the moat, and to get away at his leisure. That's understandable. But is it understandable that he should go out of his way to bring with him the most noisy weapon he could select, knowing well that it will fetch every human being in the house to the spot as quick as they can run, and that it is all odds that he will be ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... be understood by anyone. Our only fear is that its very simplicity may cause some to pass it by as unworthy of attention, while they pass on their way searching for something "deep," mysterious and non-understandable. However, the Western mind is eminently practical, and we know that it is only a question of a short time before it will recognize the practicability of ...
— The Hindu-Yogi Science Of Breath • Yogi Ramacharaka
... we do to make our tariff changes strengthen business instead of weakening business? Rival protective tariff nations have answered that question. Common sense has answered it. Next to our need to make the Sherman law modern, understandable and just, our greatest fiscal need is a genuine, ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... again—they are destroyed. They came from Satan. I saw the hell-brand on them, and I knew they were sent to betray me to sin." Then he fell to gabbling strange and dreadful things which were not clearly understandable, and which the doctor admonished them ...
— The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg • Mark Twain
... rocked back, his white teeth flashed, and he shouted with laughter. The boys broke down, too, and in a moment the entire patronage of the coffee shop was staring at the three idiots who roared with unrestrained laughter in public. Such behavior in Americans was to be deplored, perhaps, but understandable. But a licensed ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... the spiritual world. He used the material things in life to illustrate values in the realm of the ideal; He used the things that are seen to make understandable the eternal things that the ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... some obscure foundation on which to build for themselves a theory of aesthetics. To such, and to all others who have any wish to reason connectedly on art matters, Mr. Marshall's little book will be interesting and instructive reading. It is remarkably clear and understandable even to a reader with no special training in metaphysical reasoning, and in point of literary style and carefully considered use of language it is a genuine treat. Its object is to explain, in as ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 06, June 1895 - Renaissance Panels from Perugia • Various
... begin to see why you take this man as your ideal," she said, one day, to Charles Osmond, "I can not, of course, accept a great deal that He is said to have taught. When He speaks of love to men, that is understandable, one can try to obey; but when he speaks about God, then, of course, I can only think that He was deluded. You may admire Joan of Arc, and see the great beauty of her character, yet at the same time believe that she was acting under a delusion; you may admire the character ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... It is perfectly understandable from the physics of the condition of broken compensation that anything which improves the tone of the heart and makes it again compensatory removes all of these many disabilities, congestions and subacute inflammations. If, however, these passive ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... tangible as yet, nothing upon which one might put a hand or cap with a word of comprehensive description. Indeed it had been working for weeks like a yeast in the minds of sundry black folk before their Caucasian neighbors began to sense it at all, and for this there was a reason easily understandable by anyone born and reared in any sizable town in any one of the older states lying below Mason and Dixon's Line. For in each such community there are two separate and distinct worlds—a black one and a white one—interrelated ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... light of their meaning sublime." In a word we are growing into the Good. The Bad is not the ultimate, but is none the less real. This is better than Manicheism, the Miltonian contest between the Good Spirit and the Bad, which Wells also in his Invisible King presents; a simple theory, understandable but not to my mind subject to careful scrutiny. There is but one God, one Force, one Principle, one Spirit, and it is working its way through, expressing itself as best it can. And Evil is a partial ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... transport their own personal belongings, upset a few books. You would have recognized their popular covers; and the anxiety, instantly shown, to recover those treasures, broke up the formation there for a few moments into something human and understandable. The wind took a few escaped leaves and blew them ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... Providence are, however, not unfrequently so interwoven with human events as that average intelligence may be able to understand portions of them, though much of mystery must always remain. And in no one particular do these understandable portions find a clearer illustration than in those interventions which assign individual men to given pursuits and responsibilities in life. Truly, "There is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller
... have shed some tears; but, if so, no trace of them was allowed to mar the peace of mind of Mr. Peters. She merely thanked him for being frank with her, and by a little present pain saving them both a future of disaster. It was quite understandable; she knew he had never really been in love with her. She had thought him the type of man that never does fall in love, as the word is generally understood—Miss Ramsbotham did not add, with anyone except himself—and had that ...
— Tommy and Co. • Jerome K. Jerome
... reach is a Creator, but it is obvious that this plea can never give us more than a mere designer working on materials that already exist. Of necessity design implies two things, difficulties to be overcome, and skill or wisdom in overcoming them. Design is an understandable thing in connection with man, because man is always occupied in overcoming the resistance of forces that exist quite independently of him, and which operate without reference to his needs or desires. But it would be absurd to ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... find out," he replied in a voice that was really mournful, so difficult and non-understandable was the subject to him. "Before I started to work for this office there wasn't a day that I didn't meet and speak friendly with Elihu. He used to have a good many deeds and papers to sign, and he never failed to call me in when I ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Maggie—Margaret Louise had just repeated to Stevie every living thing that I ever said about her, just as I said it, only without the explanations and foot-notes that make any kind of conversation more understandable. ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... relation, or for the sense of completion in parenthood; then the tension from these unsatisfied desires shows itself in a hundred little everyday instances of lack of self-control. These mystify him and his friends, but they are understandable when ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... story of the runaway marriage. Albert listened with interest and the almost incredulous amazement with which the young always receive tales of their parents' love affairs. Love, for people of his age or a trifle older, was a natural and understandable thing, but for his father, as he remembered him, to have behaved in this ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... him about his relatives, and neither he nor she had any. "We have a friend—" he began and paused, and then rambled into a not very understandable story about a letter and a doll's house and some unknown man who had bought one of his pictures, or was supposed to have done so, in a curiously clandestine manner. I could not quite follow ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... Air is admitted by intake stroke, as with a gasoline engine. Turbulence is induced by designing the combustion chamber and piston so as to give a whirling motion to the air during the intake stroke. The following quotation from Dorner now becomes readily understandable. "Since 1922 my invention consisted in eliminating the highly complicated compressor and in injecting directly such a highly diffused fuel spray so that a quick first ignition could be depended upon. By means of rotating the air column around the cylinder axis, fresh ...
— The First Airplane Diesel Engine: Packard Model DR-980 of 1928 • Robert B. Meyer
... for such friendships; but at that time, when young men were nurtured on great ideas, when they were sacrificing themselves in a sacred cause, and had seen next to nothing of the frivolities of life, they were understandable enough. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the past few years through the technical training of men for conduct of the industry, by the example of reputable companies in regularly publishing the essential facts upon which the value of their mines is based, and through understandable nontechnical discussion in and by some sections of the financial and general press. The real investor is being educated to distinguish between reputable concerns and the counters of gamesters. Moreover, yearly, men of technical knowledge ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... of reverential compassion to his brother-in-law. Mr Verloc was sorry. The brother of Winnie had never before felt himself in such close communion with the mystery of that man's goodness. It was an understandable sorrow. And Stevie himself was sorry. He was very sorry. The same sort of sorrow. And his attention being drawn to this unpleasant state, Stevie shuffled his feet. His feelings were habitually manifested by the agitation ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... on the "wise policy of working short-time as a precaution against the contingencies of the cotton supply, and of the glutted state of distant markets for manufactured goods[685]." October 12, the Economist acknowledged that the impatience of some mill-owners was quite understandable as was talk of a European compulsion on America to stop an "objectless and hopeless" quarrel, but then entered upon an elaborate discussion of the principles involved and demonstrated why England ought ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... To make understandable the ins and outs of this matter, I must pause a moment to describe the situation of our ranch; for it is upon the peculiarity of its situation that much of my ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... written in numbers or in letters, nor yet in hieroglyphs; yet are they understandable. Alphabet is not needed, ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... time of the World's Fair quite a lot of people still favored the simpler and more understandable forms of art expression. We went to Chicago and religiously visited the Art Building, and in our nice new creaky shoes we walked past miles and miles of brought-on paintings by foreign artists, whose names we could not pronounce, in order to find some sentimental domestic subject. ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... topic. While I have diverged occasionally from the thread of the narrative, my purpose has been merely to give where possible more background to the story, that the account as a whole might be more understandable in its relation to ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... when Edison's phonograph was being exhibited to the eminent scientists of the Institute, one rushed wrathfully down the aisle and seizing by the collar the man who manipulated the instrument, cried out, "Wretch, we are not to be made dupes of by a ventriloquist!" So it is readily understandable that after being referred to the Institute, Fulton and his project disappeared for ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... our being plunge ... into an altogether other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely 'understandable' {93} world.... So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account) we belong to it ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... of untruth. That, for instance, of the ermine collar embroidered with emeralds. If an understandable reason be required for this, it would be to draw attention away from the green lights which were seen in the room, and especially in the well-hole. Any unprejudiced person would accept the green ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... surface, if expressed in understandable terms, would be equal to sixty pounds for every square foot ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... mind, that the thermometer question has been most shamefully handled by the scientific world. It is made an exclusive matter; they keep it all to themselves; they talk about Fahrenheit with the utmost coolness; of Raumur in un-understandable jargon, and fire whole volleys of words concerning the centigrade scale, till one's head spins round with their inexplicable dissertations. What is the use of these interminable technicalities to the world at large? Do they enlighten the rheumatic as to how many coats they may put on, for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... not Roscoe's fault; he could not help it. He had merely gone the way of all the men who learned navigation before him. By an understandable and forgivable confusion of values, plus a loss of orientation, he felt weighted by responsibility, and experienced the possession of power that was like unto that of a god. All his life Roscoe had lived on land, and therefore in sight of land. Being constantly in sight of land, with ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... They burst like lightning out of a clear sky. I would have done just that thing for Ruby.... Mad, you say? ... Why, man, she's not hopeless! There was something deep behind that impulse. Strange—not understandable! I'm at the mercy of every hour I spend here. Benton has got into my blood. And I see how Benton is a product of this great advance of progress—of civilization—the U. P. R. We're only atoms in a force no one can understand.... Look at Reddy King. That cowboy ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... at the Commissioner's suggestion. It had been a lengthy job, requiring a couple of hours, but it was a complete one. Which was understandable, since it was the First Lady herself, Trigger gathered gradually from the noise, who had put Mantelish under the influence, back in his own garden on Maccadon, and within two weeks after his ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... themselves, a language they've invented just to cause despair in decent people who ask for a little dinner! Why, in every country on earth, when you open your mouth, snap your jaws, smack your lips and teeth, isn't that the world's most understandable message? From Quebec to the Tuamotu Islands, from Paris to the Antipodes, doesn't it mean: I'm hungry, give me ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... he placed the menu, the Red Un repeated the words from McAndrew's hymn. It had rather got him at first; it was a new philosophy of life. To give thanks for life was understandable, even if unnecessary. But thanks for work! There was another framed card above the desk, more within the Red Un's ken: "Cable crossing! Do not ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... newcomers they stopped. The leader said in quite understandable Amer-English, "I am Taller, Khan of all the People. Our legends tell of you. You must be from First Earth." He added with a simple dignity, a quiet gesture, "Welcome to the World. ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... the narrow margin by which he had held his own and Patricia's places at the Gordon dinner-table the night before. Only in Patricia's eyes he read a curious questioning, a hint that they were finding something in his eyes which was new and not wholly understandable. He knew well enough what it was that she saw; and though she was sitting opposite him at the table for four, he looked at her as seldom as possible, devoting himself, for once in a way, ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... of the cellars to which people have been invited during the raids. "Surely," writes one of our correspondents, "it is a scandal that, at this time in the world's history, some cellars should be totally destitute of wine. That there should be no coal in the coal-cellars is understandable enough; but to ask the timid public into empty wine cellars is a travesty ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various
... parentage at that—understand what reams of public and private communications from all over the Fatherland could not make clear: just why the blunt, impetuous, shocked, and astounded Kaiser dared give utterance to that disgraceful "scrap of paper" remark—inexcusable but also very understandable in the light of his knowledge of and confidence in a more astute miscreant; why France and Germany have always considered England more or less of a Tartuffe and a "Scheinheilige" (one who seems holy); and why every German—man, woman and child—so execrates ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... not please him was precisely an example of his "absolutely un-understandable" ways of looking at things ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... quite conscious of his ignorance. And he realized that there was a vast detailed knowledge of the Earth world which we had and he did not. He would use us as the occasion arose to explain what might not be understandable to him. ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... already overwrought and eager to quit, and you've been badly scared by the size of an alien ship, it's pretty understandable that the sight of human bodies, along with the story that they're just a convenient food supply, might seem pretty convincing. But I was already pretty dubious about the genuineness of our pals, and when I saw those bodies ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... and to them he gave the task of reforming legal procedure and of pruning down the existing laws, both State and National, cutting out the obsolete and useless ones and rewriting those recommended to be retained, in plain and direct language free from useless legal verbiage and understandable to ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... loyalty of fellow-workers and the obstinate disbelief of the girl. Perhaps you think I am making too much of it all; treacherous nerves were the lot of many spiritually noble men in that hell. But little by little conviction of a deeper, less understandable, horror creeps upon the reader, only to be explained and confirmed on the last page. To be honest, The Romantic is an ugly, a detestably ugly book, but of its cleverness there can ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... easily as it explains an insect alighting on colored paper. But perhaps if people didn't like clear, bright, healthy eyes—which is biologically understandable—they couldn't like precious stones. One thing may be a necessary collateral of the others. And, after all, a fine clear sky of bright colors is the signal to come out of hiding and rejoice and ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... to go to bed again. It would not surprise ME. The amazing thing is that Nature goes on doing the same things in the same way year after year; any sudden little irrelevance on her part would be quite understandable. When the wise men tell us so confidently that there will be an eclipse of the sun in 1921, invisible at Greenwich, do they have no qualms of doubt as the day draws near? Do they glance up from their whitebait at the appointed hour, ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... a most useful work will have been accomplished and the purpose of a classification to assemble the things most nearly alike and separate them from other things will have been partially achieved. Unless these numerous groups are arranged in some definite understandable relation to each other, or are placed in definite known positions where they can be found, the mere formation of the groups, on however good a basis, is not a complete classification. Furthermore, unless the position of each group ...
— The Classification of Patents • United States Patent Office
... "It is not understandable," muttered the giant as he took up his new position and gazed with feelings of awe upon the grand scene. "I wonder if the pale-faced men in the floating islands think much about these things. Perhaps they dwell in a land ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... without a word. She lay there, inert, bewildered as in the grip of an unknown force, until presently she was aware of the beating of his heart, and a glimmering of what he felt came to her. Nor was it an understandable thing, except to the woman who loved him. And yet and yet she feared it even in that instant ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... make up over that bench yet," she said at last; and we rode out past the ideal stable—its natty weather vane forever pointing the wind to the profit of no man—through another gate of superb cunning, and so once more to an understandable landscape, where sane cattle grazed. Here I threw off the depression that comes upon one in places where our humankind so plainly have been and are not. Again I questioned of Broadmoor and its ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... their loss, Mrs Borrow expresses fear that he does "not live regular. When you find yourself low," she continues, "take a little wine, but not too much at one time; it will do you the more good; I find that by myself." Her solicitude for George's health is easily understandable. He is now her "only hope," as she pathetically tells him. "Do not grieve, my dear George," she proceeds tenderly, "I trust we shall all meet in heaven. Put a crape on your ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... burning. Some sort of a camp had been established, surrounded by an embankment of tramped snow. Over this fortress the heads of all six of the girls became visible, all crying out to their rescuers in such a medley of exclamations that no one was understandable. ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... to make the subject easily understandable and at the same time entertaining, and to appeal less to the memory of my readers than to their common sense and intelligence. I hope in that way not to have strayed too far from the ideal I had in mind when writing this book, namely, to apply to chess the only method of teaching which has ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... beauty; and these two manners of life you may recognize in a moment by their work. Generally the naturalists are the strongest; but there are two of the Puritans, whose work if I can succeed in making clearly understandable to you during my three years[183] here, it is all I need care to do. But of these two Puritans one I cannot name to you, and the other I at present will not. One I cannot, for no one knows his name, except the baptismal one, Bernard, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... stress of a campaign slackened into commonplace reiteration, accepting a futile and intellectually dishonest platform, closing his eyes to facts, misrepresenting his opponents, abandoning, in short, the very qualities which distinguished him. It is understandable. When a National Committee puts a megaphone to a man's mouth and tells him to yell, it is difficult for him to ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... our host with an obvious reluctance that turned to a less understandable dismay as I also prepared to take my leave ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... at all afraid, and prayed much in her heart." Presently a station was reached. The language spoken there was not her vernacular, but she understood enough to know something was being said about the baby. Then an official appeared, and there was a cry quite understandable to her: "A Brahman baby! That Christian there is kidnapping a Brahman baby!" The official stopped at the carriage door. She was pushed towards him amidst a confused chatter, a crowd gathered at the door in a moment, and someone ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... understandable at first sight, is nothing else than a wish realized. On account of poliomyelitis a girl, not quite four years of age, was brought from the country into town, and remained over night with a childless aunt in a big—for her, naturally, huge—bed. The next morning she stated that she had dreamt that ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... willows. He noticed that the boat had drifted downstream until it now stood almost opposite him, and only a few feet from shore. Thus it was that, as Mr. Fulton backed water with his left-hand oar and rammed the nose of the boat toward the shelving beach, he heard one complete sentence, distinct and understandable. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully understandable only as posterior to St. Paul—the most enthusiastic and influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert, from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly ...
— Progress and History • Various
... receipt were in his own pocket; and broad rivers made capital graveyards. They two alone in the fog! He whirled round the deckhouse—and backed on his heels to get his balance. Directly in front, in a very understandable pose, was the intended victim, his ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... there is much to be excused. The result was that while there was always a certain dainty equity about Stevenson's judgments, even when he was wrong, Henley seemed to think that on the right side the wronger you were the better. There was much that was feminine in him; and he is most understandable when surprised in those little solitary poems which speak of emotions mellowed, of sunset and a quiet end. Henley hurled himself into the new fashion of praising Colonial adventure at the expense both of the Christian and the republican traditions; but the sentiment ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... mental slackening made him understandable, and gave him a certain popularity in Nigger-town. Black men fell into the habit of dropping in at the Siner cabin, where they would sit outdoors, with chairs propped against the wall, and philosophize on ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... mean that it is always wise to engage a weaker force that is temporarily separated from its main body. It is readily understandable, for instance, that it would ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... willingness to accept certain statements blindly, as children and primitive minds do, and yet have made no really earnest endeavor to lift the veil and look behind it with the intent of finding out if a simple and understandable truth may ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... probably be found most useful by those who have mastered this little text is the work by G. F. Herbert-Smith, to which frequent reference has been made at the close of many of our chapters. It is thoroughly scientific, yet understandable, and is very complete on the ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... grown during my absence, and were all big for their age, and though some of them not exactly handsome, yet all pleasant to look upon—I was the only wanting in physical charms—also they were often discontented, and wished, as children will, for things they could not have; but they were natural, understandable children, not like myself, cursed with a fevered ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... blushed as Tom explained what had happened. Realizing Chow's embarrassment, Tom tried to make his mistake sound understandable. ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... announcement that Mr. Fayliss had another appointment, and called for a note of thanks to him for coming. More applause—this time unrestrained. Fayliss smiled again and swept his eyes around us, as if filled with some amusing secret. Then he said to Kutrov, "You would find them quite understandable." ...
— The Troubadour • Robert Augustine Ward Lowndes
... tended toward personal whines, like The Curate, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd's Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill's Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire for ...
— The Methodist - A Poem • Evan Lloyd
... called him a fool. He had promoted elephant fights which had stirred the Indian princes out of their melancholy indifference, and tiger hunts which had, by their duration and magnificence, threatened to disrupt the efficiency of the British military service,—whimsical excesses, not understandable by his intimate acquaintances who cynically arraigned him as ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... he said in a soft musical voice. He gave the words a most curious accent and inflexion, yet they were quite understandable to his listeners. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... explained James J. Hill. "Mr. Edison has disguised his signature sufficiently to throw off the track any German wireless operator who might catch the message, while leaving it understandable ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... woman whom they called Catalina. She broke into speech. It was cacique to cacique. She was from Boriquen—she would return in a canoe if she were free! Better drown than live with the utterly un-understandable—only that they ate and drank and laid hold of women whether these would or would not, and were understandable that far! Gods! At first she thought them gods; now she doubted. They were magicians. If she were free—if she were free—if she were free! Home—Boriquen! If not that, at ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... were extremely limited, a generally self-sufficient and naturally self-reliant community developed as a matter of survival. The characteristics which this frontier nurtured, and the non-English—even anti-English—composition of its population make understandable the sentiment in this region for independence from Great Britain. This, of course, is supremely demonstrated in the separate declaration of independence drawn, according to the report, by the settlers of the Fair ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... it did not see." Here, as always, we have the power of the hypnotiser over the hypnotised. Moreover, when this power is seen in action on minds of a superior order and previously invited to be suspicious, it is understandable how easy it is to ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... contentedness. It colored all her thoughts, created pleasant places for her in what, to Elsie, seemed a desolate life; it made Millville not only a bearable but even a happy place to live in. Millville understood Patience and loved her; Elsie, being less understandable, ...
— Little Lost Sister • Virginia Brooks
... It's a perfectly understandable way of looking at it, if it is rather far-fetched. But good-by to the hard-earned thousands. You won't have a ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... stop to think," Mollie said impatiently. "Try and think. Your head might just as well be a football. What I think is that if two un-understandable things are discovered about the same time they must belong to each other. Don't ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... was an exchange of words understandable only to those expressing them, and to those for whom they were expressed, but any one might have guessed that the boys in the Peter Pan were asking the girls in the Petrel to let them "meet" the wild bird ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... GRAHAME.]—Mr. Grahame is both a very readable and understandable author. He has reason to be proud of his poem called the SABBATH: for it is one of the sweetest and one of the purest of modern times. His scene however is laid in the country, and not in the metropolis. The very opening of this poem refreshes the heart—and ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... forward for discussion. In his heart he also feared McGregor. "Let it alone," he said sharply. "She is a woman grown and has more judgment and good sense than any other woman I know." He got up and threw the cigar over the veranda into the grass. "Women are not understandable," he half shouted. "They do inexplicable things, have inexplicable fancies. Why do they not go forward along straight lines like a sane man? I years ago gave up understanding you and now I am being compelled to give ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... simultaneously a bringing into relief of some essential facts. This clearing of the ground will not wait until the war is over; it has already begun, though men are yet but half-conscious of it, and then only in the guise of profitless disillusionment. This state of mind is understandable enough. The spectacle of thousands going out by trainload to settle differences through slaughter has been a terrible shock. Individuals, having progressed beyond that stage, had assumed that collectively, too, men must share ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... upon the glowing quivering sea. And he became very anxious to tell them something about "Francesco"; they could not understand him until the doctor caught "Battaglia" and "Pavia" and had an inspiration. Francis the First, he explained in clumsy but understandable English, slept here, when he was a prisoner of the Emperor and all was lost but honour. They looked at the slender pillars and graceful ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... from the fan-tan attraction. The service was in Chinese, but the reverend gentleman, not being fluent in the Chinese language, first gave a paragraph in English, and this was translated by his wife into Chinese, which made it more interesting and assuredly more understandable to us. The audience paid the closest attention, and to my surprise their faces revealed an animated response. The women were dressed in the long black coats and loose trousers seen everywhere, but their hair ornaments were of gold, set with jewels, and their earrings jade or large pearls of ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... contemporaries that "the world does not change." But I hope that you will not pay much attention to such talk. You see, it took our ancestors almost a million years to learn how to walk on their hind legs. Other centuries had to go by before their animal-like grunts developed into an understandable language. Writing—the art of preserving our ideas for the benefit of future generations, without which no progress is possible was invented only four thousand years ago. The idea of turning the forces of ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... this conversation came up the staircase. It was Primmie's voice which he heard most frequently and whatever words he caught were hers. There was a masculine grumble at intervals but this was not understandable ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... literature is lucid to the average mind. In fact, that is its distinguishing feature. We understand what the man means. No able writer uses the same word over and over with varying sense. Alfred Henry Lewis and William Marion Reedy use the mortal mind, and their work is understandable. You can sit in judgment on their conclusions and weigh, sift and decide for yourself. They make an appeal to ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... an understandable disinclination, amounting with some to positive revulsion, to recognise the sexual origin of much that passes for religious fervour, the fact is well known to competent medical observers, as the following citations will show. More than a generation since ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... insult one another. The secret is, that insiders understand the limitations of the criticism, which outsiders are apt to take in bulk. No race in the world possesses a richer anecdotal lore than the Jews—such pawky, even blasphemous humor, not understandable of the heathen, and to a suspicious mind Pinchas's overflowing cornucopia of such would have suggested a prior period of Continental wandering from town to town, like the Minnesingers of the middle ages, repaying the hospitality of ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... I had a theory that they were hardly the sort to be content with that sum, and that Hank Rowan's cached gold would be an excellent bait for them, if it could be uncovered. Those steadily reiterated phrases, "raw gold—on the rock" might have some understandable meaning if one were on the spot, but MacRae had kept that to himself—and I wasn't running a bureau of information for Lessard's benefit. The Canadian government might trust him, but I wouldn't—not if he took oath on a stack of Bibles, and gave a cast-iron bond to play fair. I couldn't give ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... my possession, it was so clear and understandable, I really forgot for the moment he was ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... halves of an orange which had been divided, would result in the destruction of that edible; or any more than bringing together a glove fitting the right hand and its mate fitting the left hand, would destroy the shape and usefulness of this article. The comparison may be a homely one, but it is understandable. ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... glad; as Nelda's husband, he would share in the higher price being paid for the collection. But when you realize that Rivers was buying the collection out of Dunmore's pocket, his reaction becomes quite understandable. I daresay I signed Arnold Rivers's death-warrant, ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... and he read much of it, finding his greatest joy in the simpler poets, who were more understandable. He loved beauty, and there he found beauty. Poetry, like music, stirred him profoundly, and, though he did not know it, he was preparing his mind for the heavier work that was to come. The pages of his mind were blank, and, without effort, much he read and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... (I shall continue to use my own designation for them, as clearer and more understandable than Mercer's) did not need connecting wires; they conveyed their impulses by Hertzian waves to a master receiver on the Santa Maria, which amplified them and re-broadcast them so that each of us could both send and receive ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... pride which is certainly wide-spread and which leads to the disparagement of the practical doctor and medical layman, and then further to the disparagement of the craft of nature healers. The practical doctor and the nature healer on the one hand tend towards an understandable disparagement of medical science and analysis and, on the other hand, tend towards superficiality. The superficiality of the opponents of science is, however, as unhappy an affair as the pride of the so-called scientists, but the one group should not demean the other. This would lead to successful ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... the nature of an autobiography, since Balzac, like his mouthpiece, Louis, viewed everything from an inner sense—from intuition, or the soul faculties, rather than from the standard of mere intellectual observation, analysis and synthesis. This inner sense, so real and so thoroughly understandable to those possessing it, is almost, if not quite, impossible of description to the complete comprehension of those who have no intimate relationship with this inner vision. To the person who views life from the inner sense, the soul sense (which is the approach to, and is included ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... Meredith obscure; conceivably we might find a thousand words and phrases of the year 2000 strange and perplexing; but there is no reason why a time should ever come when what has been written well in English since Elizabethan days should no longer be understandable ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... German, he spoke it but little. And so he stood quietly imbibing his bottle of beer whilst Bombastus Furiosis still held forth. His quiet attitude evidently misled the orator, whose guttural German became mixed with quite enough English to make his remarks perfectly understandable to the few Britishers ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... Cryptics, and Cufics, and Runics, and Dorics, and Ionics, and all sorts of other ricks and tricks (because the Woons, and the Neguses, and the Akhoonds, and the Repositories of Tradition would never leave a good thing alone when they saw it), the fine old easy, understandable Alphabet—A, B, C, D, E, and the rest of 'em—got back into its proper shape again for all Best Beloveds to learn when they ...
— Just So Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... between men, that it was not the same thing to be young as to be old; that the reason why she could kiss the old Judge and the little Clerk of the Court, and not kiss, say, the young manager of the great lumber firm who came every year for a fortnight's fishing at St. Saviour's, was one which had an understandable cause and was not a mere matter of individual taste. She had been good friends with this young manager, who was only thirty years of age, and was married, but when he had wanted to kiss her on saying good-bye ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... criminals, particularly of the sneak-thief or pick-pocket class, has taught us that living conditions for the individual may be founded on whole careers of misrepresentation and lies—for very understandable reasons. Self-accusations may sometimes be evolved with the idea of gaining directly practical results, as when a lover or a comrade is shielded, or when there is danger of a larger crime being fastened ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... discuss the question of Japan for the benefit of an exclusively Western audience in a convincing way because Japanese policy has two distinct facets which seem utterly contradictory, and yet which are in a great measure understandable if the objects of that diplomacy are set down. Being endowed with an extraordinary capacity for taking detached views, the Statesmen of Tokio long ago discerned the necessity of having two independent policies—an Eastern policy for Eastern Asia and a Western policy for Western nations—because ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... easy for all of us to rationalize what we want to believe, and to consider those leaders we like responsible and those we dislike irresponsible. And our task is not helped by stubborn partisanship, however understandable on the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Claire Creek. To the proprietors of Glen Alpine, and the visitors, the French name is absurd and out of place. No Frenchman has ever resided here, and if it was desired to call it Clear Water Creek, why not use good, understandable, common-sense English. At the request of those most intimately concerned, therefore, the name has been changed on the map that accompanies this volume, to Glen Alpine Creek, a name that "belongs" and to which no one can possibly have ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... often said that the outrages of the German troops in Belgium became understandable to me when I studied a Scots school where suppressive discipline turned good boys into demons. The brutality of the German army was a natural result of the brutality of their discipline. So is it in the individual soul, and in the ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... eyes peered abstractedly into the distance between the almost shut lids. That Nahoum should seek David, who had displaced him from his high office, was scarcely Oriental, when his every cue was to have revenge on his rival. This was a natural sequence to his downfall. It was understandable. But here was David safe and sound. Was it, then, some deeper scheme of future vengeance? The Oriental instinctively pierced the mind of the Oriental. He could have realised fully the fierce, blinding passion for revenge which had almost overcome Nahoum's calculating ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... perhaps it does; I don't know enough about religion to say, but it seems near enough for a first shot. And when you say it doesn't take you that way, that you haven't "got" it, I can see that that expresses a fairly understandable state of mind. Of course, I know it isn't funk. If you'd happened to think of the Ultimatum first, instead of the Government, you'd have been in at ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... ranks Huck Finn before Joan of Arc, but that is understandable. His literary culture and research enable him, in some measure, to comprehend the production of Joan; whereas to him Huck is pure magic. Huck is not altogether magic to those who know the West—the character of that section and the Mississippi River, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... pleasure. I suppose I was willing, correct, and faithful. I improved my knowledge by reading books on astronomy. I got, amongst others, 'The Mechanism of the Heavens,' by Denison Olmstead, an American; a very understandable book. Learning English, which was a foreign language to me, led me to learn other languages. I took pleasure in finding out the roots or radixes of words, and from time to time I added foreign dictionaries to my little library. But I took ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... have each a language of their own, and as far as they go they are almost as clear-cut and understandable as the talk of human beings. Just how much more is behind the veil that limits our understanding we cannot say; but no doubt ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... asylum picture, from there to return in reverse order through the second half of the drama, thus symbolising life's continuous repetition of itself, Kierkegaard's Gentagelse. The first part of The Road to Damascus is the one most frequently produced on the stage. This is understandable, having regard to its firm structure and the consistency of its faith in a Providence directing the fortunes and misfortunes of man, whether the individual rages in revolt or submits in ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human nature,—that's all that was necessary to make this romance understandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of that much abused word. It was not the romance defined in the dictionary as an action or adventure of an unusual or wonderful character, soaring beyond the limits of fact and real life and ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... give him time to think, she made her plea,—rapid, girlish, rather incoherent, but understandable enough. They would go away together and be married. She had it all planned and some of it arranged. And then they would hide somewhere, and—"And always be together," she ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... day, on the other in the fact that the laws of nature derived by science from the present condition of the world seem to rule them out.5 In the light of the concept of the world's 'ageing' which we have tried to develop here, not only do the relevant reports become plausible, but it also becomes understandable why, if such events have taken place in the past, they fail to do so ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... tossed some coppers to a small brown-faced girl, who, clasping an infant nearly as large as herself, jabbered at him in an unknown but wholly understandable language. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... stories and verse which fit into such a program we have always felt an almost total void. Whether other schools feel this would depend upon their intentional program. Surely no school would advise giving classical literature without the setting which would make the stories and verse understandable. It is a question whether the fact of desirable literature has not in the past and does not still govern our whole school program more than many educators would be willing to admit. What seems to be more logical is to set up that which is psychologically sound so far as we ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... Mystic Teachings regarding the Divine Incarnation of the Spirit in the mortal body of Jesus—a subject of the greatest importance to all who are troubled with this difficult point. We hope to be able to shed the Mystic light of Truth upon this corner which so many have found dark, non-understandable, and contrary to reason, natural law and science. The Mystic Teachings are the great Reconciler of Faith ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the land Faalelei had given them; and when, for a spell, he took a place beside her she would tenderly wipe the sweat from his forehead and look at him with perplexity. Work, yes, that, as the preacher said, was the curse of Adam; but this daily persistency was not understandable. Had not Faalelei plenty for them both? And if one taro sufficed, why be at the pains ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... after so many years of slander and misunderstanding, and to find something really touching and noble, instead of ludicrous, in the grim General's devotion to his first and only love. We get also for the first time an understandable account of the Battle of New Orleans, made up with praiseworthy impartiality from the accounts of both sides. Nor is it only here that the author gives us new light. He enables us to judge fairly of the sad story of Arbuthnot and Ambrister, and throws a great deal of light on many points of our ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... best he could become the owner, not of a fictitious, but of a real, estate. The conversation with his host had made everything clear, had made the possibility of his acquiring riches manifest, had made the difficult art of estate management at once easy and understandable; until it would seem as though particularly was his nature adapted for mastering the art in question. All that he would need to do would be to mortgage the dead souls, and then to set up a genuine establishment. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... any man in the street-car at home can tell you all about, and which Cramb and Bernhardi make so interesting and understandable, is here on the spot not so easy to put one's finger on. Apparently nobody ever heard of Bernhardi, and you might talk with every man you meet for a fortnight without finding any one who could tell you —as any young girl who happens to sit next you at dinner ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... account of the Battle of Sedgemoor is rendered singularly picturesque and understandable by the personal observation and local tradition which he has brought to bear upon it. Might not his account of the capture of Monmouth derive some few additional life-giving touches, from the same invaluable sources of information. It is extremely interesting, as ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... English, Bryce had placed his intonations almost to the block he grew up in. Almost to the half block! He was as familiar as Pop Yak, as familiar as his own face in the mirror, and as understandable. Bryce knew the inside of his mind as well as if it were a suddenly attached lobe of his own. It was like looking back through time at himself ...
— The Man Who Staked the Stars • Charles Dye
... came. They watched it for a moment together in silence. It behaved in the amazing way peculiar to its kind. Nothing in the world flies like a butterfly. Birds and other things fly straight, or sweep in curves, or rise and drop in understandable straight lines. But the Painted Lady obeyed no such rules. It dodged and darted, it jerked and shot, it was everywhere and anywhere, least of all where it ought to have been. The swallows always missed it. It simply ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... there is little in it except a matter of time. Indeed it is said that some anglers, after hooking a salmon, hand the rod to a gillie to work and land the fish. This seems going too much in the other direction, but it is quite understandable. True, the size to which salmon run is a great inducement to go after them; but even in Loch Tay, where the biggest average is to be found, the sport, if such it can be called at all, is very questionable. The rod, line, gut, and minnows used are on ...
— Scotch Loch-Fishing • AKA Black Palmer, William Senior
... the Senator, with sardonic venom. "I'll admit that the thing isn't exactly clear to me—what he's trying to do—what he's thinking. A crazy man's actions and whims seldom are understandable by a sane man. But, so I gather, after showing us, as he has this evening, a sample of his work in running municipal government, he now proposes to take full ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day |
