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More "Profundity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Pike's profundity of passion, that he paused like a somnambulist, actually rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand, and ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... bushes; and, being noticed by the careless passer-by, who cannot see the deep infinity of waters of which it is the symbol, and knows not even whether they exist, is termed "a pretty stream of thought and fancy, but one that hath no profundity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... gem in a less brilliant setting might have failed to draw my admiration. I was the captive both of the spirit and the form. Soul and body had co-operated in producing my passion, and this may account for its suddenness and profundity. Why I loved her person, I knew—I was not ignorant of the laws of beauty—but why the spirit, I knew not. Certainly not from any idea I had formed of her high moral qualities; I had no evidence of these. Of her courage, even to daring, I had proof; ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... strange remark with a simplicity and wistfulness which were in striking contrast to the awful profundity of the suggestion, and all her auditors, including the half-tipsy Zouche, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... convents, turreted dwellings and sombre monuments, bathed in an atmosphere of orisons and melancholy, threaded by foul and ill-paved alleys, made for crime, intrigue, and mystery; where buried in the profundity of night love and wickedness both stalked forth; strange temples and niches lit by twinkling lamps before the images of saints; recollections of diabolical Inquisitorial rites—a romantic and fantastic shroud, dissipated now, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... all recorded talkers. The best of all is very possibly some obscure genius who caret vate sacro: but Johnson with the invaluable help of Boswell has beaten him and all the others. What is the essence of his superiority? Not wisdom or profundity certainly. There, of course, he would be immeasurably surpassed by many men of all nations, notably by Socrates, who is probably the most famous and certainly by far the most influential of talkers. Of course ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... it went it left something behind it which for a while performed the same office. Was this the tearful secret of which Mrs. Tristram had had a glimpse, and of which, as of her friend's reserve, her high-breeding, and her profundity, she had given a sketch of which the outlines were, perhaps, rather too heavy? Newman supposed so, but he found himself wondering less every day what Madame de Cintre's secrets might be, and more convinced that secrets were, in themselves, hateful things to her. She was ...
— The American • Henry James
... the people from the city a certain childishness, for which she had the indulgent smile of an elderly person; but at the same time she was touched and joyously surprised by their faith, the profundity of which she began to realize more and more clearly. Their visions of the triumph of justice captivated her and warmed her heart. As she listened to their recital of future victories, she involuntarily ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... Emerson was due rather to the fact that Alcott presented him with his own ideas served up in forms in which he no longer recognized them, and so appeared to Emerson as original. Such originality as he had was rather in oracular and often incomprehensible verbiage than in profundity of thought, but, as no one attempted to bring him to book, bewildered as his audience generally was by the novelty of the propositions he made or by their absurdity, he used to go on until suggestion, or breath, failed him. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... was caught up,—snatched out of that black profundity with inconceivable swiftness,—and when the ascending movement ceased, I found myself floating lightly like a wind-blown leaf through twining arches of amber mist, colored here and there with rays of living flame ... I ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Pharaoh shall hear the weeping.' Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... leave no welcome for even the less elaborate work of a contemporary of Dickens and Thackeray. As regards "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret,"—the title which, for lack of a better, has been given to this Romance,—it can scarcely be pronounced deficient in either elaboration or profundity. Had Mr. Hawthorne written out the story in every part to its full dimensions, it could not have failed to rank among the greatest of his productions. He had looked forward to it as to the crowning achievement of his literary ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... diameter. We were inclosed by a natural wall, rising steep on every side to a height which produced the idea of insurmountable confinement. The interception of all lateral light caused a dismal gloom. Round us was a perpendicular rock, above us the distant sky, and below an unknown profundity of water. If I had any malice against a walking spirit, instead of laying him in the Red-sea, I would condemn him to reside in the Buller ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... again to be afflicted by the madness of youths in their love of truth. "'To worship appearance,'" he often quoted; "'to believe in forms, in tones, in words, in the whole Olympus of appearance!'" This particular excerpt he always concluded with, "'Those Greeks were superficial—OUT OF PROFUNDITY!'" ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus. ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... this effect of originality and profundity was produced by a quite limited talent for turning striking phrases, exploiting certain curious and rather catching rhythms and modulations, and devising suggestive or eccentric instrumentation. On its decorative side, it ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... campaign of the Austrians is incomprehensible to all our military men—not on account of its profundity, but on account of its absurdity or incoherency. In the present circumstances, half-measures must always be destructive, and it is better to strike strongly and firmly than justly. To invade Bavaria without disarming the Bavarian army, and to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... an extemporary apprenticeship; it wants no drilling; it never ranks in the awkward squad; it has no left hand, no deaf ear, no blind side. It puts on no look of wondrous wisdom, it has no air of profundity, but plays with the details of place as dexterously as a well-taught hand flourishes over the keys of the pianoforte. It has all the air of commonplace, and all the force and ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... satisfactory way, even to Archie ordering a new suit of clothes. The youth came out temporarily from his usual profundity, and had a real, natural boyish talk with Ralph. The latter recited the incident of the adventure with Billy Bouncer's crowd ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... the most difficult as well as one of the most successful essays in psychological analysis ever attempted by an author; and in his wonderful portrait, which must be closely studied, and not epitomized or reproduced in extracts, we see glowing enthusiasm united to cabalistic profundity, and the most morbid tension of the intellectual powers united to clear and well-defined hopes. How has the author succeeded in making Mordecai so human and so true to nature? By mixing the gold with an alloy of commoner metal, and by giving the angelic likeness ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... their decisive command of the sea, and on the vast financial resources which secured their staying power, he maintained his ascendency until his death in the following year, though he had to submit to a fine. The events which followed his death only confirmed the profundity of his political judgment, and the accuracy with which he had gauged the capacities of the state. In that winter Potidaea was forced to capitulate to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Many buy books because they are written by great stylists, but few read for just that reason. They read because there is something in an author's work which attracts them to his style, and that something may be study of character, skill in narrative, or profundity in truth, of which style is the perfect expression, but not the thing itself. Only connoisseurs, and few of them, read for style. And, furthermore, I very much doubt whether readers go to Conrad to learn about the sea. They might learn as much from Cooper or Melville, but they have not gone ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to the store; and then in the walled garden that lay behind the house he beheld a woman's form. It was draped in white and it moved about rhythmically, bending slowly from side to side; and then with the graceful ethereal lightness it leapt and whirled in a dance. In the profundity of the distance all was lost but the grace of it, the fairy-like flitting to and fro; and, as Denver watched, the tears leapt to his eyes at the ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... sense of light, which makes him deal with it, in the opening of the Purgatorio, in a wonderfully touching and penetrative way. Hellenism, which is the principle pre-eminently of intellectual light (our modern culture may have more colour, the medieval spirit greater heat and profundity, but Hellenism is pre-eminent for light), has always been most effectively conceived by those who have crept into it out of an intellectual world in which the sombre elements predominate. So it had been in the ages of the Renaissance. This repression, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... scarcely see the two men shrouded there in the profundity of shadow, and she had almost walked into the one who was to die before she realized his ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... said the doctor, laying his hand kindly upon her shoulder; "you'll want something fresh again presently. What mine of profundity are you ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... He was a navigator of some renown, principally derived from a voyage of destruction against the Spaniards in 1592; but he was a vain and affected character, little calculated for decisive and manly action. Instructions were prepared, but the King, with his accustomed profundity of folly, directed that they should be sealed in a box, and not opened until the voyagers arrived upon the coasts of Virginia. In the vessels there embarked, beyond the regular crews, one hundred five persons, to form the settlement. And it does not seem extravagant to assert that Virginia ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... consoled that they forgot to wipe away their tears. They were bright but not clear—large and shimmering, as if reflected from some invisible sea, not immediately present to his eyes. The gulfs in which they floated were black blue with profundity. There was no moon, but the night was yet so far from dark, that it seemed conscious throughout of some distant light that illumined it without shine. And his heart felt like the night, as if it held a deeper life than he could ever ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... conception of events is only very vaguely subjective. An action is looked upon more as happening than as being performed, as impersonally rather than personally produced. The idea is due, however, to anything but philosophic profundity. It springs from the most superficial of childish conceptions. For the Japanese mind is quite the reverse of abstract. Its consideration of things is concrete to a primitive degree. The language reflects the fact. The few ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... easily pulled it out, and that one of his middle teeth in his lower jaw, broke out while he was at dinner." He sat (for the last time) for "a second picture to Mr. Ryley," p. 379. Ashmole's intimacy with Lilly was the foundation of the former's (supposed) profundity in alchemical and astrological studies. In this Diary we are carefully told that "Mr. Jonas Moore brought and acquainted him with Mr. William Lilly, on a Friday night, on the 20th of November," p. 302. Ashmole was then only 26 years of age; and it will ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... accompanies this characteristic is the sense of profundity, of mighty significance. And this feeling is not necessarily an illusion. The nature of our materials — be they words, colours, or plastic matter — imposes a limit and bias upon our expression. The reality of experience can never be quite rendered through these ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... of the membranes of the human stomach, in which they used words that were over a foot long by actual measurement. I have never heard such splendid words in my life; but such were their grandiloquent profundity, and their far-reaching lucidity, that I understood rather less about it when they had finished than ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... as somebody once said with equal truth and profundity, knows what a minute may bring forth, much less, therefore, does anybody know what an evening of say two hundred and forty minutes may produce. For instance, Harold Quaritch—though by this time he had gone so far as to freely ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... he in a most stately manner, "when I devote myself, it is to the death. I have the honour to salute you!"—he bowed over her hand and kissed it. "Monsieur." He bowed to me with the profundity of a hidalgo, and trotted ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... is a reading of it by a Unitarian—a reading, I venture to say, for all minds, for all places, for all times—a reading which stands clear of controversial theology, and which, in spite of its profundity, is a message for the simple as ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... depth, judgment, reason, discernment, judiciousness, reasonableness, discretion, knowledge, sagacity, enlightenment, learning, sense, erudition, prescience, skill, foresight, profundity, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... stall, 'r' you," declared the young gentleman with a scowling profundity. "No go. Got to come out your corner 'n' fight. 'N' I'm goin' ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... and the terror of life depends on our keeping these temples pure, or defiling them. Such are the solemn and profound beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, on which all the higher art of the world has based itself. All the profundity and solemnity of it is borrowed from these, and exists for us in exact proportion to the intensity with ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the letter accompanying the suppressed Dedication to Marino Faliero. "In the Appendix to an English Work, lately translated into German, and published at Leipzig, a judgment of yours upon English poetry is quoted as follows: 'That in English poetry great genius, universal power, a feeling of profundity, with sufficient tenderness and force are to be found, but that altogether these do not constitute poets,'" etc., etc. (see Poetical Works, 1901, v. 340, 341, and Letters, 1900, v. 100-103). The originals of the Dedication and Letters were conveyed to Goethe by John Murray ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... prejudices, and the judge who owes either his election or his appointment to the money or the favor of a great corporation, are alike unworthy to sit on the bench, are alike traitors to the people; and no profundity of legal learning, or correctness of abstract conviction on questions of public policy, can serve as an offset to such shortcomings. But it is also true that judges, like executives and legislators, should hold sound views on the questions of public policy which are ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirees, 2ieme entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... But the drama gave no opportunity for anything but passing allusions to scientific, philosophical, and religious matters, so that direct evidence is lacking as to how far Shakespeare was acquainted with what was being written in these fields. On the other hand, the profundity of his insight into human motive and behavior, the evidences of prolonged and severe meditation on human life and the ways of the world, and the richness of the philosophical generalizations that lie just below the surface of his greater plays, make ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... air of profundity convulsed me. I handed my father the letter addressed to the princess to entrust it to the charge of one of the domestics, thinking carelessly at the time that Ottilia now stood free to make appointments and receive communications, and moreover that I was too proud to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... To apply, even to a small extent, the principles we have been labouring to establish, would not only lead us much too far, but would constrain us to travel out of our proper subject and prescribed province. Our purpose has only been, to vindicate the profundity, or rather the fulness of Holy Writ[514]; and to shew that under the obvious and literal meaning of the words, there lies concealed a more recondite, and a profounder sense: call that sense mystical, or spiritual, or Christian, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... of Signor Rodicaso and friends, Fidelia rose, turned toward them, and made a profound courtesy, as if to signify her abject submission. Signor Rodicaso bowed with equal profundity, and straightway proceeded to make a speech to the lady, in which he spoke of the wild idolatry that he had long felt for her, and alluded most disparagingly to his own merits. If the Signor's statements could be relied on, he was totally unworthy of an alliance ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... not forget the profundity of his main idea, that, exception made for the lower forms, the animal is essentially active, that it always reacts to the external world, is never passively acted upon. Let us not forget that he pointed out the essentially psychological moment ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... arrived at the profundity of the maxim. This inequality is, in a great measure, the result of abuses in the institutions of society. They do not speak of what exists, but of what ought to exist. Every one should be left at liberty to obtain all the advantages of society which he can compass, by the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... nor any circumscribed and scant oasis I seem to realize. A forest valley, with rocky sides and brown profundity of shade, formed by tree crowding on tree, descends deep before me. Here, indeed, dwell human beings, but so few, and in alleys so thick branched and overarched, they are neither heard nor seen. Are they savage? ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Smith to Dr. Eames, the Master of Brakespeare College, of his ideas and his purpose gives the note of fooling and profundity filling the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the pipes and sentries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... the power and profundity of the male voice, but it was as subdued, as flawless and sympathetic as a distant, deep-toned bell. There was not even a breath of effort in it, nor an insincere expression, and it pursued a theme of little range and ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... in the "Challenge" and the "Combat," and in that long flight of birds across a lake in the subdued flush of sunset (or sunrise, for no man can ever tell t'other from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water), and there is such a grave analytical profundity in the face of the connoisseurs; and such pathos in the picture of a fawn suckling its dead mother on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way that he makes animals' flesh and blood, insomuch that if the room were ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... poetry. The proudest triumphs of genius are in a realm which art can never approach, yet the wonders of art are still among the great triumphs of civilization. Zeuxis or Praxiteles may not have equaled Homer or Plato in profundity of genius, but it was only a great age which could have produced a Zeuxis or Praxiteles. I cannot place Raphael on so exalted a pinnacle as Luther, or Bacon, or Newton, and yet his fame will last as long as civilization shall exist. The creations of the chisel will ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... great deal more, with tipsy profundity and a serio-comic air, and keeping his eye all the time on Mrs Sliderskew, who was unable to hear one word, Mr Squeers concluded by helping himself and passing the bottle: to which Peg ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... whispered, and the business of the day began. There were eight in all to read essays—nice looking girls, and much like the Lasells and Wellesleys we used to know. As for the essays—well, there was either a good deal of bosh in them, or a profundity of learning and thought to which Jack Harcourt never attained. But the people cheered like mad whenever one was ended, and sent up flowers, while I grew hotter and hotter, and when the seventh went up, and unfolded the 'Age ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... soul has depths in it. It is so lucid that its luminous profundity escapes one—so with Villon. Religion hangs there. Humility—fatally divorced from simplicity—pervades it. It laughs at itself. There are ardent passions of sincerity, repressed and reacting upon themselves. The virtues, little practised, ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad for business, he affirmed; but, in truth, this specimen of ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... heavens was extensive, if not profound. On any fair view of profundity, I am inclined to think that it was profound, though of the technique of astronomy he knew but little. He had all the constellations at his fingers' ends, and had given to many of them names of his own; he knew their seasons, their days, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself—and what is really his answer? "BY MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"—but unfortunately not in five words, but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this new faculty, and the jubilation ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... flush of sunset (or sunrise—for no man can ever tell tother from which in a picture, except it has the filmy morning mist breathing itself up from the water). And there is such a grave analytical profundity in the faces of "The Connoisseurs;" and such pathos in the picture of the fawn suckling its dead mother, on a snowy waste, with only the blood in the footprints to hint that she is not asleep. And the way ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the top of the flood tide. It was not seen. There was only a black void dividing some clusters of brilliant but remote and diminished lights. There were odd stars which detached themselves from the fixed clusters, and moved in the void, sounding the profundity of the chasm beneath them with lines of trembling fire. Such a wandering comet drifted near where I stood on the verge of nothing, and then it was plain that its trail of quivering light did not sound, but floated and undulated on a travelling road—that chasm before me was ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or despise the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent fact which degrades him, or of a secret condition, or even of a coming revenge, ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... profundity of contempt in Veltman's voice; and a deeper bitterness when he snapped his teeth upon a word which sounded to Hal suspiciously like the Biblical characterization of ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the world-renowned Regent pictures set forth in chronological order. Drop the catalogue and use your own eyes. The first impression is profound; not that Hals was profound in the sense of Rembrandt's profundity, but because of the almost terrifying vitality of these portraits. Prosaic men and women, great trenchermen, devourers of huge pasties, mowers down of wine-bottles and beer-tankards, they live with such vitality on the canvases of Hals that you ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... bright. And, indeed, glory of the heavens so supreme as that is possible only far away from man, and all the works and habitations of man, and all his feeble efforts at the mitigation of the darkness. Nay, for fullest perception, it may be that it is necessary for a man to be not only alone in the profundity of Nature's night, but to be lifted somewhat out of himself and his natural darkness by extremity of joy, or still ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... often happens that glaciers encounter projecting points of rock, the sides of which become rounded, and around which funnel-like cavities are formed with more or less profundity. When glaciers diminish and retire, the blocks which have fallen into these funnels often remain perched upon the top of the projecting rocky point within it, in such a state of equilibrium that ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... if Shakespeare himself had written the Novum Organum or the Principia, we should not have had Hamlet and Lear as we now know them. There is no compensation between philosophy and poetry. No profundity, no learning, can give beauty to verses which lack the divine fire. If George Eliot's fame has to be based solely on her great powers and endowments, her art would not be worth much. However, it is not so: she was an artist, with true artistic gifts. Her philosophic power ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... of any saying of his, such as might be recorded for its wisdom or profundity. Never a brilliant thought crystallized in a single sentence. His talk was especially characterized by its cordiality and rapid flow. The 'member of society' and the poet seemed to ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... example shows the profundity of these moral truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To have learned to know herself was at first a delight. The ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... classic and probably unsurpassed achievement. Though Lincoln had to deal with a single issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind. In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the Presidential election ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... men who have not acquired their hardiness of assertion from the profundity of their thinking, about the omnipotence of a majority, in such a dissolution of an ancient society as hath taken place in France. But amongst men so disbanded there can be no such thing as majority or minority, or power in any one person to bind another. The power of ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... girl whom I had met on the first night of my university life. Then she was only in her fifteenth year. I was a junior when she produced her lauded essay on "The Immortality of the Soul," and it revealed to me the profundity of her mind. To match her, I must sit many a night driving my way through difficult pages of the classics, and often when my heart was in some smoky den with a few choice spirits, my body bent over my table and my brain ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... all he was aware of the brittleness, the unpleasantness, the profundity of what was immediately before him, how to deal with poor Winny and her innocent enormity; the impropriety, as it had been presented ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... to the celebrated John Evelyn of the Sylva, one of the Society's founders. That I have seldom even read them is also a pitiful truth; for the mysterious nomenclature of modern chemistry, the incomprehensibility (to my ignorance) of the higher mathematics, the hopeless profundity of treatises on the tides, dynamics, electricity, and microscopic anatomicals, are, I am free to avow, worse to me than "heathen Greek," nay (for I can in some sort tackle that), more difficult than the clay tablets of Assyria or a papyrus of Rameses II. So I must confess ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... that has happened since, I still remember that vigil very distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... There is nothing which appeals to the aesthetic sense about this hypothesis of an "over-soul" from whose universal being the ideas of beauty and truth and goodness may be supposed to proceed. It is a clumsy and crude speculation, easy to be grasped by the superficial mind, and with an air of profundity which is entirely deceptive. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... satisfactorily account for his present confirmed love of solitude. The position to which he was so unexpectedly called was an exceedingly difficult one for a mind filled, as his was, with ideal visions of liberty and progress, and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the picturesque, had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... equal anxiety a commonplace manner, and matter that is not commonplace. If ever he deviates into any originality of thought, he takes care that it shall be such as excites surprise for its acuteness, rather than admiration for its profundity. He takes care? say rather, that nature took care for him. It is impossible to detract from the merit of these Letters: they are suited to their purpose, and perfect in their kind. They impel to action, not thought. Had they been profound or ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... hands upon his knees, watching me with an occasional approving nod of his big head. He looked so funny standing there on his little seven-by-nine world, like a clown on a performing ball, that, despite my terrible situation, I shook my sides with laughter. There was no echo in the profundity of empty space. ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest. He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that it marked a crisis—the complete, the acute consciousness of his personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular establishment the Schoppen were very tall and the beer was very good; and ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... hope, the pitcher was empty, they stood and talked about prohibition. The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trousers-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... adjure you, thinkers, scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth in that self-conceit ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... for his Night Watch. Near by it hangs The Syndics of the Cloth Company, excelled, in this particular class of work, by no picture in the world; but it is by the portraits and the etchings that the sweep, profundity, and versatility of Rembrandt's genius is exemplified. Truly his ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... hushed, and all nature reposed under the eye of the quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... and appeared to be lost in the profundity of his thoughts, but I could easily enough see that he was only taking breath. The old man whose grief had given this turn to the conversation had fallen asleep and was roaring in the nose like a ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... to listen, as he generally listened, for anything she might find that would explain the situation. His fingers went from habit, as a man might play with his watch chain, to the symbol of his faith; her eyes followed them, and rested mutely on the cross. There was a profundity of feeling in them, wistful, acknowledging, deeply speculative. "You could not forget that?" she said, and shook her head as if she answered herself. He looked into her upturned face and saw ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... "Profundity" and "Simplicity"; the faculty of wonder; Browning's first conception of "Pippa Passes"; his residence in London; his country walks; his ways and habits, and his heart-episodes; debates whether to become a clergyman; is "Pippa Passes" a drama? estimate of the poem; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... very threadbare but clean; a bunch of seals depending from his fob suggested the idea of a watch. He held in his hand an old hat! He walked in a bent attitude, and the curve in his spine augmented the profundity of ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Peter Bell, the Idiot Boy, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Simon Lee, and the Wagoner. But there are multitudes of Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern examples of pure, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such are (out of many) Ruth, Lucy, A Portrait, To a Highland Girl, The Reverie of Poor Susan, To the Cuckoo, The Reaper, We Are ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... over the repressed female's hand with an air of profundity and said, "There being a total absence of the mounts of Mercury and the Sun, a calm and even nature is indicated." (You're nearly always safe in saying this.) "Your sense of order and of the fitness of things would not allow ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 7, 1920 • Various
... Mortimer, 'with the irresponsible imbecility of a private individual, and not with the profundity of a professional adviser, I should say that if the circumstance of its being too much, weighs upon your mind, you have the haven of consolation open to you that you can easily make it less. And if you should be apprehensive of the trouble of doing so, there is the further haven of consolation ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of life, among statesmen, men of business, and artisans, exist noble examples of exceptional profundity and reality of knowledge, but in the great average of so-called educated people of our own generation, we find the majority possessing very fragmentary interest in any of the subjects which, as students, were supposed to engage their attention. What they would have been without the so-called ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... relative! He thought about Bedient every day; an old man's heart turned to the boy whose hands had suddenly fallen upon him with such amazing power. Occasionally in the letters, there was an obvious effort to cover this profundity of affection with a surface of humor, but it always broke through before a page was blotted.... Equatoria, and his really remarkable acquisitions there, were invariably matters for light touches. He had picked up big lands for almost nothing; and he found himself presently in strong favor with ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... a low guttural grating. No cub had a cavernous profundity of sound such as that. Still there was not the stir of a muscle, so far as his ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... and who received me very pleasantly when I begged the privilege of visiting him. Now, while making inquiries of him concerning antiquity, I did not conceal from him what delighted me among the moderns; when he spoke about such things with more calmness, but, what was still worse, with more profundity than Madame Boehme; and he thus opened my eyes, at first to my greatest chagrin, but afterwards to my surprise, and at last ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... not accuse me of undue prejudice in favor of slavish surrender of volition. I accept in a large measure the view advanced with breadth of learning and defended with profundity of thought by Hegel, that history is the unfolding and realization of freedom. The point I wish to make is that the whole teaching of Bushido was so thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, that ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... and to tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... "and it is that which attaches me to you. By assuming your likeness yesterday, I became acquainted with your character, and was no less astonished at the profundity and range of your thoughts than at the heroic magnanimity with which these were combined. And now, in addition to these, you are dedicated to the great work of the Lord; for which reasons I have resolved to attach myself as ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... sallow-visaged, black-bearded speaker, who poured forth abundant venomous froth of denunciation. He had caught enough of the phraseology of the more philosophical Disciples, to impress the earnest ignorant with some show of profundity. I was glad when his stream dried up. Pendlam next arose and read a paper upon "Magnetisms and Organizations." After him, came forward a gentleman with a model, illustrating the design of a dwelling-house for the Associated Disciples. He showed, entirely to the satisfaction of himself at least, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... replied, "The profundity of your contempt I can only guess at. Whatever it is, I share it. We are ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... matter more closely. To physical science, one act is precisely the same as another; a mere matter of molecular movement or change. You raise your arm, you think with the energy and profundity of a Hegel; to the physicist it is all one and the same thing—a fresh distribution of matter and motion, muscular contraction, and rise and fall of the grey pulp called brain. A burglar shoots a policeman dead and the public ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... to our attention. It would be a mistake to insist too much upon them; Hawthorne was himself the first to recognise that. "These fitful sketches," he says in the preface to the Mosses from an Old Manse, "with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity of purpose—so reserved even while they sometimes seem so frank—often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image—such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation." This is very becomingly ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... apparently had set his heart: namely, that, after borrowing the whole substance of my philosophy from Hegel, I have been guilty of making "vast and extravagant pretensions" as to my own "novelty," "originality," and "profundity," not only with regard to my published books, but also with regard to my "still unpublished system of philosophy." His ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... to the reader's acuteness and yet save his labour, not often obscure, and never wearisome, an evident generalisation of long experience, without pedantry, without method, without deductive reasonings, yet wearing an appearance at least of profundity; they delight the intelligent though indolent man of the world, and must be read with some admiration by the philosopher . . . . yet they bear witness to the contracted observation and the precipitate inferences which an intercourse with a single class of society scarcely fails to generate." ...
— Reflections - Or, Sentences and Moral Maxims • Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld
... great spirits, and thought this drive in the wet huge fun, again replied heartily, "Rather," and her mother congratulated herself on having done the right thing in bringing her to Germany, home of erudition and profundity, already evidently ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... the honourable reader, who is loathe to believe of any laborious provider for a great intellectual interest that he can deliberately have meant to deceive: the first point, and, separately by itself, an all-sufficient demur, is this—that, not in proportion to the learning and profundity brought to bear upon Herodotus, did the doubts and scruples upon his fidelity strengthen or multiply. Precisely in the opposite current was the movement of human opinion, as it applied itself to this patriarch of history. Exactly as critics and investigators arose like Larcher—just, reasonable, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... the mighty sage, Yavakri, son of the ascetic Bharadwaja, acquire profundity in the Vedas? And how also did he perish? I am anxious to hear all this, just as it happened. I take delight in listening to the narration of the deeds of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... and nearer, until, looking through the wonderfully transparent water, they caught sight of a vast precipice descending with frightful steepness, down and down, until all was lost in the profundity beneath. ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at all less in literature, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... be the same after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying, "Was that thought ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... turned to Helen with an air of profundity. "I'm convinced people are wrong when they say it's work that wears one; it's responsibility. That's why one pays one's cook more than ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... away from fairer pastures. There were mountains everywhere—huge, rugged mountains, erected in the igneous fury of world-making, long since calmed. Above them all the sky was almost incredibly blue—an intense ultramarine of extraordinary clearness and profundity. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... sat in several parliaments, and given bushels of votes. He is a man of that profundity in the matter of vote-giving, that you never know what he means. When he seems to be voting pure white, he may be in reality voting jet black. When he says Yes, it is just as likely as not - or rather more so - that he means No. This is the statesmanship ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... close kinship; and very similar reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written must have ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the record of a sentimental experience, guided by the caprice of a whimsical will. Whimsicality is a flower that defies transplanting; when once rooted in other soil it shoots up into obscurity, masquerading as profundity, or pure silliness without reason or a smile. The whimsies of one language become amazing contortions in another. The humor of Shandy, though deep-dyed in Sterne's own eccentricity, is still essentially British and demands for its appreciation ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... mechanically reproduce his mental and oral accents. Emerson was before long talking in the midst of a babbling Simonetta of echoes.' Inferior writers have copied the tones of the oracle without first making sure of the inspiration. They forget that a platitude is not turned into a profundity by being dressed up as a conundrum. Pithiness in him dwindles into tenuity in them; honest discontinuity in the master is made an excuse for finical incoherencies in the disciples; the quaint, ingenious, and unexpected collocations of the original degenerate in the imitators ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... found; and, after she had found him, lectured him all the way for his temerity in presuming to be absent when Miss Walladmor condescended to want him. Tom's intellectual faculties were not of the most brilliant order: whether Tom had any latent and yet undiscovered profundity which qualified him for philosophic speculations, we cannot say: for the honor of the male sex, we heartily hope that he had some bright endowment in his brain which was deeply concealed from all men to balance his prodigious inferiority to Grace in all which was revealed. Indeed Tom had ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... his side Dolly's musical giggle as one of them struck her. A bird on a long twig balanced above them, and for a time a squirrel chattered at them in mock scolding from the top of a pine. Little by little Charles-Norton sank into a profundity of well-being. He could see ahead, now, his life stretching placid and colored, solved at last, with both Dolly and the wings, uniting love and freedom, the ecstasies of flight with ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... Nephew, Figaro, two or three hasty sketches of Crebillon the younger and Colle' (p. 258). Nothing living but this! But this is much and very much. We do not pretend to compare the authors of these admirable delineations with Moliere and La Bruyere in profundity of insight or in grasp and ethical mastery, but they are certainly altogether in a new vein even from those two great writers, when we speak of the familiar, the real, and the particular, as distinguished from old classic generality. And, we may add in passing, that the social life of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... not only to Jews, but also to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly, but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually increasing in profundity and truth. The Greek thinkers had approximated closest to the Hebraic God-idea when they conceived one supreme, immanent reason in the universe; and Philo, in carrying his audiences beyond this to the transcendent-immanent ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... interested in the specific, obscure field, but by saturating himself in facts about it, he has developed an interest in it amounting to passionate absorption, which manifests itself in "absent-mindedness" of such profundity as to make him often an object of ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... of fortune had brought it here—here of all spots? what chance of chances? I looked at the bleak, inaccessible wall at my back and know the profundity of despair. Escape was hopeless, out of the question. I thought of Maud, asleep there in the hut we had reared; I remembered her "Good-night, Humphrey"; "my woman, my mate," went ringing through my brain, but now, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... perfect of the AEons, the Abysm, reposed on the bosom of Profundity together with Thought. From their union sprang Intelligence, who had for his ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... 'Ode of Life.' The only fault we have to find with this really remarkable effort—a sort of expansion of Wordsworth's famous Ode—is that it is rather too long for its ideas; but it possesses power, sweetness, occasional profundity, and unmistakable music. It is, when all is said and done, a true 'Ode,' sweeping the reader along as ...
— Gycia - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Lewis Morris
... lectures on Aristotle is, though cloudy, intelligible. The remainder is a fair specimen of that skimmy-dashy style of thought which glances over the surfaces of things and never reaches their substance or reality, yet boasts of its unlimited profundity because it does not know the meaning of profound. Such thinking must necessarily end in falsity and folly, of which the lecture gives many specimens, which it is worth while to quote, to show what the devotees of antiquity ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... mining exhibits—in their selectness and profusion—gave evidence of the inexhaustible wealth yet stored up for man's future uses notwithstanding the geological fact, that the earth's crust has no great profundity compared ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... and deep brown, was worn back from his face and temples, and left a broad high majestic forehead utterly unrelieved and bare; and on the brow there was not a single wrinkle—it was as smooth as it might have been some fifteen years ago. There was a singular calmness, and, so to speak, profundity of thought, eloquent upon its clear expanse, which suggested the idea of one who had passed his life rather in contemplation than emotion. It was a face that a physiognomist would have loved to look upon, so much did it speak both of the refinement ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... noble reticence distinguished her bray. It was one of which a less sagacious animal would have been foolishly vain or ostentatiously prodigal. It was a contralto of great compass and profundity—reaching from low G to high C—perhaps a trifle stronger in the lower register, and not altogether free from a nasal falsetto in the upper. Daring and brilliant as it was in the middle notes, it was perhaps more musically remarkable for its great sustaining ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... espied the weary and unconscious Tom approaching, lost in the profundity of thought, and though not in love, ruminating on every miss he had made in ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... asked should be answered as simply as possible, the parent remembering that children's questions are usually more profound to the hearer than to the asker. It is difficult for the adult not to read into the child's chance question all the profundity of his own years of experience, and the mother who approaches this subject with dread is almost invariably astonished and relieved to find how easily the ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley
... defend my remark on the score of profundity; I did not think it profound myself; but I have noticed that the effect of our speeches is not always proportionate with their importance in our own eyes; and if I had shot Mr. D. through and through with a Paixhan bomb, or knocked him in the head with the "Poets and Poetry of America," he could ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... natural wall, rising steep on every side to a height which produced the idea of insurmountable confinement. The interception of all lateral light caused a dismal gloom. Round us was a perpendicular rock, above us the distant sky, and below an unknown profundity of water. If I had any malice against a walking spirit, instead of laying him in the Red-sea, I would condemn him to reside ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... express the sum total of such reactions and should not be interpreted as something different from or more than these reactions. So long as so little is known of the actual processes involved in development the use of the term "individuality", while giving the appearance of profundity, in reality often serves merely to cover ignorance and to make a mystery ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... Amalgamation of races, the negroes, Slavery, influence of the Latin races, the Teutonic race, the United States, their growth and destiny, are made the subjects of a continuous discussion, remarkable alike for an air at least of breadth and profundity, careful and comprehensive knowledge, and for concise and often eloquent expression. The introduction is followed by chapters on Iceland, Greenland, and the various expeditions to the polar regions of the north, treating those topics both historically and ethnographically, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... This only proves the profundity of an observation made by Mr. Bagehot —a man who carried away into the next world more originality of thought than is now to be found in the Three Estates of the Realm. Whilst remarking upon the extraordinary reputation of the late Francis Horner and the trifling cost he was put ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... the quite surprising keenness of their interest is not due to another cause. I wonder if they do not feel—perhaps unconsciously—that words indicate the man, that the power to write well shows intellect, and measures, if not its profundity, at least the stage of its development. We fasten on the defects of the letters written by undergraduates, on their faltering speeches, on their confused examination papers, as something significant, ominous, worthy ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... heroes a grand, and venerable, and lofty fixedness of mind, and the whole divine race together a perfect preparation for sharing in Plato's most mystical and far-seeing speculations, which he declares to us himself in the Parmenides, with the profundity befitting such topics, but which he (i.e. his master Syrianus) completed by his most pure and luminous apprehensions, who did most truly share the Platonic feast, and was the medium for transmitting the divine truth, the guide in our speculations, and the hierophant of these ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... stands in the betting-ring and nervously pencils his race-card never thinks that the time of weakness and sadness and weariness is coming on; that gray and tremulous old man who bends over the roulette-table never thinks that he will speedily drop into a profundity deeper than ever plummet sounded. The gliding ball does not swing round in its groove faster than the old man's soul fares towards the darkness; and yet he clenches his jaw and engages in the most trivial of pursuits ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... more placable of the two; he had taken possession of the bench outside, and he had his note-book and much profundity to haul up with it while fish were frying. His countryman had rushed inside to avoid him, and remained there pacing the chamber like a lion newly caged. Their boatmen were brotherly in the anticipation ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nature of their themes permitted it. But the drama gave no opportunity for anything but passing allusions to scientific, philosophical, and religious matters, so that direct evidence is lacking as to how far Shakespeare was acquainted with what was being written in these fields. On the other hand, the profundity of his insight into human motive and behavior, the evidences of prolonged and severe meditation on human life and the ways of the world, and the richness of the philosophical generalizations that lie just below ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... was built exactly as he had projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion, astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that 'an Archbishop of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... was full by then and buzzing with voices. I had been looked at with curiosity by every one, but how am I to describe the sensation produced by the appearance of Falk himself blocking the doorway? The tension of expectation could be measured by the profundity of the silence that fell upon the very click of the billiard balls. As to Schomberg, he looked extremely frightened; he hated mortally any sort of row (fracas he called it) in his establishment. Fracas was bad for business, ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... back, we are pained to perceive how slight is the justice we have been able to render to the rare combination of powers exhibited in the works we have enumerated. We have left unnoticed the wonderful extent and accuracy of the learning, the compass and profundity of the thought, the inexhaustible spirit, ever preserving the happy mean between mental languor and nervous excitement. In these twenty-seven volumes of criticism, scarcely an error has been detected, scarcely a single repetition is met with; there is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... at all points. His was a great soul and a fine talent. But neither were well enough served by circumstances. We see in him a personality worthy of all veneration, a man of singular goodness and a writer of distinction, but not quite a great man, nor yet a great writer. Profundity and purity, these are what he possesses in a high degree, but not greatness, properly speaking. For that, he is a little too subtle and analytical, too ingenious and fine-spun; his thought is overladen with detail, and has not enough flow, eloquence, imagination, warmth, and largeness. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... its high level of eloquent simplicity, became that of metaphor, "When JOSEPH," he said, "shall reveal himself to his brethren, the whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping." On another occasion I heard him dwell on that vast profundity, characteristic of the scriptural revelation of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... in accordance with the expression of his and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bruyere, to ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... hither and thither in the midst of a medley of whirling wreckage, flying ropes'-ends, and struggling men. Opening my eyes I beheld the hull of the schooner, a short distance away, standing almost perpendicular, and slowly gliding downwards, bows first. Even as I looked she vanished into the dark profundity beneath, and then I directed my glances above me. It seemed that I was fathoms deep, for the phosphorescent foam that boiled overhead looked almost as far aloft as a frigate's lower yard; and by the same ghastly phosphorescent ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... as far asunder from Edwards's "as from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings belong to theology rather than to literature, but there is an intensity and a spiritual elevation about them, apart from the profundity and acuteness of the thought, which lift them here and there into the finer ether of purely emotional or imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the terrors than the comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dogmas ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... they followed the ridge of a hill. That was on the one hand, but on the other they rolled, vague and blurred, down into a vast hollow from which the mist was drifting. The sound of the river rose reverberating from its profundity of shadow, for it had cost the party most of a day to climb to the height they had pitched the camp upon. There was but little light overhead, though here and there a star blinked fitfully, and Alton shivered again, for it was very cold and but little past the hour when man's ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... will and vehemence. There are so many dangerous steps, that, for the more safety, we must a little lightly and superficially glide over the world, and not rush through it. Pleasure itself is painful in profundity: ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... this occur in such poems as Peter Bell, the Idiot Boy, Goody Blake and Harry Gill, Simon Lee, and the Wagoner. But there are multitudes of Wordsworth's ballads and lyrics which are simple without being silly, and which, in their homeliness and clear {229} profundity, in their production of the strongest effects by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern examples of pure, as distinguished from decorated, art. Such are (out of many) Ruth, Lucy, A Portrait, To a Highland Girl, The Reverie of Poor Susan, To the Cuckoo, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... tremble lest what had in the past been by the nation excellently commenced might be in the future not with similar excellence accomplished if an inverecund habit shall have gradually traduced the honourable by ancestors transmitted customs to that thither of profundity that that one was audacious excessively who would have the hardihood to rise affirming that no more odious offence can for anyone be than to oblivious neglect to consign that evangel simultaneously command and promise which on all mortals with prophecy of abundance or with diminution's menace that ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... scholars, and authors who are still worthy of this name! Your laments over the general shallowness, thoughtlessness, and superficiality, over self-conceit and inexhaustible babble, over the contempt for seriousness and profundity in all classes, may be true, even as they actually are. Yet what class is it, pray, that has educated all these classes, that has transformed everything pertaining to science into a jest for them, and that has trained them from their earliest youth in that self-conceit and that babble? ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Jesus could not grasp the simplicity and profundity of his message; still less could his opponents. When the crisis came, he alone remained unshaken in his faith. He was accused of blasphemy to the ecclesiastical authorities and of insurrection to the civil ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... communication by word of mouth. And this is asserted to be the case not only in respect to brief messages, but in long addresses, which are given every Sunday in our principal cities before large audiences, and in the writing of books of considerable length, but not, as a rule, of any great profundity or literary value. To all these claims, however, we can simply record the verdict "not proven." When a man writes or says anything we want more than his mere assertion to prove that it does not come from his own mind. And, even if we are satisfied that he is not consciously deceiving, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... was thinking with a profundity that implied something which must very nearly affect his personal interests. And these personal interests, at the moment, centred round George Iredale and—the graveyard. He had discredited the story ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... had steered; for months I had him at my back—a help—an instrument. It was a kind of partnership. He steered for me—I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware when it was suddenly broken. And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a claim of distant kinship affirmed ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... shows the profundity of these moral truths. She perceived that she had senses. A second was enough to bring about this discovery, to change her soul, to alter her whole life. To have learned to know herself was at first a delight. The {greek here} of the ancient philosophy ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... she was not only being diverted from her purpose, but led by a side tract to an unexplored profundity. On the further side of it she discerned, dimly, the undesirable. It was a murky region, haunted by still murkier presences, by Lady Cayley and her kind. She persisted ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... distinctly: the black and silent observatory, the shadowed lantern throwing a feeble glow upon the floor in the corner, the steady ticking of the clockwork of the telescope, the little slit in the roof—an oblong profundity with the stardust streaked across it. Ogilvy moved about, invisible but audible. Looking through the telescope, one saw a circle of deep blue and the little round planet swimming in the field. It seemed such a little thing, so bright ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... charm. Everything that he did and said had some distinction and unusualness: perceptive observation, ripe wisdom, and, with it all, the petulant attractiveness of the spoiled and engaging child. And yet even so, one is baffled, because it is not the profundity or the gravity of what he said that impresses; it is rather the delicate and fantastic turn he gave to a thought or a phrase that makes his simplest deductions from life, his most sensible bits of counsel, appear to have something fresh and interesting about ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... intelligent and discreet crime. Machiavelli emphasised the separation, at times relative, at times absolute, which exists between politics and morals. His Discourses upon Livius are full of sense, penetration, and profundity; his light works show a singular dexterity of thought united to a fundamental grossness which it would be impossible ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... direction in which we had climbed, lay—nothing: a void, a sheer gulf many thousands of feet deep, and one shrank back instinctively from the little parapet of the snow basin when one had glanced at the awful profundity. Across the gulf, about three thousand feet beneath us and fifteen or twenty miles away, sprang most splendidly into view the great mass of Denali's Wife, or Mount Foraker, as some white men misname her, filling majestically ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... infinite and immeasurable in depth. It is a painting of the air, something into which you can see, through the parts which are near you into those which are far off; something which has no surface, and through which we can plunge far and farther, and without stay or end, into the profundity of space;—whereas, with all the old landscape painters, except Claude, you may indeed go a long way before you come to the sky, but you will strike hard against it at last. A perfectly genuine and untouched ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... Madame Carolina! I need hardly add that during your short stay at Court you will be delighted with her. If ever you know her as well as I do, you will find her vain, superficial, heartless; her sentiment a system, her enthusiasm exaggeration, and her genius merely a clever adoption of the profundity of others." ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... Millet. His affinities were with the New-Greeks early in life, and ever since he has inclined toward the academic in style, though handling the rustic subject. He is a good technician, except in his late work; but as an original thinker, as a pictorial poet, he does not show the intensity or profundity of Millet. The followers of the Millet-Breton tradition are many. The blue-frocked and sabot-shod peasantry have appeared in salon and gallery for twenty years and more, but with not very good results. The imitators, as usual, have caught at the subject and missed the ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... Margaret Fuller":—"Life Within and Without," "At Home and Abroad," "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," "Art, Literature, and Drama,"—he would be prepared to find eccentricities of style, straining for effect, mystical utterances, attempts at profundity, and stilted commonplace. He would, however, find nothing of this sort, or of any sort of make believe, but simply a writer always in earnest, always convinced, with a fair English style, perfectly intelligible, intent ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... mental shocks. Nature seems to collect her strength to sustain the misfortune. We do not feel all its intensity at once; it is only afterwards that we realize the extent and profundity of the evil. ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Durban, the editor, writing from London of John Clifford in the Homiletic Review, styles him "the renowned Baptist preacher, undoubtedly the most conspicuous figure in his own denomination." He speaks of "the profundity of thought," "simplicity and beauty of diction," the "compactness of argument" and "instructive expository character" of ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... heart as well as in his brain. He has the most unbiassed attitude, I think, of any author in the world. Mr. Edward Garnett, in his introduction to Mrs. Garnett's translation of Tchehov's tales, speaks admirably of his "profundity of acceptation." There is no writer who is less inclined to use italics in his record of human life. Perhaps Mr. Garnett goes too far when he says that Tchehov "stands close to all his characters, watching them quietly and registering ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... it all he was aware of the brittleness, the unpleasantness, the profundity of what was immediately before him, how to deal with poor Winny and her innocent enormity; the impropriety, as it had been presented to ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... Folter was busied with her hair; "I want to know your opinion of it." Folter gave a toss of her head that seemed to say, "Have not I spoken?" but what it really did mean, how should other mortal know? for the main obstructions to understanding are profundity and shallowness, and the latter is far the more perplexing ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... people, who take what they are able to receive, the French spirit seems trivial and superficial, merely wanton and gay, chiefly characterised by that Lubricity which worried the pedagogic Matthew Arnold. The French spirit is more specifically distinguished by its profundity and its seriousness. Without profundity and seriousness, indeed, gaiety and wantonness have no significance. If the Seven Sins had not been Deadly, the Christian Church could never have clothed them in garments of tragic dignity. Unless ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... truths from etymologies. He has an argument for the deterioration of man, drawn from the fact that the Romans expressed in the same word, supplicium, the two ideas of prayer and punishment (Soirees, 2ieme entretien, i. p. 108). His profundity as an etymologist may be gathered from his analysis of cadaver: ca-ro, da-ta, ver-mibus. There are many others of the ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... admires." She calmed her fears and returned to the charming gayety of Florence. She had seen casually, at the Offices, a picture that Dechartre liked. It was a decapitated head of the Medusa, a work wherein Leonardo, the sculptor said, had expressed the minute profundity and tragic refinement of his genius. She wished to see it again, regretting that she had not seen it better at first. She extinguished her lamp and went ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... only far away from man, and all the works and habitations of man, and all his feeble efforts at the mitigation of the darkness. Nay, for fullest perception, it may be that it is necessary for a man to be not only alone in the profundity of Nature's night, but to be lifted somewhat out of himself and his natural darkness by extremity of joy, or ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... presence here might lead? Thy expiation is severe. Such as we, alas!" and the monk heaved a sigh, "who cannot feel the vibration of some of the tenderest chords of humanity, know not how to sound in its profundity; but I can judge that it must be grievous to bear. Still it must be so. Go, then, in peace—but go. What I command no longer in the name of thy salvation, I ask of thy heart, for the repose of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... group that he was prepared to die with the city train bands under the walls of the capital, but that he still could not help regretting having been left in ignorance of what was happening, and that had he known it sooner things would have been different.... A fifth group, displaying the profundity of their strategic perceptions, discussed the direction the troops would now have to take. A sixth group was talking absolute nonsense. Kutuzov's expression grew more and more preoccupied and gloomy. From all ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... woman had risen a sudden hope. It was a struggling ray of light in the blackness of her despair. It was a weak struggling flicker—just a flicker. And even as it rose its power was dashed again in the profundity of her suffering. She could not grasp the hand held out—she could not see it. She could not believe the ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... intellect, may be designed to stimulate that intellect to strenuous action and healthy effort—as well as to supply, in their solution, as time rolls on, an ever-accumulating mass of proofs of the profundity of the wisdom which has so far anticipated all the wisdom of man; and of the divine origin of both the great books which he is privileged to study as a pupil, and even to illustrate as a commentator,—but the text ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... about war and peace going on in those times. The talking Doctor hits him very hard in "Taxation no Tyranny": "Those who wrote the Address (of the American Congress in 1775), though they have shown no great extent or profundity of mind, are yet probably wiser than to believe it: but they have been taught by some master of mischief how to put in motion the engine of political electricity; to attract by the sounds of Liberty and Property, to repel by those of Popery and Slavery; ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... strain in that unfortunate miscellany which constitutes "the criminal class." They invoke the name of "science" with just as much confidence and just as much claim as the early Victorian phrenologists. They speak and write with ineffable profundity about the "criminal" ear, the "criminal" thumb, the "criminal" glance. They gain access to gaols and pester unfortunate prisoners with callipers and cameras, and quite unforgivable prying into personal and private matters, and ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... not entirely new. The Restoration had heralded its coming, and the tone of Halifax has more in common with Bolingbroke and Hume than with Hobbes and Filmer. Nor has the eighteenth century an historical profundity to compare with that of the zealous pamphleteers in the seventeenth. Heroic archivists like Prynne find very different substitutes in brilliant journalists like Defoe, and if Dalrymple and Blackstone are respectable, ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... familiarly talking for hours. They baffled him because Sarah—well, Sarah was deep, deeper than she had ever yet had a chance to show herself. He didn't say that this was partly the effect of her opening so straight down, as it were, into her mother, and that, given Mrs. Newsome's profundity, the shaft thus sunk might well have a reach; but he wasn't without a resigned apprehension that, at such a rate of confidence between the two women, he was likely soon to be moved to show how already, at moments, it had been for him as if he were dealing directly with Mrs. Newsome. ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... the anonymous Jesuit Uira or Vira is a corruption of Pirua meaning a depository. The first meaning of Cocha is a lake, but here it is held to signify profundity, abyss, space. The "Dweller in Space." Ticci or Tici is base or foundation, hence the founder. Illa means light. The anonymous Jesuit gives the meaning "Eternal Light" to Illa-Ticci. The word Con, given by Betanzos and Garcia, has no ...
— History of the Incas • Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa
... vapours are to the traveller; he follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to engulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible. Whatever be the dignity or profundity of his disquisition, whether he be enlarging knowledge or exalting affection, whether he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... possess for the investigation of the masses of the planets; and though it may be difficult in its application—not only from the observations which are required, but also from the intricacy and the profundity of the calculations to which those observations must be submitted—yet, in the case of Jupiter at least, there is no uncertainty about ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... shall hear the weeping.' Could there be an allusion of more classical beauty, or more finely charged with typical truth? And yet such was one of the common and briefer exercises of the illustrative faculty in this gifted man. On another occasion we heard him dwell on that vast profundity characteristic of the scriptural representations of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and the more thoroughly it is explored, until at length the student—struck at first by its expansiveness, but conceiving ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... internal commotions producing irregularities of structure. The absolute depth of spot-cavities—at least of their sloping sides—was determined by Father Secchi through measurement of the "parallax of profundity"[451]—that is, of apparent displacements attendant on the sun's rotation, due to depression below the sun's surface. He found that in every case it fell short of 4,000 miles, and averaged not more than ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... as I have hinted, he liked to talk as well as any one; but he could hold his tongue, if that were more expressive, and he usually did so when his perplexities were greatest. He had been sitting for several evenings in a beer-cellar, smoking his pipe with a profundity of reticence. This attitude was so unbroken that it marked a crisis—the complete, the acute consciousness of his personal situation. It was the cheapest way he knew of spending an evening. At this particular establishment the Schoppen were very tall ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... teaching of Christ himself, the Indian finds it excellent but not ample or satisfying. There is little in it which cannot be found in some of the many scriptures of Hinduism and it is silent on many points about which they speak, if not with convincing authority, at least with suggestive profundity. Neither do I think that Europe is likely to adopt Buddhist or Brahmanic methods of thought on any large scale. Theosophical and Buddhist societies have my sympathy but it is sympathy with lonely workers in an unpopular cause and I am not ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... colored surfaces without depth or meaning. During these intervals, by a sort of irony of the gods the old gentleman's face wore a look of philosophic concentration, so that his mental hiatuses had given him a reputation for profundity, which was county wide. It had been this, years before, that had carried him by a powerful majority into the Tennessee legislature. The voters agreed, almost to a man, that they preferred depth to a shallow facility. The rival candidate had been shallow and facile. The polls returned the ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... the young girl, bride and widow at eighteen; how she sought to throw herself into the clear blue gulf; how she refused to leave Heiligenblut; how she would sit, tearless, by the rim of the crevasse, day after day, and gaze into its profundity. A guide or man was always with her at these times, for it was still feared she would follow her young husband to the depths of that still sea. Her aunt went over from England to her; the summer waxed; autumn storms set in; but no ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... Gymnasium. He zealously studied the life of antiquity, but understood nothing of the life going on around him. Raisky felt himself drawn to this young man, at first because of his loneliness, his reserve, simplicity and kindness; later he discovered in him passion, the sacred fire, profundity of comprehension and austerity of thought and delicacy of perception—in all that pertained to antiquity. Koslov on his side was devoted to Raisky, whose vivacious temperament could not be permanently bound by anything. The outcome was the great gift ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... understanding the matter, this youthful figure, with soft, rounded cheeks, eyes clear and, at first view, extraordinarily naive, the eyes of an infant. True, at the moment Rouletabille's expression hardly suggested any superhuman profundity of thought, for, left in view of a table, spread with hors-d'oeuvres, the young man appeared solely occupied in digging out with a spoon all the caviare that remained in the jars. Matrena noted the rosy freshness of his cheeks, the absence of down on his lip and not a hint of ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... bestowed, animated and brought into full operation every faculty; while his steady, reserved, and earnest demeanor secured obedience and discipline. His very appearance excited awe and reverence; his figure was proud, lofty, and warlike, while his bright, piercing eye expressed profundity of thought, combined with gravity and mystery. His favorite study was that of the stars, and his most intimate friend was an Italian astrologer. He had a fondness for pomp and extravagance. He maintained sixty pages; his ante-chamber was guarded by fifty life-guards, and his table ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... the same after the war." This is one of the consoling platitudes with which people cover over voids of thought. They utter it with an air of round-eyed profundity. But to ask in reply, "Then how will things be different?" is in many cases to rouse great resentment. It is almost as rude as saying, "Was that thought of yours really ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... generously of the edition. In the Life of Rowe he said that as an editor Howe "has done more than he promised; and that, without the pomp of notes or the boast of criticism, many passages are happily restored." The preface, in his opinion, "cannot be said to discover much profundity or penetration." But he acknowledged Rowe's influence on Shakespeare's reputation. In our own century, more justice has been done Rowe, at least ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... achievement. Though Lincoln had to deal with a single issue demanding no great width of knowledge, it must be evident that the passions aroused by it and the confused and shifting state of public sentiment made his problem very subtle, and it was a rare profundity and sincerity of thought which solved it in his own mind. In expressing the result of thought so far deeper than that of most men, he achieved a clearness of expression which very few writers, and those among the greatest, have excelled. He once during the Presidential election of 1856 wrote ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... Volkerpsychologie and sociology were embryonic sciences, explains the phenomena of Jewish history as well as the phenomena of the religious and spiritual evolution of mankind, and does it with remarkable originality and profundity. ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... first creation made an order of angels, and among all made one principal, which was the ——, who would not be content with his estate, but affected the celsitude and rule of Creator, for the which he was divested from the altitude of heaven into the profundity of hell into everlasting darkness, without repair or return, with those that consented unto his pride. So it now lately befell in this our worldly hierarchy of the court by the fall of Queen Anne as a worldly Lucifer, not content with her estate to be true ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... a bad thing to set up as a judge without a plentiful stock of profundity. Mark scowled angrily at the sleepers, and turned away in disgust to gaze out of the cabin window at the flashing sea and try in vain to catch sight of some sail, ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... political history and political science, and adorned with the busts of celebrated statesmen and of profound political sages. Bentham was the philosopher then affected by young gentleman of ambition, and who wished to have credit for profundity and hard heads. Mr. Bertie Tremaine had been the proprietor of a close borough, which for several generations had returned his family to parliament, the faithful supporters of Pitt, and Perceval, and Liverpool, and he had contemplated following the same line, though ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... are its feelings, its progress is the successive conditions of mind, and it terminates with the triumph of virtue. If it be not a record of actual conversation, it is an embodiment of a most wonderful ideality. The eternity of God, the grandeur of Nature, the profundity of the soul, move in silent panorama before you. The great and agitating problems of human existence are depicted with astonishing energy and precision, and marvellous is the conduct of the piece to us who behold it as a painting away back on ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... woman for contradicting herself in claiming earthly and celestial happiness at the same time. She answered him with profundity, that the contradiction lay not in herself, but in the things ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... of the college of the Society of Jesus, and qualifier of the Holy Office, sealed the glory of that day. He mounted the pulpit, where he preached a sermon so well suited to the subject in its eloquence, the depth of its arguments, the gravity and maturity of its discourse, the profundity and erudition of its fundamental proofs, and the solidity and thoroughness of its learning, that he arrested the attention and even the admiration of those present. Not less learnedly did he instruct them than he melted them to affection and sorrow, quickening in them all, with his intellectual ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXXVI, 1649-1666 • Various
... of materials for his history of the wars between France and England, it is not as an historian that he is now remembered; it is as a writer of magnificent prose. His Chroniques, devoid of any profundity of insight, any true grasp of the movements of the age, have rarely been paralleled in the brilliance and animation of their descriptions, the vigour of their character-drawing, the flowing picturesqueness of their style. They unroll themselves like some long tapestry, gorgeously ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... to the present age, we see that Christian logic (yes, and Christian veracity) has undergone little if any alteration. It is as infantile and as impudent as ever. Arguments that would look fallacious in the nursery are used in the pulpit, generation after generation, with an air of solemn profundity, as though they were as wise as the oracles of omniscience. To select from such a plethora is almost impossible; the difficulty is where to begin. But happily we are under no necessity of selection. A case is before us, ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... supposed to know everything which a young man had ever known. Those who looked most to dead knowledge were inclined to back him as first favourite. It had, however, been remarked, that his utility as a clerk had not been equal to the profundity of his acquirements. Of all the candidates he was ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... nightingales; went to bed without a candle, that it might gaze on the chubby faces of the stars; discoursed sweet nothings to all who would listen to its nonsense; and displayed (horrendum dictu) the acute profundity of its grief in ponderous folios and spiral duodecimos. The literary world, little suspecting the dangerous consequences of this distressing malady, suffered it to germinate in silence; and not until they became thoroughly convinced that the disorder was of an epidemical nature, did they start ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... approximated nearer towards him, he became lost in a labyrinth of conjecture, on perceiving, that the pericranium of its principal inmate was enveloped in a wig of appalling dimensions; he now inquired whether the profundity of wisdom was denoted by the magnitude of a wig; and if so, why it was not worn by the Civic Sovereign rather on the seat of justice, where it might operate in terrorem on delinquency, than on the happy occasion of his Majesty's anniversary; ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... and Nazarites (which last discovered that the name of Noah's wife was Ouria, and that she set the ark on fire); or with the Valentinians, who taught that there were thirty AEones, ages or worlds, born out of Profundity (Bathos), male, and Silence, female; or with the Marcites, Colarbasii, and Heracleonites (who still kept up that bother about AEones, Mr. Profundity and Mrs. Silence); or with the Ophites, who are said to have worshipped the serpent; or the Cainites, who ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Religion[11] I have known for more than a quarter of a century, and have heard much of its profundity, spiritualism, and symbolism. But no critic will assign to the picture the first rank among works of creative reason and imagination; the comparison has inevitably been instituted with Raphael's Disputa, in the Vatican, to which it is confessedly inferior. Historically, it finds a place ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... of one single drop measured against the bitter and stormy immensity of an ocean. And this was very natural too. For when we begin to meditate on the meaning of our own past it seems to fill all the world in its profundity and its magnitude. This book was written in the last three months of the year 1916. Of all the subjects of which a writer of tales is more or less conscious within himself this is the only one I found it possible to attempt at the time. The depth and the nature of the mood with which I approached ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... is and must be, shall be!" Bakahenzie grunted his acknowledgment of the profundity of the statement. "He who would trap the leopard must needs dig the pit!" Another uncompromising silence urged Birnier to force the pace a little: "O son of Maliko, what say the omens and the signs of the ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... hardly believed were I to relate the instances which fell in my way, of the utter ignorance respecting pictures to be found among persons of the first standing in society. Often where a liberal spirit exists, and a wish to patronise the fine arts is expressed, it is joined to a profundity of ignorance on the subject almost inconceivable. A doubt as to the excellence of their artists is very nervously received, and one gentleman, with much civility, told me, that at the present era, all the world were ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... obstinate injustice of destiny in this case, Thenardier was one of those men who understand best, with the most profundity and in the most modern fashion, that thing which is a virtue among barbarous peoples and an object of merchandise among civilized peoples,—hospitality. Besides, he was an admirable poacher, and quoted for his skill in shooting. He had a certain cold and tranquil laugh, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... rational mind; whilst, referring to him whatever we find of right or good or fair in ourselves, discovering his strength and wisdom even in our own weakness and imperfection, honoring them where we discover them clearly, and adoring their profundity where we are lost in our search, we may be inquisitive without impertinence, and elevated without pride; we may be admitted, if I may dare to say so, into the counsels of the Almighty by a consideration of his works. The elevation of the mind ought to be the principal ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... our eyes, a moral phenomenon of amazing profundity takes place which is, nevertheless, so simple as never to be noticed. If two men meet in a salon, one of whom has the right to hate or despise the other, whether from a knowledge of some private and latent fact which ...
— The Red Inn • Honore de Balzac
... own annoyance with Joyce's statement. It reflected the impressions in his own mind which he was trying to ignore. "Nonsense," he said. "There's no use trying to read great profundity in the words of an old patriarch of the woods. He's nothing except ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... that he thought the ladies—as if their liability had been equal—were a "leetle" fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause named for it. It was one of the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by a profundity, a true deviltry of resource, he always met the latter's Italian with English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual, slightly smiled at him in the process—but ever so slightly this time, his manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing, whatever it was, that constituted ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... for Chopin's work to become popular." Heine also wrote that his favorite pianist was Chopin, "who, however," he adds, "is more of a composer than a virtuoso. When Chopin is at the piano I forget all about the technical side of playing and become absorbed in the sweet profundity, the sad loveliness of his creations, which are as deep as they are elegant. Chopin is the great inspired tone-poet who properly should be named only in company with Mozart, ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... loved such disguises and representations as were witty and sudden; the more ridiculous, and to him the more pleasant. This vain and frivolous humour might seem unworthy and unbecoming in so great a prince, whose profundity of wisdom had well entitled him to the appellation of "our English Solomon," did we not call to remembrance that the greatest of men have not disdained to be children in their sports; the deepest dispositions of the mind seeming to require the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... just!" said the professor, solemnly, though still with a sluggish utterance. "I sought to glorify God to the end of mine own glorification, and lo! He hath taken from me my own heart's blood!" Swept off his feet by the profundity of his emotion, the ministerial form of speech, so long disused, rose naturally ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... in its ontological profundity, is of a subtlety and vastness that would rack the brain of a Fichte or a Schelling; but, popularly stated, so far as our present purpose demands, it is this. Existence is the one all inclusive evil; ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the exquisite sensation of departed pain almost atone for the discomfort of its presence? How heartily, for your sake, would I be the most profound and able writer in the world, and how gladly should all my profundity and ability be laid at your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... you remember what you've been taught." To which Letty, who was in great spirits, and thought this drive in the wet huge fun, again replied heartily, "Rather," and her mother congratulated herself on having done the right thing in bringing her to Germany, home of erudition and profundity, already evidently beginning to do ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... what wit, what profundity, what vastness of knowledge, what a grand gossip concerning all things, and more beside, did we anticipate, only to find the promise broken, and a big impostor with no more muscle than the black drone who fills the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... when it departs from the body! Every wave in that illimitable ocean of space is freighted with wisdom, every sound is the tone of undying truth, every breath is redolent of divine wisdom. We wonder now at the wisdom of the sages of our own and of ages gone by—at the learning, the profundity, the astonishing acquirements of the Newtons, the Lockes, the Bacons, the Franklins, and the Humboldts. But when we shall stand, in all the nakedness of pure, unfettered spirit, within the confines of the spirit land, and gaze with all the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... it; joined to Him as we may be by true faith in Him, it is ours, and with it all the blessings which it brings into our else empty and thirsting hearts. Now all this sets in strong light the dignity and work of Christian men; the profundity and clearness of their religious character is the great sign to the world of the love of God. The message of Christ to man lacks one chief evidence of its worth if they who profess to have received ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... without the pomp of notes or boasts of criticism, many passages are happily restored. He prefixed a life of the author, such as tradition, then almost expiring, could supply, and a preface, which cannot be said to discover much profundity or penetration. He at least contributed to the popularity of his author. He was willing enough to improve his fortune by other arts than poetry. He was under-secretary for three years when the Duke of Queensberry was Secretary of State, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... I pass by; their profundity of erudition, and their liberality of sentiment; their total want of pride, and their detestation of hypocrisy, are so proverbially notorious as to place them far, far above either ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... hopeful. Christ cured a lunatic "by prayer and fasting." Proper feeding would work wonders in prisons. It would also be very beneficial for wayward girls and young men who are passion's slaves. St. Peter recommended fasting as an aid to morality, which is another evidence of the profundity of ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... also worth a glance with the five-inch glass. It is dense, but its stars are very small, so that to enjoy its beauty we should have to employ a large telescope. Yet there is a certain attraction in these far-away glimpses of starry swarms, for they give us some perception of the awful profundity of space. When the mind is rightly attuned for these revelations of the telescope, there are no words that can express its impressions of the overwhelming ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... man and his mother was strangely invisible now. Of love it may be said, the less earthly the less demonstrative. In its absolutely indestructible form it reaches a profundity in which all exhibition of itself is painful. It was so with these. Had conversations between them been overheard, people would have said, "How cold they are ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... writer, Wordsworth not excepted, who reveals more delight in the visions of Nature than Henry Vaughan. He is a true forerunner of Wordsworth, inasmuch as the latter sets forth with only greater profundity and more art than he, the relations between Nature and Human Nature; while, on the other hand, he is the forerunner as well of some one that must yet do what Wordsworth has left almost unattempted, namely—set forth the sympathy of Nature with the aspirations of ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... as being a man of taste, but of no great profundity. He has a painting which he believes to be by Guido; it seemed to me too fresh in its coloring ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... tea, two or three cupfuls of which would produce a sleep of many hours' duration. The worthy old ladies were wont to carry a silver grater and Nutmeg case suspended from the waist on their chatelaines. But in any large quantity the Nutmeg may produce sleep of such a profundity as to prove really dangerous. Two drachms of the powder have brought on a comatose sleep with ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... without profundity of thought, without impassioned song," writes Duff, "he yet pierces to the universal heart.... His secret lies in sanity rather than impetus. Kindly and shrewd observer of the manifold activities of life, he draws vignettes ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... at the profundity of the maxim. This inequality is, in a great measure, the result of abuses in the institutions of society. They do not speak of what exists, but of what ought to exist. Every one should be left at liberty to obtain all the advantages of society which he can compass, by the free exertion of his ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... can see and do a good deal in that time," I said, not flattering myself on the originality of the remark, but desiring to set him talking. In the country, as elsewhere, we must forego profundity if we ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... a less brilliant setting might have failed to draw my admiration. I was the captive both of the spirit and the form. Soul and body had co-operated in producing my passion, and this may account for its suddenness and profundity. Why I loved her person, I knew—I was not ignorant of the laws of beauty—but why the spirit, I knew not. Certainly not from any idea I had formed of her high moral qualities; I had no evidence of these. Of her courage, even to daring, I had proof; of energy and determined ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... uncouth and fantastic; the sculpturing is never disordered; the luxury of ornament never overloads the chaste eloquence of the principal lines. His best works abound in combinations which may be said to be an epoch in the handling of musical style. Daring, brilliant, and attractive, they disguise their profundity under so much grace, their science under so many charms, that it is with difficulty we free ourselves sufficiently from their magical inthrallment, to judge coldly of their ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... to express the profundity of his emotion, Dag Daughtry broke off the sentence and drowned it in ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her—watch her—with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... which he had been directed by the genius and example of Turnour. So zealous and unobtrusive were the pursuits of the latter, that even his immediate connexions and relatives were unaware of the value and extent of his acquirements till apprised of their importance and profundity by the acclamation with which his discoveries and translations from the Pali were received by the savans of Europe. Major Forbes, in a private letter, which I have been permitted to see, speaking of the difficulty of doing justice to the literary character of Turnour, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... subscribe to or receive the journal at all! . . . HERE is a rich specimen of clerical catachresis, which we derive from an eastern correspondent: 'Our good dominie gave us on Sunday a sermon on the ocean; its wonders, its glories, its beauties; its infinity, its profundity, its mightiness, etc., 'But,' said he, 'what is all this? It is but a drop in the bucket of God's infinity!' I wonder what is outside of it!' . . . IT is not the wont of the Editor of this Magazine, as those of its readers who ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... majority and minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities for instance of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... spectacle of their distractions which first made me a sceptic; and I think I am hardly likely to be reconvinced by the mere sound of their names, ushered in by vague professions of profound admiration of their profundity! The praise is often oddly justified by citing something or other, which, obscure enough in the original, is absolute darkness when translated into English; and must, like some versions I have seen of the classics, be examined in the original, in order to gain a ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... been struck with the brilliancy of our own conversation and the profundity of our own thoughts, when we shared them with one, with whom we were in sympathy at the time. The brilliancy was not ours; it was the reflex action which was the result of the communion. That is why the effect of different people upon us is different, one making us creep into ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... The question is:—Does a thief (and a fraudulent debtor is no better) acquire a claim to impunity by not possessing the power of restoring the goods? Every moral act derives its character (says a Schoolman with an unusual combination of profundity with quaintness) 'aut voluntate originis aut origine voluntatis'. Now the very essence of guilt, its dire and incommunicable character, consists in its tendency to destroy the free will;—but when thus destroyed, are the habits of vice thenceforward ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... may arise either from intellectual insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one's own convictions, procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity. Amongst a lot of exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited with reserve power. By his comrades at the St. Petersburg University, ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... to demagogic sentiments or class hatreds and prejudices, and the judge who owes either his election or his appointment to the money or the favor of a great corporation, are alike unworthy to sit on the bench, are alike traitors to the people; and no profundity of legal learning, or correctness of abstract conviction on questions of public policy, can serve as an offset to such shortcomings. But it is also true that judges, like executives and legislators, should hold sound views on the questions of public policy which are of vital interest ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... do, it would n't do!" he repeated, as we lay on the hillside, in a tone so musically tender that it chimes in my ear now as I write down his confession. It can surely be no breach of confidence to publish it—it is too creditable to the profundity of Davidson's affections. As I knew him, he was one of the purest ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... expressions, as, to an ordinary modern reader, much of Sir THOMAS MORE's writing is well-nigh unintelligible; nay, in some instances, the Baron can only approximately arrive at the meaning, as though it were a writ in a foreign language with which his acquaintance was of no great profundity. Certes, the learned and reverend compiler hath a keen relish for this quaintness, but not so will fifteen out of his twenty readers, who, pardie! shall regret the absence of a key without which some of the treasure must, to them at least, remain ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... quiet moon. A few fishing vessels alone specked the water, and now and then the gentle breeze wafted the sound of voices as the fishermen called to one another. I felt the silence, although I was hardly conscious of its extreme profundity, until my ear was suddenly arrested by the paddling of oars near the shore, and a person landed close to ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... vain enough, or perhaps reasonable enough, to doubt whether those crude ideas which, arising in ill-regulated minds, have all the appearance, may not often in effect possess all the force, the reality, and other inherent properties, of instinct or intuition; whether, to proceed a step farther, profundity itself might not, in matters of a purely speculative nature, be detected as a legitimate source of falsity and error. In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... compared, for excellence in its own manner, with Tom Jones or the Vicar of Wakefield or the Citizen of the World. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or the profundity of Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as he; his Discourses have little to fear when they are set beside ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... impressions such as well might be the creation of fantastic romance! Clustered with monasteries and convents, turreted dwellings and sombre monuments, bathed in an atmosphere of orisons and melancholy, threaded by foul and ill-paved alleys, made for crime, intrigue, and mystery; where buried in the profundity of night love and wickedness both stalked forth; strange temples and niches lit by twinkling lamps before the images of saints; recollections of diabolical Inquisitorial rites—a romantic and fantastic shroud, dissipated now, torn into shreds by the iron hand of destiny, and banished ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... consciousness forced on me by these things—I feel that thought must yet grow larger and correspond in magnitude of conception to these. But these cannot content me, these Titanic things of sea, and sun, and profundity; I feel that my thought is stronger than they are. I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek— my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... sentenced to gradually sink in a burning lake of brimstone and fire. Those whose sins cause them to sink so low that they no longer can rise to the surface are for ever forgotten by God, i.e., they fade out from the omniscient memory, says the poem—an expression, by the way, of an extraordinary profundity of thought, when closely analysed. The Virgin is terribly shocked, and falling down upon her knees in tears before the throne of God, begs that all she has seen in hell—all, all without exception, should have their sentences remitted ...
— "The Grand Inquisitor" by Feodor Dostoevsky • Feodor Dostoevsky
... European policy, and the important movements of foreign governments, or our own, in matters tending to affect the general welfare and progress of humanity, had a profound interest for me; but I talked so little on such subjects, as became the profundity of my ignorance, that Mrs. Grote supposed them altogether above my sympathy, and probably above ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... the law of character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... criticism on the pair, that Voltaire wrote on more subjects, but that Rousseau was the more profound. In truth one was hardly much more profound than the other. Rousseau had the sonorousness of speech which popular confusion of thought is apt to identify with depth. And he had seriousness. If profundity means the quality of seeing to the heart of subjects, Rousseau had in a general way rather less of it than the shrewd-witted crusher of the Infamous. What the distinction really amounts to is that Rousseau ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... to Naples," said Byron to Lady Blessington ('Conversations', pp. 238, 239), "you must make acquaintance with Sir William Drummond, for he is certainly one of the most erudite men and admirable philosophers now living. He has all the wit of Voltaire, with a profundity that seldom appertains to wit, and writes so forcibly, and with such elegance and purity of style, that his works possess a peculiar charm. Have you read his 'Academical Questions'? If not, get them directly, and I think you will ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... she felt stirring in her bosom things she could not express; a vague comprehension of the pure spirituality of the man who had died to save her child, a response to the love that had stirred in the bosom now cold beneath the sea. All the primitive deep profundity of the devotion of that wild-hearted man who had brought a wealth of food to her from over the mountains, who had faced death for her on the frozen seas, who had tended her in her time of trial with the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... Judge (Mr. Breese) on the birth of a grandson. Next Sunday he is to be loaded with names, not quite as many as the Spanish Ambassador who signed the treaty of peace in 1783, but only four! He may have the sagacity of a Jewish Rabbi, or the profundity of a Calvin, or the sublimity of a Homer for aught I know. But time will bring ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
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