|
|
|
More "Simplicity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enough to have killed him, all his friends said; but it did not. He lived to be a man, and—what is rarer—to keep the faith, the simplicity, the tender-heartedness, the vivid fancy of his childhood. He lived to see many Christmas trees "at home," in that old country where the robins are redbreasts, and sing in winter. There a heart as good and gentle as his own became one with his; and once he brought ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... characteristics of these Boer farmers and their wives, and to learn what a curious race they are. Mrs. Keeley told me a great deal of their ideas, habits, and ways, in which low cunning is combined with extreme curiosity and naive simplicity. Many of the fathers and sons in the neighbourhood had slunk off to fight across the border, sending meanwhile their wives and daughters to call on Mrs. Keeley and condole with her in what they termed "her trouble," and to ascertain at the same time all the circumstances of the ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... otherwise. Living as he did, dying as he did, with the ruin of so many lives involved in his fate, that last journey should have been taken in simplicity and quietness. The lesson his death conveys is too solemn for display, too mournful for anything but stillness. The elements of a great man left Vermont only a few years ago; New York has sent back the ruins. Let them rest ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... is not to our present purpose to comment on this plan which the author with his characteristic simplicity seriously pressed upon the attention of statesmen. It is easy to criticise it in the light of subsequent history, and to see that, if the impossible had happened and the experiment had been tried and succeeded, it might have caused more suffering ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... you if you refuse it. Once in America a clever and candid woman said to me, at the close of a dinner, during which I had been sitting beside her, "Mr. Roundabout, I was told I should not like you; and I don't." "Well, ma'am," says I, in a tone of the most unfeigned simplicity, "I don't care." And we became good friends immediately, and esteemed each ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... suggestions of the horrors of hell— which were certainly literally understood by his hearers—it is pertinent to quote in connection with them his own assertion, that "he who knows how to interpret allegorically will see that the inner sense excels the simplicity of the letter as ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... There was sincerity in the man's actions. It was not acting. When the light first broke he turned his eyes full into the radiance. It was the act of a child and, so it struck the officer, of the same trust and simplicity—and likewise the same effect. He drew away quickly: ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... It has freshness and charm and its sentiment seems to me to be exactly right—the sentiment of an eager and attractive young girl relating the feelings of her heart in the tenderest and prettiest style as far removed from preciosity as it is from a silly simplicity. All the stories have the essential merits of brightness and lightness, and most of them have that peculiar kind of ingenuity which is one of Mr. PAIN's strong points. Suddenly they land you at a point which is nowhere near to that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 28, 1914 • Various
... to discourage the latter. They would sympathize with every measure which tends to the rapid formation of capitals. They would be enthusiastic promoters of peace, liberty, order, security, the union of classes and peoples, economy, moderation in public expenses, simplicity in the machinery of Government; for it is under the sway of all these circumstances that saving does its work, brings plenty within the reach of the masses, invites those persons to become the formers of capital who were ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... time to time that summer and she seemed, and I think she was, happier than ever she had been before in her whole life. Making over her garden, selecting the "essential books," choosing the best pictures for her rooms, even reforming the clothing of the boys, all with an emphasis upon perfect simplicity—her mind was completely absorbed. Occasionally Richard appeared upon the stage, a kind of absurd Greek chorus of one, who remarked what a wonderful woman this was and poked fun at himself and at the new house, and asserted that Mary could be as simple as ever she liked, he insisted ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... business of his own at Cetinale other than procuring funds for his patron, that in fact he had brought his niece in the hope of securing for her husband the banker Chigi, a good match even then in point of fortune. There was in Maria Dovizio such dewy freshness and sweetness, such absolute simplicity and purity as could not fail to appeal to any man with eyes to see; but Chigi was blind, being enamoured of another woman and she of a very different type, the improvisatrice Imperia, accounted the most talented ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... have you," he said, with dead simplicity, as one states a bare, essential fact. Then Bonbright was visualized before him, and rage flooded once more. "He sha'n't keep you!... You're mine—you were mine first.... What is he to you? I'm going to take you away from him.... ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... were sure of growing obsolete. However, the authors of those days were not likely to make these obvious reflections; and indeed seem to have aimed at no one perfection. From the Conquest to the reign of Henry the Eighth it is difficult to discover any one beauty in our writers, but their simplicity. They told their tale, like story-tellers; that is, they related without art or ornament; and they related whatever they heard. No councils of princes, no motives of conduct, no remoter springs of action, did they investigate or learn. We have even little ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... more, ladies Sighed and looked again —unutterable things Sign, dies and makes no Sight, out of, out of mind —, loved not at first Seigniors, grave and reverend Silence is the perfectest herald of joy —in love bewrays more woe —, ye wolves —, come then, expressive Siloa's brook Simplicity a child Sin, fools make a mock at —of the world —, wages of, is death —, no, for a man to labor in his vocation Single blessedness Sinned against, more Sinning, more sinned against than Sins, charity shall cover the multitude of Sion hill delight thee more Sires, ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... have to show you!" And an instant later the old man's admonitions are entirely forgotten, and his artless nature—dull now to everything but the childish glee in which he shares— is all the sweeter and more lovable for its simplicity. ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... devant ton pere!"—"Daughter of Day, but born before thy father!" GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted "History of Switzerland," JOHNSON'S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in. RAPHAEL, when he first drew his meagre forms under Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty which one day ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... night expressway to Youngerstun. His suspicions, sharply keyed from life on Omega, would not let him rest. There had to be a catch to all this splendid simplicity. Perhaps he ...
— The Status Civilization • Robert Sheckley
... consequence of his age and the gradual approach of infirmity, his utterance is not so clear as it used to be, yet you can always understand immediately his whole meaning. He uses the plainest language of every-day colloquy. His style is impressive from its doric simplicity. You never entertain a doubt of his sincerity; and although you may not always agree with him in opinion, you have, at least, the satisfaction of knowing that his propositions are the true result of his feelings or his thoughts; ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... farthest removed from nature: and it is the consequence of this interchange which has taken place,—this imitation of the manners of the higher orders by the lower classes of the peasantry—that we shall in vain look for any thing in France like a simple national poetry. The truth, the simplicity, the nature, which ought to form it, are not to be found amongst any classes of the French people. The poetry of France, both ancient and modern, that of Ronsard and Marot, in earlier days; and that of Boileau, Racine, Corneille and ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... life," she continued. "The obligation of obeying the doctor, of seducing men in order to snatch their secrets from them, made me hate them with a deadly aggressiveness.... But you came. You, who are so good and generous! You who sought me with the enthusiastic simplicity of a growing boy, making me turn back a page in my life, as though I were still only in my teens and being courted for the first time!... Besides, you are not a selfish person. You gave with noble enthusiasm. I believe that if we had known each other ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... whose roofs the two walked as they descended the mountains, were unlovely and unclean, wives of many husbands, and afflicted with goitre. The men were woodcutters when they were not farmers—meek, and of an incredible simplicity. But that suitable discourse might not fail, Fate sent them, overtaking and overtaken upon the road, the courteous Dacca physician, who paid for his food in ointments good for goitre and counsels that ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... proprieties of conduct which are among the best securities of the young. While she looked in her lover's face with confidence, and held his arm with the grasp of one who is sure of a right to do so, there was an air of childish simplicity in her manner which was wholly at variance with wild passions and improper fancies. While the hunter maintained her on his arm, and looked down into her eyes with love, his glance was yet as respectful, as unexpressive of presumption, as her own. Had the ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... the little fellow with a tender smile. He was so small, so full of happy life and engaging simplicity. Then he had such a wonderful picture face, with its fringe of curling hair which thrust its way out from under the thick, arctic helmet of fur which was part of his outer clothing. For a moment, as he bundled over the snow like a brown woolly ball, Steve wondered ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... was informed that it was a common-place trick for gangs of pickpockets to throw unwary passengers down with violence, pretend to pity and give them aid, pick their pockets while helping them up, and then decamp with all possible expedition. But said I, with great simplicity, to my informer, 'Will not the gentleman come back?'—'What! The man who ran off?'—'Yes.'—'Back! No, no: you will never see his face more, I promise you, Sir; unless you will take the trouble to visit Newgate, or ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... called at the big house on Fifth Avenue, which had for so long been identified as the home of Simon Harley. It bore his impress stamped on it. Its austerity suggested the Puritan rather than the classic conception of simplicity. The immense rooms were as chill as dungeons, and the forlorn little figure in black, lost in the loneliness of their bleakness, wandered to and fro among her retinue of servants like a butterfly beating its wings against ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... incumbrance; anonymity makes them stiff, pompous, and over-magisterial. With others, however, the effect is just the reverse. If they sign, they become self-conscious, stilted, and even pretentious; it is only when they are anonymous that they recover simplicity and ease. It is as if an actor who is the soul of what is natural under the disguises of his part, should become extremely artificial if he were compelled to come upon the stage in his own proper clothes and speaking only in ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... had made all these reasonings before and found no very good reply to them; so I put on all the simplicity I could. "In that case, sir," said I, "I would just have to ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... each other fifty or sixty years ago present a striking contrast when placed side by side with those of the present day. The native simplicity, the artless manners, and the honest motives of all betokened a purity of heart and life that was truly charming. We mourn the absence of these marks of genuine piety, when at the present day, we see artistic display, formality, stiffness, and a "putting on" of studied courtesies and civilities ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... as Phaedrus, the Aesopian fabulist. A great mistake it was, on the part of Doctor S., that the second book in the Latin language which I was summoned to study should have been Phaedrus—a writer ambitious of investing the simplicity, or rather homeliness, of Aesop with aulic graces and satiric brilliancy. But so it was; and Phaedrus naturally towered into enthusiasm when he had occasion to mention that the most intellectual of all races amongst men, viz., the Athenians, had raised a mighty statue to ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... rites, which were performed with great solemnity. The god-parents gave to each child sixteen yards of white percale and a string of blue beads. Mea, nevertheless, felt somewhat disappointed, for in the simplicity of her soul she thought that after the baptism her skin would at once turn white, and great was her astonishment when she observed that she remained as black as before. Nell comforted her, however, with the assurance that now she possessed a ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... morning costume was light and graceful, and her whole toilet showed just enough of neglige to add interest to the simplicity of her personal attire. Her dark, jetty hair contrasted strongly with the pure white of her dress, and there was not an ornament upon her person, save those that nature had lavished there in prodigal abundance. She had never looked more lovely ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... dining room, long and dark and dignified, where maids were already moving noiselessly about the business of dinner. Here in the hall was the pleasant shade and coolness, the subtle drifting scent of early summer flowers, space, and the simplicity of dark polished floors and sombre rugs. The whole house seemed empty, lovely, silent, after the confusion of the terrace and the heat ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... Earlier and later pictures are but a few inches of face to several feet of figure and costume, and more insignificant than the latter because seldom so well done; and I suspect the same would generally be the case now, only that the present simplicity of costume gives the face ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Suzanne had arranged photographs, books, flowers in the little salon, had put cushions here and there, and thrown pretty coverings over the sofa and the two low chairs. The room had an air of cosiness, of occupation. It was a room one could sit in without restlessness, and Domini liked its simplicity, its bare wooden floor and white walls. The sun made everything right here. Without the sun—but she could not think of Beni-Mora ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... Jerusalem, and frequented the society of those who had acted, and were acting the chief parts in the transaction. I lay down this point positively; for had the ancient attestations to this valuable record been less satisfactory than they are, the unaffectedness and simplicity with which the author notes his presence upon certain occasions, and the entire absence of art and design from these notices, would have been sufficient to persuade my mind that, whoever he was, he actually lived in the times, and occupied the situation, in which he represents himself ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... almost perfection in its way; but there was something of that ostentatious simplicity whereby the parvenu endeavours sometimes to escape from the vulgar glitter of his wealth. The chairs and tables were of unpolished oak, and of a rustic fashion. There were no pictures, but the walls of the dining-room ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... story. In fact, before the day was over, he knew all the history of her innocent life, and was struck with amazement at the variety and depth of her scholastic acquirements and the extraordinary power of her mind, which, combined with her simplicity and total ignorance of the ways of the world, produced an affect as charming as it was unusual. Needless to say that every hour he knew her he fell more deeply in ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... impartiality which was so marked among the writings of our forefathers, we are seldom content with the simple narration of fact, but must rush off into an almost declamatory description of them; my meaning will be plain to all who have studied Thucydides. The dignity of his simplicity is, I think, marred by those who put in the accessories which seem thought necessary in all present histories. How few writers of the present day would not, instead of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] rather write, "Night fell upon this horrid scene ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... "'Simplicity itself, ma'am,' I answered. 'She could hardly have done less. And from Eaton Square to Pimlico, what is it but a step? . . . Or, you may put it down to a brain-wave. Yes, ma'am. And ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... several pretty girls present, but she outshone them all, and, what interested me still more, I could not avoid observing that in acquiring the easy politeness which distinguishes people of quality, she had preserved her Norwegian simplicity. There was, in fact, a graceful timidity in her address, inexpressibly charming. This surprised me a little, because her husband was quite a Frenchman of the ancien regime, or rather a courtier, the same kind of ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... earl as he sat was the family escutcheon emblazoned above the mantelpiece. A child might read the simplicity of its proud significance—an ox rampant quartered in a field of gules with a pike dexter and a dog intermittent in a plain parallelogram right centre, with the motto, "Hic, haec, hoc, ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... and his successor were sportsmen and gave hunting-parties, those of the marshal being as much in royal style as possible. M. Grevy preferred republican simplicity. When he was allowed, as Speaker of the House, to live in Marie Antoinette's apartments in the Chateau of Versailles, he might have been seen any day sauntering about the streets with his hands in his pockets, or smoking his cigar at the door of a cafe. He had a brougham, but he rarely used it. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... confessed, that the grandee loved the estaminet where he could play billiards with the first comer; that he had a passion for the gambling-house; that he was a loose and disorderly nobleman: but, in whatever company he found himself, a certain kindness, simplicity, and politeness distinguished him always. He bowed to the damsel who sold him a penny cigar, as graciously as to a duchess; he crushed a manant's impertinence or familiarity as haughtily as his noble ancestors ever did at the Louvre, at Marli, or Versailles. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... haunting presence, mild in its manliness and gentle in its strength, of a princely benefactor common to all, has displaced the grim phantoms of old chieftains and reigns in their stead. It hovers over the dearly loved Highland home with its fitting touch of stateliness in the middle of its simplicity, over the forest where a true sportsman stalked the deer, over the streams and lochs in which he fished, and the paths he trod by hill and glen. We are made to remember that Balmoral was the Prince Consort's property, that he bought it for his possession, as Osborne was the Queen's, and that ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... in the numerous "signs" here recorded. At first sight, it may be thought that extreme folly is their salient quality. Yet if we take a wide view the case is reversed; we are surprised, not at the unintelligibility of popular belief, but at its simplicity, and at the frequency with which we can discern the natural process of unsystematic conjecture. Such judgments are not to be treated with derision, as subjects of ridicule, but to be seriously examined, as revealing the ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... human being," said Waife, greatly affected. "And, mark my words, a mantle of charity so large you will live to wear as a robe of honour. But hear me, sir! Mr. Hartopp also is a man infinitely charitable, benevolent, kindly, and, through all his simplicity, acutely shrewd; Mr. Hartopp, on hearing what was said against me, deemed me unfit to retain my grandchild, resigned the trust I had confided to him, and would have given me alms, no doubt, had I asked them, but not his ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... tone, after a quick glance toward the many windows through which the bulwarks of Protestantism might be gazing. But all was dark, both without and within, and the Father gave his blessing to both of us, fervently, but with an apostolic simplicity. Then he left us, and I watched his tall form, crowned with silvery hair, as he passed down the cherry-tree avenue. Later in the evening the moon came out, and I saw a Mackinac boat skimming by the house, its white sails swelling ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... nature of the forces which operate to produce this astounding result, Herschel puts forward a theory of singular simplicity and directness. ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... Rushing River Camp she was almost inclined to be glad that Nick was not there. She admired Theo's splendid red hair and dazzling skin. She saw that, though the young woman's clothes were simple, their simplicity was Parisian and expensive; and she saw also that Theo was a flirt—a "man-eater," as she put it to herself, her dark eyes meeting the green eyes ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... buildings, the Palace of Horticulture, with its glorious roof of glass, and the Festival Hall, closely related in outline, and yet very different in detail. And the garden itself, with its dark, pointed trees standing against the wall, and with its simplicity of design, made an agreeable approach to the great arched entrance under the Tower of Jewels. "Those banners down there, shielding the lights, are a stroke of genius, both in their orange color and their shape. And those orange-colored streamers, how they ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... changed her dress, she was morally sure Miss Nason would appear in a gown fit for a state dinner. But when she was dressed and went out on the porch where her guests were, she found Miss Blanch attired in a white muslin, severe in its simplicity. It was a pleasant surprise, and then the matter of dress no longer troubled her, for at no time during their stay did Alice feel any reason to consider herself poorly clad in comparison. Of the conversation that evening, so little was said that ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... complete, and it would be difficult to divine any reason for disliking it, even amongst the most ignorant. "A Spring Evening" is neither so striking nor so immediately attractive; its charm is none the less real. An insinuating and gentle picture, whose delicacy and simplicity I like. ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... vain to contend with him: he was too determined, and had taken this oath in the simplicity of his heart, that it might not be possible for him to recede. I therefore accepted the money: but I endeavoured, having received it to satisfy his oath, to persuade him to take a part of it back again. My efforts were fruitless. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... other is the effort of expiring humanity to relieve itself from pain. The sculptor's chisel and the painter's brush have often been called upon to represent scenes of death in all its various forms and manifestations. Yet have they never attained the simplicity, the impressiveness, the vivid naturalness of the story told by the figure which lies ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... contravenes man's reason. Truth courts investigation—the more disrobed, the more beautiful. Science reveals, that there is no mystery in truth. Its simplicity is often disfigured with unnatural and ridiculous superstitions, and these sometimes are so prominent as to conceal it. They certainly, with many, bring it into disrepute. The more intellectual pluck these off and cast them away. They see and know the truth. Yonder birds obey an instinct: the chill ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... away in the starlit gloom of the bay; a voice would respond in cautious tones, and our serang, putting his head down the open skylight, would inform us without surprise, "That Rajah, he coming. He here now." Karain appeared noiselessly in the doorway of the little cabin. He was simplicity itself then; all in white; muffled about his head; for arms only a kriss with a plain buffalo-horn handle, which he would politely conceal within a fold of his sarong before stepping over the threshold. The old sword-bearer's ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Nyack were honest in those days, paid their debts, were happy in their very simplicity, and had no thought of sending to Paris either for ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... weather-worn as his apparel, with a long hooked nose, prominent chin, a wide mouth exceedingly straight and pinched, with a melancholy or contemplative twist at the corners, and a pair of black staring eyes, that beamed a good-natured, humble, and perhaps submissive, simplicity of disposition. His gait, too, as he stumbled along up the hill, with a shuffling, awkward, hesitating step, was like that of a man who apprehended injury and insult, and who did not possess the spirit to resist them. The fact, moreover, of his sustaining on his own shoulders ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... away, Margot," she ordered clearly, "You can't stay here and talk so to me—" the childish simplicity of her phrases was absurdly inadequate to express her scorn, "You do not know that I have a vairee bad temper—I make myself proud, proud, proud when I lose it —but it will make you vairee unhappy if I do—I say and I do most dreadful ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought, "he hadn't nothing to say fer himself." Sadly to his disadvantage, she compared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the bold self-assertion and easy familiarity of the young fellows with whom she had come in contact during the winter. Their impertinences had offended her grievously at the time, but, woman-like, she permitted herself ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... and trembling, after all. He believed in the magic powers of the witch of Brandon; and he asked Torfrida, in his simplicity, whether she was not cunning enough to defeat her spells by ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... composition. Two of them are within the gate, one on the top of it, and this latter is on the whole the best, though all are beautiful; uniting the intense northern energy in their figure sculpture with the most serene classical restraint in their outlines, and unaffected, but masculine simplicity of construction. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... and gave him a smile of kindness and encouragement, responsive to his own look of veneration. We must not take upon us to affirm that this was a mistake, although the Face may have looked no more kindly at Ernest than at all the world besides. But the secret was, that the boy's tender and confiding simplicity discerned what other people could not see; and thus the love, which was meant for ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... the tunnel. There was no one in sight. He noted the elaborate terra-cotta decorations of the walls, and marveled at the bad taste which had lost sight of this opportunity for artistic simplicity. But through the opening before him he could see the fountain playing in the center of the court. The central figure of the group, a naiad, beckoned with a hand from which the water fell in a shower. The effect was not so unpleasing. ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... moved most of all by the unimpaired simplicity of heart with which his mother could take up past relations, and open her meagre life to the high visitations of grace and fashion, without a tinge of self-consciousness or apology. "I shall never be as genuine as that," ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... major part of them resemble their countrymen. The mistaken character which the lady formed of Thomson from his Seasons is well known. He let part of the secret out in his Castle of Indolence; and the more he let out, the more honour he did to the simplicity and cordiality of the poet's nature, though not always to the elegance of it. Allan Ramsay knew his friends Gay and Somerville as well in their writings, as he did when he came to be personally acquainted with them; but Allan, who had bustled up from a barber's shop into a bookseller's, was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various
... be set on fire, and that any one possessing this baneful secret could destroy the world? The plausibility with which the idea was presented, the bare directness of the style, added to its convincing power. It sounded too real to be invention, was told with too frank a simplicity to be all imagination. People could not decide where truth and fiction blended, and the name of ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes
... "The simplicity is beyond question." Blount returned the list of stockholders and fell back upon the pencil-sharpening. "It is quite elementary, as you say; but there is another phase of the transaction which seems to have escaped you. Are you aware that the present arrangement ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... conditions. To describe, again, the play of a number of reciprocal forces, we have to find what mathematicians call an 'independent variable': some one element in the changes on which all other changes will depend. That element, roughly speaking, ultimately comes out to be 'labour.' The simplicity of the system gave an impression both of clearness and certainty, which was transferred from the reasoning to the premises. The facts seemed to be established, because they were necessary to the system. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... should have by this time a fine accumulation of simplified knowledge for diffusion in public schools; a store of practical experience in how to promote social advancement most rapidly, a progressive economy and ease of administration, a simplicity in theory and visible benefit in practice, such as should make every child an eager ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... to Mr Rugg his fixed resolution. He told Mr Rugg that his partner was a man of great simplicity and integrity, and that in all he meant to do, he was guided above all things by a knowledge of his partner's character, and a respect for his feelings. He explained that his partner was then absent on an enterprise of importance, and that it particularly behoved ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... general quality of style in Bacchylides is his perfect simplicity and clearness. Where the text is not corrupt, there are few sentences which are not lucid in meaning and simple in structure. This lucidity is partly due, no doubt, to the fact that he seldom attempts imagery of the bolder kind, and never ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... wide the sitting-room door and announced the visitor, the sounds ceased, but the musician sat with her hands resting upon the gilded strings for a moment, her eyes turned in inquiry toward the door, then rose and with the simplicity of a child came forward to place her hand in that of Mr. Graham. Mother Clemm who sat near the window with a piece of sewing in her lap also arose, and with gentle dignity came forward to be introduced and to do her part in making ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... not pleased, but she could not object; so she mentioned a shop. Katy's heart gave a bound of relief. She thought No. 6, with a wash-stand, might be very comfortable. Its bareness and simplicity had the charm of novelty. Then there was something very interesting to her in the idea of a ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... good judgment and the dramatic habit of things altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, as things then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, except that divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensible faith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to be true. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessary to change the range of human vision, making it telescopic ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... Philadelphia was not far behind New York in extravagance, notwithstanding Quaker traditions, while Boston, rich in solid wealth, was more conservative in displaying it, and retained in appearance at least something of Puritan simplicity. ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... one hand full of curds or butter which he has stolen. We speak of idolizing a child, and when Hindu women worship this image they are unconsciously generalizing the process and worshipping childhood, its wayward pranks as well as its loveable simplicity, and though it is hard for a man to think of the freaks of the butter thief as a manifestation of divinity, yet clearly there is an analogy between these childish escapades and the caprices of mature ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... most trivial features of the land. I believe every one was glad to say farewell to Chiloe; yet if we could forget the gloom and ceaseless rain of winter, Chiloe might pass for a charming island. There is also something very attractive in the simplicity and humble politeness of the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... was called. There was not a young gallant for ten miles round who would not have gone to Jerusalem to win her, and not a week passed but some nosegay or languishing sonnet was conveyed into the Rose's chamber, all of which she stowed away with the simplicity of a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... of piety," I retorted. "In fact, I hardly noticed her clothes at all, except to think that their simplicity gave her a sort of ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... rest of their days on the Kentish downs. There is a great variety of characters in this play, which are excellently distinguished and supported; and some of the scenes have as much wit as can be desired in a perfect comedy. The simplicity of its plan must naturally bring to our mind the old species of comedy described by Horace, in which, before it was restrained by a public edict, living characters were exposed by name upon the stage, and the audience made merry at their expense without any intricacy ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... slave-owners, who, occupied with the welfare of those around and dependent upon them, know little of the world beyond; in the same way as in England, a Christian family may be an example of patriarchal simplicity and of apostolic zeal and love, and yet beyond the circle of their action, though not very far from its circumference, the greatest distress and perhaps cruelty may abound. How many of the dark spots on our community ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... of the name of Cheshire at an expense, exclusive of the old materials, of 245l. 10s. the height of the spire from the ground 61 yards. In this church, in which for many years he officiated as curate, is interred the Rev. W. Bickerstaffe, a man of great simplicity of manners, and urbanity of disposition; who by his laborious and minute researches materially assisted ...
— A Walk through Leicester - being a Guide to Strangers • Susanna Watts
... I do love thee, meek simplicity! For of thy lays, the lulling simpleness Goes to my heart, and soothes each small distress, Distress, though small, yet haply great to me! 'Tis true, on lady fortune's gentlest pad, I amble on; yet, though I know not why, So sad I am!—but should a friend and I Grow cool and ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... in watchfulness against every attempt that may be used, either violently and suddenly, or gently and imperceptibly, to effect a revolution in the spirit and genius of our government; and should there be among us characters to whom the simplicity of it is offensive, let our attention and perseverance be such as to preclude the ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... would have saved me, and she would not speak it." ... Whether that word would have saved them is a question—it was their only chance—and he would not speak it; that word revolted his conscience, it would have been false. I know nothing grander than the sublime simplicity of that refusal. ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... front, the narrow brim closely turned up all round. The high collar of the jacket alone sheltered her neck. Her gloves, though worn, were obviously of good kid; her boots—strangest thing of all in a work-girl's daily attire—were both strong and shapely. This simplicity seemed a declaration that she could not afford genuine luxuries and scorned ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... watch the gay parasols, but furtively studying my Jew. Yes, in that odd figure, so strangely seated on the pavement, I had chanced on the very features, the haunting sadness and mystery of which I had been so long in quest. I wondered at the simplicity with which he was able to maintain a pose so essentially undignified. I told myself I beheld the East squatted broodingly as on a divan, while the West paraded with parasol and Prayer-Book. I wondered that the beadles were unobservant of him. Were they content with his abstention from ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... village two interesting examples of the simplicity of Indian thought took place. Smith wrote a message to Jamestown, the settlement of the whites, sending it by one of the Indians, and receiving an answer. On his reading this and speaking of what he had learned from it, the Indians looked on it as the ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... us, it will be simply perfect!" they told each other when they settled down for the night in their hard little cots. They said that many times in the days that followed. The utter joy of work and freedom and simplicity had no ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... widow, who kept a school for young children in Lichfield. He told me she could read the black letter, and asked him to borrow for her, from his father, a bible in that character. When he was going to Oxford, she came to take leave of him, brought him, in the simplicity of her kindness, a present of gingerbread, and said, he was the best scholar she ever had. He delighted in mentioning this early compliment: adding, with a smile, that 'this was as high a proof of his merit as he could conceive.' His next instructor in English was a master, whom, when he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... and to the tents, since those who had been in for an early swim could not sit down to breakfast in their wet bathing suits. But no one took any great length of time to dress, since here the utmost simplicity ruled in clothes. ...
— A Campfire Girl's Happiness • Jane L. Stewart
... to find them. It was Ibsen's revelation of a new world, in which moral values were real and convincing, that thrilled the nineteenth century, and thrills us yet. Can any one read sedately that scene in Ghosts in which Mrs. Alving shows with bewildering simplicity that, however respectable the Pastor's morality may ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... part of my intelligence: but, I fear, the angle that plucks our son thither. Thou shalt accompany us to the place; where we will, not appearing what we are, have some question with the shepherd; from whose simplicity I think it not uneasy to get the cause of my son's resort thither. Pr'ythee, be my present partner in this business, and lay aside the thoughts ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... empire. But, if his fortune was great, his genius was transcendent; decision flashed upon his counsels; and it was the same to decide and to perform. To inferior intellects his combinations appeared perfectly impossible, his plans perfectly impracticable; but, in his hands, simplicity marked their development, and success vindicated their adoption. His person partook the character of his mind,—if the one never yielded in the cabinet, the other never bent in the field. Nature ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... about the sketch. It proved to be the work of a young Englishman then residing in the neighborhood. I obtained his address and sought his dwelling. He was scraping an old palette as we entered, and advanced with it in one hand, while he saluted me with the air of a gentleman and the simplicity of an honest man. He wore a linen blouse, his collar was open, his hair long and dark, his complexion pale, his eye thoughtful, and a settled expression of sweetness and candor about the mouth made me feel, at a glance, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... isolation, almost infantine in her natural simplicity, a single enjoyment was sufficient to satisfy all the passions of her age. Father, mother, lover, and companion; liberties, amusements, and adornments—they were all summed up for her in that simple lute. The archness, the liveliness, ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... inflamed me. I shut the door, and made the little hussy witness of my ardour with my sweetheart. Sara looked on attentively, playing the part of astonishment to perfection, and when I had finished she said, with the utmost simplicity, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... saw that now) Scotch face; the worn voice, unused to sustained utterance, gasping for breath in the middle of a line, and sometimes failing to be ready in time ("I lost the run of it," he explained to us in the middle of a temporary breakdown); the quaint simplicity of the words, "Kind, kind and gentle is she, kind is ma Ma-ary"; the thunder of applause that greeted the close; the immediate and unassailable popularity of the Captain. If I have described it as I saw it, you will understand why I shall ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... littered with the debris of restoration. Then follow the cloister and the refectory, and down below them on the second floor of the Merveille is the Salle des Chevaliers. Besides the wonderful Gothic halls with their vaulted roofs and perfect simplicity of design, there are the endless series of crypts and dungeons, which leave a very strong impression on the minds of all those whose knowledge of architecture is lean. There is the shadowy crypt of Les Gros Pilliers down below ...
— Normandy, Complete - The Scenery & Romance Of Its Ancient Towns • Gordon Home
... and legislators were deeply impressed with the contrast between an inland and a maritime city: in the former, simplicity and uniformity of life, tenacity of ancient habits and dislike of what is new or foreign, great force of exclusive sympathy and narrow range both of objects and ideas; in the latter, variety and novelty of sensations, expansive imagination, toleration, and occasional ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... could do without them. In taking up his pen he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist, but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind, in its naked simplicity and force, that he thought any ways worth communicating. He did not, in the abstract character of an author, undertake to say all that could be said upon a subject, but what in his capacity as an inquirer after truth he happened to know about it. He was neither ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... monsters as these shamelessly peer over the surrounding buildings. We see bulbous protuberances stuck on the fronts of buildings and we are told they are 'new art' motives. I have seen the 'new art' in other countries, but it is not so ugly as with us; it has fancy and it has simplicity. It is only in our own country that by a sad privilege we may behold the newest and most diverse styles of architectural ugliness. Not ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... of "The Seven Who Were Hanged" is thus far his most important achievement. The keen psychological insight and the masterly simplicity with which Andreyev has penetrated and depicted each of the tragedies of the seven who were hanged place him in the same class as an artist with Russia's greatest masters of fiction, ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... appetite for his breakfast, but now he let his coffee stand long un-tasted. There were several things about this note that touched him—the childlike simplicity and directness, the generous courage, even the imperfection and crudity of the literature. However he saw it afterward, he saw it then in its true intention. He respected that intention; through all the sophistications in which life had wrapped ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... Thompson up the winding stair and was shown the dormitories, the walls decorated as gaily as if for a bride, but otherwise of a severe if comfortable simplicity. Every cot was as neat as a new hospital's in the second year of the war, and there was an immense lavatory ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Charles Darwin's system. We shall have some idyllic young naturalist bringing up Dr. Erasmus Darwin's note on Trapa natans, {181a} and Lamarck's kindred passage on the descent of Ranunculus hederaceus from Ranunculus aquatilis {181b} as fresh discoveries, and be told, with much happy simplicity, that those animals and plants which have felt the need of such or such a structure have developed it, while those which have not wanted it have gone without it. Thus, it will be declared, every leaf we see around us, every structure of the minutest insect, will bear witness ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... you have everything done for you. When I was a girl we used to camp out in the Maine woods, and we girls took turns cooking and washing dishes, while the boys gathered wood for the fires, caught fish and looked after the horses. To take a crowd of servants along would rob the life of all its simplicity." ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs
... gospels have come down to us, which are full of stories, most of them absurd and some of them worse, about the infancy of Jesus Christ. Their puerilities bring out more distinctly the simplicity, the nobleness, the worthiness of this one solitary incident of His early days, which has been preserved for us. How has it been preserved? If you will look over the narratives there will be very little difficulty, I think, in answering that question. Observing the prominence that is ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... remain. The reason was that, though older than I, she was yet young, and young girls seldom take much notice of children, whereas your aunt was of an age when women admire their innocence and engaging simplicity. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... The Surveillant's care; eventually I could also draw on my account with Norton-Harjes in Paris; meantime he had quelques sous which might well go into chocolate and cigarettes. The large lady had a pleasant quietness about her, a sort of simplicity, which made me extremely desirous of complying with B.'s suggestion. Incidentally I was feeling somewhat uncertain in the region of the stomach, due to the unique quality of the lunch which I had just enjoyed, and I brightened at the thought of anything as solid as chocolate. ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... Yaouma, how I envy you! If you but knew the ill they have done me. They have half killed me, killing all the legends and all the memories that were mine. They made me blush at my simplicity. I felt shamed to have been so easily fooled by such gross make-believes. And now, what have I gained by this revelation? My soul is a house after the burning, black, ruined, empty. Nothing is left but ruins, ruins one might laugh at. [In tears] I am parched with thirst, I hunger, ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... Henrietta was in the utmost confusion, dreading lest the grossness of her mother should again send off Cecilia in anger: but Cecilia, who perceived her uneasiness, and who was more charmed with her character than ever, from the simplicity of her sincerity, determined to save her that pain, by quietly hearing her harangue, and then quietly departing: though she was much provoked to find from the complaining hints every instant thrown out, that Mrs Belfield was still internally convinced ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... pointed out that inspectors could do nothing but see that the regulations were carried out. He took up the position that it was the regulations which needed reform. His plea was irrefutable in its moderation and simplicity: but it was beyond the comprehension of an English Home Secretary apparently, for all the abuses pointed out by Oscar Wilde still flourish. I can't help giving some extracts from this memorable indictment: memorable for its reserve and sanity and ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... but she was not mocking him, and, marvelling at her simplicity and honest innocence, he relaxed into a smile. "Not very likely, my dear," he said. "In other days a pleasant underground cell in the Lollards' Tower would have been ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... noble, enthusiasm for the rescue of his Bavarian subjects from Jesuit obscurantism, he imagined that similar measures might also be advantageously taken in the Tyrol, where the mountaineers, true to their ancient simplicity, were revolted by the severity of the cure, attempted too by a physician of whose intentions they were mistrustful. Bavaria was overrun with rich monasteries; the Tyrol, less fertile, possessed merely a patriarchal clergy, less ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... good idea," he said. "Democratic simplicity is the right thing at home, of course; but when you go abroad and mix with crowned heads, you want to show them that you know ...
— Cinderella - And Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... Hye Way is simplicity itself. Copland, taking refuge near St. Bartholomew's Hospital during a passing shower, engages the porter in conversation concerning the "losels, mighty beggars and vagabonds, the michers, hedge-creepers, fylloks and luskes" ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... to his name at the roll-call when the great of earth are summoned in the morning of the last great reveille. Till then [apostrophizing Lincoln's portrait which hung above the President's head], till then, farewell, gentlest of all spirits, noblest of all hearts! The child's simplicity was mingled with the majestic grandeur of your nature. You have handed down unto a grateful people the richest legacy which man can leave to man—the memory of a good name, the inheritance of a great example! [Loud ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... will meet with anywhere. Art never has fathomed them, and may never be able to do so. Often have I stood dumbfounded before some simple day-labourer with whom I worked. Art does not affect me, as this kind of grand simplicity in life does. I keep muttering to myself: there must be a meaning to our lives somewhere, or else we must sunder this social fabrication and create a meaning; and so my ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Day, and "this" was an Indian basket of holly and mistletoe, conspicuous, among many costly floral offerings, by its simplicity. The card which accompanied it read, "To her Ladyship, from the Candy Man," but this Mrs. Pennington ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... may be asked, is this to be done? I have hinted elsewhere in my writings that sublimity is, so to say, the image of greatness of soul. Hence a thought in its naked simplicity, even though unuttered, is sometimes admirable by the sheer force of its sublimity; for instance, the silence of Ajax in the eleventh Odyssey[1] is great, and grander than anything he could ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... Avilion's bowery hollows, Ida's peak, The lily-laden Lotos land, the fields Of amaranth! What may vagrant Fancy seek More than thy rich song yields, Of Orient odour, Faery wizardry, Or soft Arcadian simplicity? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... respects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard among my fellow-creatures for a long time. And then the "style," the treatment and expression,—yes, it is inimitable, best—Emersonian throughout. Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, soft enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as silent electricity goes. You have done very well; and many will know it ever better by degrees.—Only one thing farther ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... as in those quaintly carved and coloured imageries of the Middle Age—the martyrdom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for instance, round the choir at Amiens—comes the full contrast, with a quite medieval simplicity and directness, between the insolence of the tyrant, now at last in sight of his prey, and the outraged beauty of the youthful god, meek, surrounded by his enemies, like some fair wild creature in the snare of the hunter. Dionysus has been taken prisoner; he is led on to ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... organization and practice in peace is most essential. Infantry may suddenly be increased without much deranging its action in the field, but cavalry cannot be hurried into an increased augmentation. In tactics simplicity in every evolution and rapidity in execution are the most important principles. This simplicity of drill, I think, might be assisted if our squadrons were divided into four divisions, zuges, or pelotons. When squadrons have 48 files in the front rank there might be four of these, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 664, September 22,1888 • Various
... quiet for the moment the gaseous brain of the turbulent woman. She accepted the kindness, and, the singing over, did not refuse to look on the same holy page with her daughter's friend, while the ploughman read, with fitting simplicity, the parable of the Prodigal Son. It touched something in both, but a different something in each. Strange to say, neither applied it to her own case, but each to her neighbour's. As the reader uttered the words "was ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... Tartarus. There is in each, besides all else, a certain remarkable directness of glance, an intrepid and penetrating quality of vision, which defies analysis. Occasional turgidity of phrase and unidiomatic handling of language do not conceal the simplicity of the process by which Mr. Carlyle pierces through obstruction down to the abstrusest depths. And the important fact is that this abstruseness is not verbal, any more than it is the abstruseness of fog and cloud. His epithet, or ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... that had pierced his cheek and broken three of his teeth at the battle of Moncontour had left a livid scar that lost itself in his long white beard. His forehead was high and bald, and his eyes were of a steely keenness under their tufted brows. He was dressed with Calvinistic simplicity entirely in black, and just as this contrasted with the King's suit of sulphur-coloured satin, so did the gravity of his countenance contrast with the stupidity ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... rather than a woman. There was a hardy, masculine freedom in the pliable motion of her straight back, a ripple with muscles that played easily beneath the close bodice, in her arms, and her finely turned ankles and legs, that were bared below the knee. The very simplicity of her costume helped to mark the Greek severity of her figure. She wore a short skirt of some coarse hempen stuff, covered with a thick apron made of sail-cloth, her feet thrust into black sabots, while the upper part of her body ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... retorts, tubes, cylinders, crucibles, and other apparatus of chemical research. An electrical machine stood ready for immediate use. The atmosphere felt oppressively close, and was tainted with gaseous odors which had been tormented forth by the processes of science. The severe and homely simplicity of the apartment, with its naked walls and brick pavement, looked strange, accustomed as Georgiana had become to the fantastic elegance of her boudoir. But what chiefly, indeed almost solely, drew her attention, was the aspect of ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... model. The soffite is more beautiful than any thing of either style separate. There is a little error in the inscription; it should be Horatius Walpole posuit. The urn is of marble, richly polished; the rest of stone. On the whole, I think there is simplicity and decency, with a degree ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... your politics and policies are summed up in the one intention to do well for yourself, great simplicity is given to your theories, if not ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... life's work; and in 1776 published the "Wealth of Nations," which at once achieved a permanent reputation. The author was appointed, in 1778, Commissioner of Customs for Scotland, and died on July 17, 1790. Adam Smith was a man of vast learning and of great simplicity and kindliness of character. His reasonings have had vast influence not only on the science of Economics but also on practical politics; his powerful defence of free trade, and his indictment of the East ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... our unreasonable motions; a goat, when we conquer wantonness; a turtledove, when we keep chaste; unleavened bread, when we feast on the unleavened bread of sincerity." And it is evident that the dove denotes charity and simplicity of heart. ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... was once more in a position to help my fellows, what could I want to give them but that which was the very bread and water of life to me—the Saviour himself? And how was I to do this?—By trying to represent the man in all the simplicity of His life, of His sayings and doings, of His refusals to say or do.—I took the story from the beginning, and told them about the Baby; trying to make the fathers and mothers, and all whose love for children supplied the lack of fatherhood and ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... pitched her voice to sing, Then glanced her dark eye on the king, And then around the silent ring; And laughed, and blushed, and oft did say Her pretty oath, By yea and nay, She could not, would not, durst not play! At length upon the harp with glee, Mingled with arch simplicity, A soft yet lively air she rung, While thus the ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... not, exist in the possessor of the face. The power of such a countenance lies not so much in what it actually represents, as in the suggestion it holds out to another. So often it is with a beautiful character. Analyze it carefully, and you will reduce it generally to absolute simplicity and absolute purity—two elements common enough in adulteration; but place it face to face with a more complex personality, and mirror-like it will take on a hundred delicate shades of ethical beauty, while at the same time preserving ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... no connected plot in it and hardly any action, but there is the same incisive character-drawing and clear etching of conditions that characterize the earlier work. It is a maturer effort and a more forceful political argument, hence it lacks the charm and simplicity which assign Noli Me Tangere to a preeminent place in Philippine literature. The light satire of the earlier work is replaced by bitter sarcasm delivered with deliberate intent, for the iron had evidently entered his soul with broadening ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... slender and very lean. He had a curious teetering gait, and he took ridiculously short steps in marching, as if he were a monkey who had not learned to feel at ease on his hind legs. His small, wilted, wrinkled face, and his expression of mingled simplicity and shrewdness, were also monkey-like. At Thurstane's reprimand he trotted close up to him with exactly the air of a circus Jocko who expects a whipping, but who hopes ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... simplicity the lesson may be broken up. For one thing, the husband has much to do in solving the problem. Does a man think always deeply of the responsibility he assumes when he takes a young wife away from the shelter of mother-love and father-love, ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... deductions are simplicity itself," said he. "It would be difficult to name any articles which afford a finer field for inference than a pair of glasses, especially so remarkable a pair as these. That they belong to a woman I infer ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... fortune in such cunning words, pretending to have heard all about it, that before long the Farmer found himself telling the whole story—all except the secret of blowing the conch, for, with all his simplicity, the Farmer was not quite such a fool as to ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... before seen anybody so handsome, or so finely dressed as the Count; and, in the simplicity of her coquetry, allowed her satisfaction to be quite visible. Nothing could be more clumsy than the gentleman's mode of complimenting her; but for this, perhaps, his speeches were more effective than others more delicate would have ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... them. I know that I can rely upon you." He then asked with great warmth of friendship what I was about, and inquired after my family, etc. In short, I never saw him display less reserve or more familiarity and unaffected simplicity; which he did the more readily, perhaps, because his ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Euclidean geometry and the practically-rigid body of reality, we readily arrive at the following view, which was entertained by that acute and profound thinker, H. Poincare:—Euclidean geometry is distinguished above all other imaginable axiomatic geometries by its simplicity. Now since axiomatic geometry by itself contains no assertions as to the reality which can be experienced, but can do so only in combination with physical laws, it should be possible and reasonable—whatever may be the nature of reality—to retain Euclidean ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... moment came, there was some little attempt at glory. Who does not know the way in which a lately married couple's little dinner-party stretches itself out from the pure simplicity of a fried sole and a leg of mutton to the attempt at clear soup, the unfortunately cold dish of round balls which is handed about after the sole, and the brightly red jelly, and beautifully pink cream, which are ordered, in ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... and began to burn their houses indiscriminately, and also a meeting-house which was built by them, except eight dollars, a convenient chapel where the early christian Tuscaroras such as Sacaresa and Solomon Longboard, both sachems, with many others, delighted to worship the Almighty in the simplicity of their faith. And after they had finished their destruction they went down in pursuit of the fleeing train of white people on the ridge road: by this time the Tuscaroras had stationed themselves at a log house, ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... and fear nothing, and gradually you will learn what little you need to know; and most of all, you will know yourself the best and the loveliest of women. Dear Ivy, I would not part with your sweet, unconscious simplicity for all the accomplishments and acquired elegancies of the finest lady in the world." (That's what men always say.) "You are not ignorant of anything you ought to know, and your ignorance of the world is an additional charm to one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... these well-dressed young ladies (Eloquent took into account that it was Sunday) have held out helping hands to a total stranger with such absolute simplicity, so entirely as a matter of course? not as a young woman to a young man, but as one fellow-creature to another who had, literally, in this instance, ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... which, starting out from principles, evident of themselves, develops science by way of conclusions drawn, after the manner of the geometricians. The apparent severity and simplicity of this method are very seductive, and very dangerous, when we have to deal not with figures, but with men; when the varied, complex and delicate exigencies which accumulate when human nature comes into play do not exactly square with the formula; and, when instead of dealing with abstractions, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... was touched; and with a beautiful child-like simplicity, she received all the blessed truths that her 'white brother' taught her. Her affections were strongly drawn towards the character of Jesus the Merciful, as she always called the Savior; and she became sensitively alive to the guilt of ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... some sturdy cobbler holds out, and refuses to part with his stall, and the whole plan is disconcerted. Long may such impediments exist! But then we should conform to circumstances, and assume in our public works a certain sober simplicity of character, which should point out that they were dictated by utility rather than show. The affectation of an expensive style only places us at a disadvantageous contrast with other nations, and our ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... recent conduct; if he ate of the cake, he surely could not have put in poison himself, or directed others to do so; if, on the other hand, he had poisoned the cake, Cardan feared greatly that, in the simplicity of his nature, he would assuredly let his accusers know what he had done. And his mind was greatly upset by the prodigies of which he had recently had experience. For some reason or other he did not visit the accused in ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... the executive head of the provisional government which had been formed in Massachusetts, during one of the last of his lucid intervals. On behalf of the government he sent a letter to Lee, quite touching for its fairminded simplicity. The council had come into possesssion of a letter from Ireland making very unfavorable mention of Lee. It produced no impression upon the council. "On the contrary," says Otis, "we are at a loss to know which is the highest evidence of your virtues—the ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... to be fairly and cheerfully admitted that General Grant's conduct, with respect to all the circumstances of the surrender exhibited some extraordinary traits of magnanimity. He had conducted it with as much simplicity as possible, avoided sensation, and spared everything that might wound the feelings or imply the humiliation of a vanquished foe. Such conduct was noble. Before the surrender, General Grant had expressed to his own officers his intention not to require ...
— Lee's Last Campaign • John C. Gorman
... barbaric splendour in the costumes of both men and women, combined with some degree of graceful simplicity. The king was clothed in a softly-dressed deer-skin jacket, over which he wore a wolf-skin with the hair outside. A tunic of purple cotton, brought by Phoenician ships from the far East, covered him as far down as the knees, which were bare, while his ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... working. Also the obtaining of a working impulse in the cylinder for each revolution of the crankshaft should give a great advantage in regularity of rotation—which it undoubtedly does—and the elimination of the operating gear for the valves, inlet and exhaust, should give greater simplicity ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... The very simplicity of the picture gives it singular dignity and repose. Classic in its clearness of outline and paucity of detail, mediaeval in sentiment, since the great Norman church dominates the whole, its appeal is at once wistful and severe. And, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... with all the enthusiasm of a romantic girl's first love. She felt the most ardent attachment, and could not,—would not conceal it from the object of her adoration. She loved him with the genuine simplicity of a heart incapable of deceit; and, unpractised in the school of worldly prudence, unacquainted with the arts to which more experienced women resort for the purpose of enhancing their own charms, or fixing more firmly the affections of men, she had surrendered her whole soul to her lover ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... his general conduct, also, certain traits appeared, forcing themselves upon his mother's attention. He ceased to affect the dandy, but became more attentive to the cleanliness of his body and dress, and moved more freely and alertly. The increasing softness and simplicity of his manner aroused a ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... the King James version of the Bible, especially in one of its earlier printings, with a page of serious discourse of to-day and the effects of the tendency will be easily seen. It is part of the general tendency toward greater simplicity of expression which has developed the clear and simple English of the best contemporary writers out of the involved and ornate style of the period of Queen Elizabeth. An ornate and involved style needs a good deal of punctuation to make it intelligible, while a simple and direct style ...
— Punctuation - A Primer of Information about the Marks of Punctuation and - their Use Both Grammatically and Typographically • Frederick W. Hamilton
... It was the vice of the Pharisees, on whom Christ denounced the severest judgments. He, too, would denounce it with the most unsparing severity, whenever he fancied he detected it in rulers, or in venerated dignitaries of the church, or in the customs of conventional life. He sought simplicity and sincerity in all their forms. Truth alone should be his polar star, and this would be revealed by the "inner light," the peculiar genius of his whole system, which, if it led to many new views of duty and holiness, yet was the cause of many ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... Russia's foremost workers in the revolutionary movement, and one who, through beauty of character, simplicity of soul and great strategical ability, has been the idol of the Russian revolutionary youth for many years, is here as the delegate of the Russian Revolutionary Socialist party, to raise funds for a new uprising. He was right when he said, at the meeting ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... In one delicious village they wandered, after lunch at the inn, into the little church which stood embowered among blossoming trees. The old vicar left his garden and offered to show them its beauties, and Jean fell in love with the simplicity and the feeling of homeliness that ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... belongs to the category of musical philosophers, which is all the more strange, as her mind is full of simplicity. This caryatid has the limpid, innocent eyes of a child, and is unsophisticated and sincere like one. She is surrounded by a great throng of admirers, who are attracted by her beauty, and more still by the nimbus that makes a woman touched by ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... shelter, so out we went and got one of our ambulances, and a young doctor with his fiancee went off with her. There was a lot of argument about where the woman lived, until one young man said, "Well, get in somehow, or the baby will have arrived." There is a simplicity about these tragic times, and nothing matters ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... a singular condition of simplicity those days. It was due to the fact that I had had no confidant in school and had been brought up in a home where there was neither father ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... work all this out for ourselves; we must make our own place in society; we must frame our own creeds; we must live our own religion; for no longer can one man's religion be taken unquestionably by any other. As the world has been unified, so is the individual unit exalted. With all this, the simplicity of life is passing away. Our front doors are wide open as the trains go by. The caravan traverses our front yard. We speak to millions, millions speak to us; and we must cultivate the social tact, the gentleness, the adroitness, the firmness ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... to the memory of James Nicholson, late stuard of William and Mary College. Was born in the Town of Invenck, North Britton, ano 1711, died the 22nd of January, 1773. Frugality—industry, and simplicity of manners and independence of Soul Adorned his character ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... been preached, the strenuous life has been lauded, but, as William Barclay Parsons recently stated it:[1] "We need force, we need a vigorous force; we need that direction and avoidance of the unnecessary which is simplicity, but with either one alone there is something lacking. Instead of latent force and great energy without control, instead of quiet gentleness, of power of control without vigor to be controlled, what we need is ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... bee-keeper without further directions, will readily perceive how any operation, which in the common hives, is performed with difficulty, if it can be performed at all, is reduced to simplicity and certainty, by the control of the combs. If however, bee-keepers will be negligent and ignorant, no hive can possible make them very successful. If they belong to the fraternity of "no eyes," who have kept ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... native air, greatly enfeebled in body, and sorely afflicted in mind. The charge of theatrical affectation of illness has been brought against Grattan by the Unionists,—against Grattan who, as to his personal habits, was simplicity itself! It is a ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... Roundheads dour, with their pitiless creed, had failed to destroy its fragrant sanctity, which lingered in those foot-worn aisles like the memory of incense, the echo of a monkish prayer. Was it all a great delusion?—or were our fathers wise in their simplicity? In the past men had died for every faith; to-day it would be hard to find men having any ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... they arrived at a house built with equal elegance and simplicity, where nothing favored either of prodigality or avarice. The master of it was a philosopher, who had retired from the world, and who cultivated in peace the study of virtue and wisdom, without any of that rigid and morose severity so commonly to be found in men of his character. He had chosen to ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... in a kind of ironic simplicity, and he seemed to me as I looked upon him like a man exalted out of all reason by some great joy. "It is but a gardener's wrangle—how best to ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... from foes, there was one proof of unimpeachable orthodoxy that was rarely disputed. He must be a good Catholic who could curse and swear. The Huguenot soldier would do neither.[278] So nearly, indeed, did the Huguenot affirmation approach to the simplicity of the biblical precept, that one Roman Catholic partisan leader of more than ordinary audacity had assumed for the motto on his standard the blasphemous device: "'Double 's death' has conquered 'Verily.'"[279] But the strictness ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... have presented these thoughts, read the poem again to the children. Call attention to its musical structure, its simplicity, the beauty of its expressions, and then read it a third time. It is one of those beautiful things which may well ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... picture of the senseless, corrupting luxury of the Samaritan magnates, on which the Tekoan shepherd pours his scorn, but which is simplicity itself, and almost asceticism, before what he would see if he came to London or New York. To him it seemed effeminate to loll on a divan at meals, and possibly it was a custom imported from abroad. It is noted that 'the older custom in Israel was to sit while eating.' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... scarcely less a stout brave presence and an emphasised character for the new generation than for the old; noted here as she is, in particular, for her fine old-time value of clearness and straightness. I see in her strong simplicity, that of an earlier, quieter world, a New York of better manners and better morals and homelier beliefs, the very elements of some portrait by a grave Dutch or other truth-seeking master; she looks out with some of the strong marks, the anxious honesty, the modest humour, the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... generally liked, nor more useful to the vegetarian cook than the haricot bean. Whether on account of its refined flavour, its delicate colour, its size, or last, but not least, its cheapness, I do not hesitate to place it first. Like the potato, however, its very simplicity lays it open to careless treatment, and many who would be the first to appreciate its good qualities if it were placed before them well cooked and served, now recoil from the idea of habitually feeding off what they ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... Jackson used the offices for partisan purposes, and few objected to the practice on theoretical grounds. The simplicity of the National Government made the habit less destructive than it otherwise would have been. The spoils system did not enter the army or navy, the only extensive technical departments of the United States. In other branches of ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... But her simplicity of belief and earnestness of purpose soon changed their thoughts on the subject and when, early in the year 1812, Mr. and Mrs. Newell sailed for Calcutta, many came together to wish them God-speed on their ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... it so much feeling and good sense, mixed with an amiable and girlish simplicity, as to render it particularly engaging. There is also something peculiarly gratifying to an Englishman in the reflection, that such disaster could not have befallen almost any British crew. It was evidently ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... few more hints might have preserved me from the painful process of what was called rubbing off one's horns. Again and again I had to say to myself, "That would have done very well at home, but it was a mistake for all that." My social rawness and simplicity stuck to me for many years, just as the Dessau dialect remained with me for life; at least I was assured by my friends that though I had spoken French and English for so many years, they could always detect in my German that I came from Dessau ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... 1st Rule. Simplicity of Conception.—From this rule we learn that the hypothesis must be simple in conception, and simple in its fundamental principles, and further, that the same characteristic of simplicity must mark each step ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... you cannot do better than to begin in front of this landmark, and drive down Commercial Street. Here for several smiling miles there is nothing—no ugly building large or small, no ruthless invasion of modernity to mar the mood of happy simplicity. Her beauty of beach, of sky, of river, Weymouth shares with other South Shore towns. Her perfection of ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... engines of destruction were intended for fighting at close quarters, and can be described here in a few lines because of their guileless simplicity. They consisted of conical explosive bombs on the ends of broom handles! A strong man could whirl one of them round his head, like a two-handed sword or battle-axe, and, when the momentum was sufficient, hurl it over the water for about seventy-five feet. On nose-diving into the sea and ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows, bridging the morning and evening twilight ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... consume, the sacramentarian theories of this day. 'O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you?' Is it not like some malignant sorcery, that after the Evangelical revival of the last century and the earlier part of this, there should spring up again this old, old error, and darken the simplicity of the Gospel teaching, that Christ's work, apprehended by faith, without anything else, is the means, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... women, who seemed to be the principal, and who was called Oorattooa, stepped upon them, and taking up her garments all around her to the waist, turned about, with great composure and deliberation, and with an air of perfect innocence and simplicity, three times; when this was done, she dropped the veil, and stepping off the cloth, three more pieces were laid on, and she repeated the ceremony, then stepping off as before; the last three were laid on, and the ceremony was repeated in the same manner the third time. Immediately after ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... waking to terrible facts, who was struggling to comprehend a world that had caught her unawares. She had removed her hat and was carrying it loosely in her hand that had fallen to her side. Her hair swept back in two waves above the temples with a simplicity that made the head distinguished. Even the nurses' caps betrayed stray curls or rolls. Her figure was large, and the articulation was perfect as she walked, showing that she had had the run of fields in her girlhood. Yet she did not stoop as is the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... cousin, Richard Mallock of Cockington, had been asked, and had consented, to stand as Conservative candidate for the Torquay division of Devonshire. His local popularity, which was great, depended mainly on the engaging and somewhat shy simplicity of his manner, on his honesty, which was recognized by all, and on his generosity and sound sense as a landlord. These latter qualities had lately been made conspicuous by his administration of those parts of his property which were now, one after another, being quickly ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... in this," replied the old woman, "that the beard of thy understanding is not yet grown; and that the egg-shell of thy inexperience is still sticking to the head of thy simplicity; and that thy brains bear no adequate proportion to the skull enveloping them; and in fine, lest I seem to speak overmuch in parables, or to employ a superfluity of epithets, that thou art ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... There was a genial simplicity about the man; Suvaroff felt overcome with confusion. "What is the matter? Are you ill?" he ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... rendered more gay and cheerful by the reflections in the water, the green of the trees, the red of the houses, the tall windmills, showing their dark tops and white sails against the azure of the sky, and still more by an air of quiet simplicity not seen in any ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... with a smile as he put away his pocket-book, "if people would only settle their affairs in that way, a good part of the occupation of lawyers would be gone. Brevity is the soul of wit; and the fear of simplicity is the beginning ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... thoughts. She resented her commanding neighbor's casual manners. There was something puzzling and difficult to meet in her plainness of speech, which excluded the personal relation. It was like the cut and finish of her clothes—mysterious in their simplicity, and not to ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... experienced in a trolley. This confidence is quickly shattered. I doubt if there is anything in the world more "hair lifting" than the road over which that car conveys its startled occupants. Its very simplicity makes it the more horrifying; for, since the vehicle is light, no massive supports are deemed essential; and, as the car is open, the passengers seem to be traveling in a flying machine. I never realized what it was to be ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the retreat of the Hurons to Isle St. Joseph, the principal authorities are the Relations of 1649 and 1650, which are ample in detail, and written with an excellent simplicity and modesty; the Relation Abrge of Bressani; the reports of the Father Superior to the General of the Jesuits at Rome; the manuscript of 1652, entitled Mmoires touchant la Mort et les Vertus des Pres, etc.; the unpublished letters of Garnier; and a letter of Chaumonot, written on the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... should be a modification or transformation of its predecessor. No form should be entirely destroyed. It is also essential that the series should be developed so that each step should show either an evolution into greater manifoldness and variety, or a return to greater simplicity."—Froebel's Pedagogics, page 225. ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... present to you an annual report on the state of the Union, I found my thought dominated by an immortal sentence of Abraham Lincoln's—"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it"—a sentence immortal because it embodies in a form of utter simplicity and purity the essential faith of the nation, the faith in which it was conceived, and the faith in which it has grown to glory and power. With that faith and the birth of a nation founded upon it came the hope into the world that a new order would prevail throughout the affairs of mankind, an ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... the field in which he was to manifest his greatest achievements. But there is just as little doubt that all the elements of character which exalted his military gifts and instincts into an almost antique nobility, simplicity, and grandeur—his dignity, purity, dutifulness, his profound religious devotion, and sense of humor—came to him from his mother, who was descended from an ancient patrician family of the little republican commonwealth, the once famous ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... appearance had changed, but he could not help penetrating his disguise. It was the man who had called himself Count von Weimer—an Alsatian whose sympathies were so strongly French, and who had come to Cornwall for peace. The simplicity, and yet the audacity, of ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... of ears of grain, we follow the same calling; the latter produce food for the stomach, the former food for the mind. Thus I understand their explanation and welcome it as an example of gracious simplicity. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... marked ability in this body is Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford. He is the third son of William Wilberforce, the celebrated philanthropist, but by no means inherits the simplicity of character and singular absence of all personal ambition which made his father so widely beloved and respected. He is known as the leading exponent of High-Church views, and has been heard in the House of Lords on every question directly or indirectly affecting the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... was the son of a Leicestershire weaver, and he was himself a weaver by trade. He had thoughts and he could express them. And so he traveled and preached in the marketplaces, at crossroads, on church-steps—just the religion of friendship: simplicity, industry, directness, truth. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... an idea for the tenderest handling. My feeling is, while giving Mrs. BUCKROSE every credit for such an inspiration, that she should have been a little sterner with herself over the treatment, and thus avoided a certain stickiness that may irritate those who prefer the simplicity of nature to a not quite sufficiently concealed art. But, as I began by saying, it all depends on the individual palate; and, anyhow, the book has the historic excuse of being a very little one, which you can read, with pleasure or ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 31, 1917 • Various
... in the nature of Ludwig much the same simplicity and gentleness that characterized Andreas—which common qualities, no doubt, had much to do with the strong friendship that there was between them; and all his neighbors, remembering how good a son he ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... airy temple that his dismal figure had thrown its shadow there. He pointed to some scattered stones, the remnants of a former structure, and to flowers such as young girls delight to nurse in their gardens, but which had now relapsed into the wild simplicity of nature. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ignorance and simplicity of our travelling' lady, we give the following,—and what will the North say to this new argument in favor of slavery? namely, a truckle-cart! a black boy riding!! two white boys giving him a ride!!! and three girls, one of them black! arm in arm!! ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... was threatened with mischief from hostile elements about him which he could not control; for around John Knox all was peace. He thanked God for having granted him grace, that by his means the Gospel was preached throughout Scotland in its simplicity and truth: he now desired nothing more than to depart out of this miserable life; and thus, without pain, in November 1572, after bearing the burden and heat of the day, he ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... declared. "I prefer anything which does not make too great a strain upon the intellect. Besides, it is the very simplicity of this country which makes ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... grew, Eve's courage redoubled; the greatness of her husband's nature, his inventor's simplicity, the tears that now and again she saw in the eyes of this dreamer of dreams with the tender heart,—all these things aroused in her an unsuspected energy of resistance. Once again she tried the plan that had succeeded so well already. She wrote to M. Metivier, ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... great merits of "Don Quixote," and one of the qualities that have secured its acceptance by all classes of readers and made it the most cosmopolitan of books, is its simplicity. There are, of course, points obvious enough to a Spanish seventeenth century audience which do not immediately strike a reader now-a-days, and Cervantes often takes it for granted that an allusion will be generally ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and simplicity which recall some of the French sentimental novelists of the eighteenth century, and especially ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... very fast, and was not always delivered with strict accuracy, a rumour got abroad that the Queen was walking in the Palace Garden when the messengers came to tell her she had succeeded to the Crown. A great deal was made of the poetic simplicity of the surroundings of the interesting central figure—the girl in her tender bloom among the lilies and roses, which she resembled. We can remember a brilliant novel of the time which had a famous chapter beginning with an impassioned apostrophe ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... it seemed that he was looking into features exemplifying all the wholesome virtues of those men who built the Republic. It was a face of rugged strength and unassuming simplicity. Its lines bespoke perils faced without fear and privations endured without complaint. Here in a pocket of wilderness which the nation had forgotten survived many others of those unaltered pioneers. But in the expression that death had made ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... 'Mr. Gibson's skill is most admirable when we consider that it is allied to poetic feeling of the utmost simplicity and depth.' ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... L1,500, and a City remembrancer could do the same for L1,200. The scheme proposed by the mayor and sheriffs on this occasion affected no less than one hundred and sixty-three places of employment, and was simplicity itself, being nothing more than that they themselves and their successors should forego one-third of the value of any place that became vacant during their year of office, and that this third should be ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume II • Reginald R. Sharpe
... genius in all childhood. But the creative joy that makes it great in its simplicity dies a natural death or is killed, and genius dies with it. In favored spirits, neither few nor many, the joy and the might survive; for you must know that unless it be accompanied with imagination, memory is cold and lifeless. The forms it brings before ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... which has been so well illustrated by the late Professor Sekiya's model of the motion of an earth-particle during the Japanese earthquake of January 15th, 1887. The motion in this case was so complicated that the model was, for simplicity, made in three parts, the first of which alone is represented in Fig. 7.[10] It is clear that in such an earthquake, Mallet's method would utterly fail in ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... tender sympathy stole over him; a loving mercy to himself as well as others stole into his heart. He thought of HER as she had nestled at his side, hand in hand, upon the moonlit veranda of her father's house, before his hard convictions had chilled and affrighted her. He thought of her fresh simplicity, and what had seemed to him her wonderful girlish beauty, and lo! in a quick turn of the path he stood breathless and tremulous before the house. The moonbeams lay tenderly upon the peaceful eaves; the long blossoms of the Madeira ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... medium size, has light-brown hair and beard, which are closely trimmed. His features are sharp, well cut, his eye bright, and his general expression calm and thoughtful. His manner is reserved, and to all but his intimate friends cold. He dresses with great simplicity, but with taste, and in the style of the day. His habits are simple, and he avoids publicity in all things. Standing as he does at the head of the mercantile interests of the country, he affords a fine example of the calm and dignified manner in which a ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... rest of the stuff of Europe. It leads one to consider the flux and reflux of civilization as something much more comparable to a pulse than to a growth. It makes us remember that rhythm which is observed in all forms of energy. It makes us doubt that mere progress from simplicity to complexity which used to be affirmed as the ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... careful always to play each in its right place; they carry their simplifying process to the length of using their chosen harmonies in regular order, one after the other, two bars each—it may come right and it may not, and when it does not the resulting complexities ruin the simplicity. This sort of thing might become unbearable, but I know how to escape from people of the corporal's class without being rude. I do not tell them I have another engagement—that is not accepted because, as ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... Waller, than with the 'well of English undefiled.' I cannot help differing. There are touches of nature about the old bard of Woodstock, that, to me, are worth all the turns of laborious wit in Cowley, and all the ornate and artificial simplicity of his courtly competitor. The description, for instance, of his ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... to them, to give, them a chance of becoming wise by foresight. The nearest thing to having experience of one's own, is to have other people's affairs brought before us in a shape that is interesting; this is sure to happen from your pen; our affairs and management will have an air of simplicity or importance that will not fail to strike; and I am convinced you have conducted them with as much originality as if you had been conducting discussions in politics or philosophy; and what more worthy ...
— The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... believed Mr. Crawford to be the first intellect of the age, and Mr. Macon the most honest man. The strict honesty of Macon captivated him, as it did most men. His home-spun ideas, his unaffected plainness of dress, and primitive simplicity of manner, combined with a wonderful fund of common sense, went home to the heart of Randolph, and he ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... steadily in the face for about thirty seconds. His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... before seen the gown, and she asked the Vicomtesse where she got the pattern. The Vicomtesse said that the gown had been made by Leonard, a court dressmaker, and it was of the fashion the Queen had set to wear in the gardens of the Trianon when simplicity became the craze. Antoinette is to have it copied, so ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... there can be no danger possible," he said, in perfect simplicity of good faith. "For me—well, I have said it. I cannot imagine love coming near me in any shape, by degrees or unawares. It is a strange defect in my nature, but I am glad of it since it makes this pleasant ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... could, with this child of nature, it dawned upon her that she had hitherto been mistaken in her estimate of the Russian character. She began to understand the inward sense of that brotherly love, that apostolic spirit, which binds together every class of the immense Empire—to revere their simplicity of soul and calm god-like faith. She revised her former narrow Lutheran views and openly confessed that she was quite wrong in declaring, as she once did, that what the Little White Cows needed was "more soap and less salvation." The magic of love! It softened, not for the first time, her heart towards ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... furnishings. They surrounded themselves with troops of slaves. Instead of plain linen clothes they and their wives wore garments of silk and gold. At their banquets they spread embroidered carpets, purple coverings, and dishes of gilt plate. Pomp and splendor replaced the rude simplicity of an earlier age. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... moment he felt a mad impulse to cast himself at the other's feet—and to say he knew not what. It was an emotion that so deeply stirred him, rather than a coherent thought, and he was aware in some vague way of his own unworthiness and smallness in the presence of this other man who possessed the simplicity of a child and ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... for his speech, for his skill in arms, for his horsemanship, for his soldiership, for his statesmanship, for his learning, he was beloved for his friendship, his generosity, his steadfastness, his simplicity, his conscientiousness, his religion. Amongst the lamentations over his death printed in Spenser's works, there is one poem by Matthew Roydon, a few verses of which I shall quote, being no vain eulogy. Describing his ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... added, but for want of room, anecdotes which show the quick decision and vivacity of her mind. Her face was in harmony with this combination. Her brow is as ideal and the eyes and lids as devout and modest as the Italian picture of the Madonna, while the lower part of the face has the simplicity and childish strength of the Indian race. Her picture presents the finest specimen of Indian beauty we have ever seen. Such a Woman is the sister and friend of all beings, as the worthy Man ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the impulse to personal effort which has fallen upon us, the greatness of the work that is to be done, the simplicity of the means to be employed, and the cooperation of the better kind of working men themselves, I cannot but think that the promoters of this scheme have only to hold up their hands in order to collect as many voluntary teachers as they ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... its transparent spirit-world can appear to be shallow. This fervid faith disappeared with the progress of time as necessarily as the dew of morning disappears before the rising sun, and thus the Latin religion came subsequently to wither; but the Latins preserved their simplicity of belief longer than most peoples and longer especially than the Greeks. As colours are effects of light and at the same time dim it, so art and science are not merely the creations but also the destroyers of faith; and, much as this ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... was the simple old clergyman: "You are going to London to join the Church, John; Golly is going there, too, as hospital nurse. There's a pair of you! He! he! Look after her, John, and protect her Manx simplicity." Before John could recover himself, Golly was at his side executing the final steps of a "cellar-door flap ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... nearer; every day was a pain past and a nearer joy. Welcome to the nipping frost and the northern winds; welcome the hail, the rain, the sleet—it brought him nearer. How she prayed for him with the loving simplicity of a child. If Heaven would but spare him, would save him from all dangers, would send him sunny skies and favorable winds, would work miracles in his behalf, would avert all accident by rail and road, would bring him back to her longing, loving arms—ah, if the kind, dear Heaven would do this. ...
— A Mad Love • Bertha M. Clay
... regarded her with a rather hesitant air, as if he were at once puzzled and fearful,—puzzled by her simplicity, and fearful of grieving ...
— Mere Girauds Little Daughter • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... they treated diseases of every kind—though it does not appear that they were subject to many—with roots and herbs. Josephus says they were long-lived, and that many of them lived over a hundred years. This he attributes to their 'regular course of life,' and especially to 'the simplicity of ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... hopeless odds, to reestablish it. In 1867 the entire administration was reorganized; the supreme power, both military and civil, being restored to the Mikado. Soon afterward the Shinto cult, officially revived in its primal simplicity, was declared the Religion of State; and Buddhism was disendowed. Thus the Empire was reestablished upon the ancient lines; and all that the literary party had [375] hoped for seemed to ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... in the comparative simplicity of a republic, I am apt to be struck with even the ordinary circumstances incident to an aristocratical state of society. If, however, I should at any time amuse myself by pointing out some of the eccentricities, and some of the poetical characteristics of the latter, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... means of checking the overaction of this government; to resist its tendency to concentrate all power here, and to prevent a departure from the Constitution; or in case of one, to restore the government to its original simplicity and purity. State interposition, or to express it more fully, the right of a State to interpose her sovereign voice, as one of the parties to our constitutional compact, against the encroachments of this government, is the only ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... no children here," I said to myself, as I began to grow more excited, and the more so I grew, the less able I was to make out that which later on appeared to be simplicity itself. ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... and his gallantry, are no longer discovered, or believed no longer to exist, in the ranks of life to which he belongs, it will be worse for all of us than for the fame of his creator. Nor, when faith is lost in that possible combination of eccentricities and benevolences, shrewdness and simplicity, good sense and folly, all that suggests the ludicrous and nothing that suggests contempt for it, which form the delightful oddity of Pickwick, will the mistake committed be one merely of critical misjudgment. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... branches, and many a gross abuse couched under its shadow. But these might have been scared away without mutilating the tree till it was reduced to a stump. He desired, doubtless, to bring back the Church to the condition in which he supposed it had been when born. But one cannot reduce an adult to the simplicity and innocence of childhood by stripping off all his clothes, and denying him the ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... reply; "but, you see, special knowledge of this kind is the stock-in-trade of the medical jurist, and has to be acquired by special study, though the present example is one of the greatest simplicity. But let us consider it point by point; and first we will take this set of footprints which I have inferred to be a fisherman's. Note their enormous size. They should be the footprints of a giant. But the length of the stride shows that they were ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... means; and this is especially the case with communities, because the stakes played for are the highest, freedom or empire, and, when all are acting together, each man irrationally magnifies his own capacity. In fine, it is impossible to prevent, and only great simplicity can hope to prevent, human nature doing what it has once set its mind upon, by force of law or by any other deterrent ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... which Locke had already foreshadowed, with respect to the question of the substance of the soul. Hume enunciates two opinions. The first is that the question itself is unintelligible, and therefore cannot receive any answer; the second is that the popular doctrine respecting the immateriality, simplicity, and indivisibility of a thinking substance is a "true atheism, and will serve to justify all those sentiments for which ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... are remarkable for their simplicity. Indeed, in some cases he would seem to have applied himself to making trials the result of which could not have been seriously questioned. The following, quoting from Dr. Phipson's translation, will ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... strengthening of the sun's warmth. As I walked, or rather, trotted along, it did just that, and in the growing warmth of the day the sweet fragrances of the many various grasses rose to the surface, delighting my odor perceiving sensors with their earthy simplicity. ...
— The Revolutions of Time • Jonathan Dunn
... before he had split wood and lighted fires and swept corridors to earn two years of higher education. Pierson's mother, defeated in her wish that her son should go East to college, had tried to mitigate the rigors of Battle Field's primitive simplicity by herself fitting up his quarters. And she made them the show-rooms ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... raptures of millinery, and with the rainbow range in their delicately floating, delicately clinging draperies. But their hats, their gowns, always express sentiment, even when they cannot always express simplicity; and the just observer is obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if not simplicity, sentiment. Their beauty is very, very great, not a beauty of coloring alone, but a beauty of feature which is able to be patrician without being unkind; and if, as some American ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... privilege of wearing out their wretched lives in the brutal treadmill,—to barter their blood for a scanty crust of black bread and beg in vain; then, finding the world against them, turn their hands against the world,—become recruits to the great army of crime. From the child-like simplicity, where man saw and adored the Deity in all his works, heard his laughter in the ripple of the stream, his voice in the thunder-storm and saw his anger in the writhen bolt, to the present age of skepticism, where ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... accompany the Prince. I did not answer; she squeezed my hand, saying, "Ah! Madame Campan, what a blow I receive!" She embraced the child and me with tears. She knew how much I loved and valued the goodness and the noble simplicity of her disposition. I endeavoured to reassure her by saying that I should bring back the Prince to her; but she persisted, and said she understood the order, and knew what it meant. She then retired to her private room, holding her handkerchief to her eyes. One of the under-governesses ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course, and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again: seeing that the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground, are those ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... establishment in the palace, spoken to him of his apprehension of the increasing power of the party who, having reverted to the opinions of the Stoic philosophers, were ever denouncing the luxury and extravagance of modern ways, and endeavouring, both by example and precept, to reintroduce the simplicity ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... and telling the Gentile converts that, unless they were circumcised, they could not be saved. In this way they were filling them with alarm, lest they might be omitting something on which the welfare of their souls depended, and they were confusing their minds as to the simplicity of the gospel. To quiet these disturbed consciences it was resolved by the church at Antioch to appeal to the leading apostles at Jerusalem, and Paul and Barnabas were sent thither to procure a decision. This was the origin of what is called the Council ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... the Falls. Her gustativeness predominated so largely over her ideality, that she reminded me of a young lady who, after describing to me a supper of which by her own account she had largely partaken, said, with a candour almost shocking in its simplicity— ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... realize the extreme simplicity of a poor man's kitchen. A Dutch oven, a kettle, a gridiron, a saucepan, two or three dumpy cooking-pots, and a frying-pan—that was all. All the crockery in the place, white and brown earthenware together, was not worth more than twelve ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness (see also {KISS Principle}). It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... originated in our times, but long before, in the days of our ancestors. It is likely that they did not hold to strict accuracy, and thus was formed a custom for their posterity, according to their own simplicity and their peculiar method. Yet all these lived more or less in peace, and we also live in peace with one another; and the disagreement in regard to the fast confirms the agreement in the faith.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Among these were the elders [i.e., bishops of earlier date] ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... structure of the Cherokee language or dialect, that the syllabic alphabet is also in the nature of a grammar; so that those who know the language by ear, and master the alphabet, can at once read and write. Owing to the extreme simplicity of this system, it can be acquired in a few days. Some have learned it even in one day. Thus it happened that the Cherokees, who were at the beginning of one year ignorant and illiterate, had become in the course ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... terms. These you have absolutely rejected; and that, though in saucy terms enough, yet in such a manner as makes me admire you the more. Your pretty chit-chat to Mrs. Jewkes, the last Sunday night, so innocent, and so full of beautiful simplicity, half disarmed my resolution before I approached your bed: And I see you so watchful over your virtue, that though I hoped to find it otherwise, I cannot but confess my passion for you is increased by it. But now, what shall I say farther, Pamela?—I will make you, though a party, ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... Lessing says: "The superstition in which we have grown up does not lose its power over us when we see through it; not all who laugh about their chains are free"; or again, "We are soon indifferent to the good and even to the best, when it becomes regular"; "The genius loves simplicity, while the wit prefers complexity"; "The characteristic of a great man is that he treats the small things as small, and the important things as important"; "Whoever loses his mind from love would have lost it sooner ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... righteousness that is not always found in books. Their individual value, as they go out into the world, is to set right values on social customs and decrees; to establish the law of freedom in the home; to lead men and women out of the thraldom of ignorance, vulgarity, hearsay, and "style," into simplicity of living and a sane scale of household expense. The university leader of the future is the man who shall set laws over household accounts and who shall rule over such simple things as what best to eat and buy. He shall be an economist ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... of people, and yet to do it so (apparently) artlessly. This struck me so forcibly that it was not till later I began to realise with a sigh—if one himself is a writer, a sigh of envy—that Nene has a directness, a simplicity, a principle of internal growth or dramatic life of its own, which, alas! most of us ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... too many eatables on your expeditions. Dr. Kane says his party learned to modify and reduce their travelling-gear, and found that in direct proportion to its simplicity and to their apparent privation of articles of supposed necessity were their actual comfort and practical efficiency. Step by step, as long as their Arctic service continued, they went on reducing their sledging-outfit, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... much in other matters for White Fang to learn. Life in the Northland was simplicity itself when compared with the complicated affairs of Sierra Vista. First of all, he had to learn the family of the master. In a way he was prepared to do this. As Mit-sah and Kloo-kooch had belonged to Grey Beaver, sharing ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... yet carried out her plans of decoration—though there were few servants, no great display of splendid plate, no extravagance in the dinner itself, no magnificence in the ladies' dresses, for at this time simplicity was the fashion—yet everything pleased him, because of the perfections of his hostess. Madame de Sainfoy laid herself out to flatter him, to put him in a good humour with himself. Rather to the disgust of various old neighbours who had not dined at Lancilly for more ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... a handful of gold from his pocket. "For the poor of your parish, mon pere, if you will be good enough to accept it for them," said he, with great charm and simplicity of manner. The old priest flushed with pleasure, saying that he had many poor, and was constantly distressed because he could do so little. This would be a Godsend. I glanced at the Italian, and saw that his weary, ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... two systems, both seductive from their apparent simplicity, and both simple only by mutilation, that the Philosophy of the Conditioned, of which Sir William Hamilton is the representative, endeavours to steer a middle course, at the risk of sharing the fate of most mediators in a quarrel,—being repudiated ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... extreme simplicity of her dress she looked out of place standing on that bridge at that hour; he was thinking that she had not lost her distinction ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... year and upwards, all the teasing accomplishments of life are taught, and Mrs. Jorrocks, in her own mind, had already appropriated her to James Green, while Mr. Jorrocks, on the other hand, had assigned her to Stubbs. Belinda's dress was simplicity itself; her silken hair hung in shining tresses down her smiling face, confined by a plain tortoiseshell comb behind, and a narrow pink velvet band before. Round her swan-like neck was a plain white cornelian necklace; and her ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... when he had returned to his home in the back street of Twybridge, and was endeavouring to spend the holidays in a hard 'grind'. He loathed the penurious simplicity to which his life was condemned; all familiar circumstances were become petty, coarse, vulgar, in his eyes; the contrast with the idealised world of his ambition plunged him into despair: Even Mr. Gunnery seemed an ignoble figure when compared with the Professors ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... then, and introduced some gentlemen to me; and while they were talking Mr. Lawrence turned away. In a few moments he was back again with a lovely-looking young girl on his arm, blushing and yet self-possessed, with the same exquisite simplicity of manner he has himself. "My cousin Alice Wilton asks me to introduce her to you, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... commonest events and objects, as a test to prove that nature is always interesting from its inherent truth and beauty, without any of the ornaments of dress or pomp of circumstances to set it off. Hence the unaccountable mixture of seeming simplicity and real abstruseness in the Lyrical Ballads. Fools have laughed at, wise men scarcely understand them. He takes a subject or a story merely as pegs or loops to hang thought and feeling on; the incidents ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... nature of things; that the basis of all wit is truth; and that no thought can be valuable of which good sense is not the groundwork. Boileau has endeavoured to inculcate the same notion in several parts of his writings, both in prose and verse. This is that natural way of writing, that beautiful simplicity which we so much admire in the compositions of the ancients, and which nobody deviates from but those who want strength of genius to make a thought shine in its own natural beauties. Poets who want this strength ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... in the dreadful conflict—a service which had actually made them, within the last twelve hours, the foremost topic of conversation in London—so absolutely was fear swallowed up in joy—that, in the mere simplicity of her fervent nature, the poor woman threw her arms round my neck, as she thought of her son, and gave to me the kiss which ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... and ever fresh incidents, the young Castelfrancan passed a singularly calm and uneventful life. Untroubled, apparently, by the storm and stress of the political world about him, he devoted himself with a whole-hearted simplicity to the advancement of his art. Like Leonardo, he early won fame for his skill in music, and Vasari tells us the gifted young lute-player was a welcome guest in distinguished circles. Although of humble origin, he must have possessed a singular charm of manner, and ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... grammar, in which, among other innovations designed to simplify the study of the language for "boys just initiated," he proposed to substitute for the name of "ablative" that of "quale-quare-quidditive case." The mixture of amiable simplicity and not unamiable pedantry to which this stroke of nomenclature testifies was further illustrated in his practice of diversifying his sermons to his village flock with Hebrew quotations, which he always commended to their attention as "the immediate language of the Holy Ghost"—a practice which ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... given to Mary of Guise when she spoke, on the whole, the plain truth; and generally with the entire conduct of the prophet and of the Congregation. Dr. M'Crie justly remarks that Knox "found it difficult to preserve integrity and Christian simplicity amidst the ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... shares in addition would be offered. What stock could support itself against such a flood as that? When the bottom was reached, and the time was ripe, the pool would gather in the harvest. It was a beautiful plan; the more beautiful because of its simplicity! ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... and the church. The energy with which he entered into the controversies of the time attracted public notice, and the burgesses of Cambridge chose him for their representative in both the parliaments called by the king in 1640. He carried with him to the house the simplicity of dress, and the awkwardness of manner, which bespoke the country farmer; occasionally he rose to speak, and then, though his voice was harsh, his utterance confused, and his matter unpremeditated, yet he seldom failed to command respect and attention ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... the drive. Then the man saw him and pulled up, though it is doubtful if he got any order or, indeed, any word. Julia had been looking back, but from the other side; and because she had been looking back and remembering much happiness and simplicity here, she was so grieved for one at least who dwelt here that her eyes were ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... kindness and encouragement, responsive to his own look of veneration. We must not take upon us to affirm that this was a mistake, although the Face may have looked no more kindly at Ernest than at all the world beside. But the secret was, that the boy's tender and confiding simplicity discerned what other people could not see; and thus the love, which was meant for all, became ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... another charming church, looking the very haunt of peace, good will to men. I can quite believe that even the devil might come a long way to gaze at some of these old New England churches. You can't think what a feeling of pure delight they give to the mind, in spite of, or because of, their simplicity. The green banks where they are built might be vast altars with elms for the altar candlesticks, and the smooth sward for the altar cloth. The devil may have heard all this, and wanted to see for himself if it were true. I don't know how he escaped from Rowley, as he left ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... potent than brevity and simplicity. His answer brought the blood to her face as no long dissertation could have brought it; it was so direct, so personal, so compounded of ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... when we remember the men and the age from which it comes, tempts one to form such a conception of Cartwright as, indeed, the portrait prefixed to his works (ed. 1651) gives us; the offspring of an over-educated and pedantic age, highly stored with everything but strength and simplicity; one in whom genius has been rather shaped (perhaps cramped) than developed: but genius was present, without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial trappings; and Ben Jonson spoke but truth when he said, 'My son Cartwright writes all like a man.' ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... solicit the reader's attention to the simplicity, the pathos and the beauty of this personification ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... lined with fruit-trees, and numerous little gardens are strewn here and there,—true country gardens with everything in them; flowers, onions, cabbages and grapevines, currants, and a great deal of manure. The village has a primitive air; it is rustic, and has that decorative simplicity which we artists are forever seeking. In the far distance is the little town of Soulanges overhanging a vast sheet of water, like the buildings ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... he had to learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind. Hence his impulsive candor, the clearness of his views, and the straightforward simplicity of his speech at once attracted notice, and although so young, he went speedily to the front in the local management of his party. In the article already quoted from, he tells us that after 1834 the managers left ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... The simplicity of Peter Junior's story, and the ingenuous manner in which it had been told, called for a different cross-examination from that which would have been adopted if this same counsel had been called upon to cross-examine the Swede. He made no effort to entangle ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... with quivering nostrils; a deep dimple accentuated the chin; the bluish-black tint of the shaven skin, softened with rice-powder, contrasted with the clear rose and white of the upper part of his cheeks. Always dressed with meticulous neatness and simplicity, following English rather than French taste; in manner punctiliously observant of the strictest conventionality, scrupulously, even excessively polite; in talk measuring his phrases, using only the most select terms, and pronouncing certain words as if the sound itself ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the frizzle of red hair, which shone round their little sickly faces. Very soon she had begun to haunt them in her eager way, to try and penetrate their peasant lives, which were so full of enigma and attraction to her, mainly because of their very defectiveness, their closeness to an animal simplicity, never to be reached by any one of her sort. She soon discovered or imagined that Hurd had more education than his neighbours. At any rate, he would sit listening to her—and smoking, as she made him do—while she talked politics and ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cookery, and one that appears to be fully the equal in all respects and superior to many of its predecessors. Simplicity is sought to be blended with science, economy with all the enjoyments of the table, and health and happiness with an ample household liberally. Every purse and every taste will find in Mrs. Dodds' book, material within its means of grasp for efficient ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... an authoritative definition of Democracy. Then we shall know where, collectively, we are. Of course you may say that it has been defined for all time by Abraham Lincoln. But thrilling in its clear simplicity as his slogan epigram may be, a complex political and social system cannot be fully dealt with in fifteen words. I thought I knew what it was until a tidy few millions of friends and myself were knocked silly by recent events in Russia. Here, where the privates of a regiment hold a mass ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... were in mourning, yet dressed with elegant simplicity, befitting their rank and position in society. The Chevalier Le Gardeur de Tilly had fallen two years ago, fighting gallantly for his King and country, leaving a childless widow to manage his vast domain and succeed him as sole ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... were now covered with admirable tapestry, representing mythological subjects. The Cure dared scarcely glance at this tapestry; it was enough for him to perceive that the goddesses who wandered through these shades wore costumes of antique simplicity. ...
— L'Abbe Constantin, Complete • Ludovic Halevy
... unsubstantial forms supply The place of Beauty, Strength, Simplicity. Each varied colour, of the brightest hue, The green, the red, the yellow, and the blue, In every part the dazzled eyes behold, Here streak'd with silver, there enrich'd with gold; While fancied forms upon the ceiling sprawl, And shapeless ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... name is, according to him, a work of fiction, written by some Spanish De Foe, who had read the common narratives of the conquest of Mexico, but who had no personal knowledge of the scene in which his story is laid. What first excited Mr. Wilson's suspicions was the charming simplicity and apparent truthfulness which, in common with all readers of Bernal Diaz, he has found to be the distinguishing characteristics of the narrative. "A striking feature," he tells us, "in Spanish literature, is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... hear those voices. He hurls at you this book of his own deeds that it may smite you into acquiescent admiration. Casanova, at the end of a long life in which he had tasted all the forbidden fruits of the earth, with a simplicity of pleasure in which the sense of their being forbidden was only the least of their abounding flavours, looked back upon his past self with a slightly pathetic admiration, and set himself to go all over those successful adventures, in love and in other arts, firstly, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
Copyright © 2026 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
