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Actual   Listen
adjective
Actual  adj.  
1.
Involving or comprising action; active. (Obs.) "Her walking and other actual performances." "Let your holy and pious intention be actual; that is... by a special prayer or action,... given to God."
2.
Existing in act or reality; really acted or acting; in fact; real; opposed to potential, possible, virtual, speculative, conceivable, theoretical, or nominal; as, the actual cost of goods; the actual case under discussion.
3.
In action at the time being; now exiting; present; as the actual situation of the country.
Actual cautery. See under Cautery.
Actual sin (Theol.), that kind of sin which is done by ourselves in contradistinction to "original sin."
Synonyms: Real; genuine; positive; certain. See Real.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Actual" Quotes from Famous Books



... cool and entirely of alabaster, was an elaborately wrought marble tomb, upon which I beheld, stretched at full length, a knight, not of bronze, or marble, or jasper, as are seen on other tombs, but of actual flesh and bone. His right hand (which seemed to me somewhat hairy and sinewy, a sign of great strength in its owner) lay on the side of his heart; but before I could put any question to Montesinos, he, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... fixed smile on her face that ill concealed her anxiety. She had heard every word of the talk between Mrs. Cheston and the colonel, but she did not share the old lady's alarm as to any actual conflict. She would trust Uncle George to avoid that. But what kept Harry? Why leave her thus abruptly and send no word back? In her dilemma she leaned forward and touched the ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... compare all three of these would-be aims of the public school with the actual facts to be observed in the present method of teaching German, we see immediately what they really amount to in practice,—that is to say, only to subterfuges for use in the fight and struggle for existence and, often enough, mere means wherewith to bewilder an opponent. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... wandered for a moment, as thought will do when the mind is overstrained; they wandered to the speculation of why American women should have such small and white hands, and then he brought himself back to the actual conversation. ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn

... carnage. Ammunition enough was issued to kill a million men, and the doctors were packing bandages and plasters, and physic, and splints and probes, until it made me sick to look at them. When I thought of actual war, my mind reverted to my mule, the kicking brute that was no good, and I decided to get a horse. I had got so, actually, that I could hear bullets whistle without turning pale and having cold chills run over me, and it seemed as though a horse was none too good for me, so I went to ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck

... Gabriel [Spencer], for he is slain in Hogsden fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer." The last word is perhaps Henslowe's thrust at Jonson in his displeasure rather than a designation of his actual continuance at his trade up to this time. It is fair to Jonson to remark however, that his adversary appears to have been a notorious fire-eater who had shortly before killed one Feeke in a similar squabble. Duelling was a frequent occurrence of the time among gentlemen ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... order in which they were to leave the ship. When one boat had received its complement and shoved off, Walford once more pressed forward, half wild with anxiety now, and begged in piteous terms that he might not be left on board, as now seemed to be the actual determination of the mutineers. Upon this Talbot lost all patience with him, and, seizing him once more by the collar, thrust him before him into the saloon, exclaiming ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood

... shuffle forward was an actual leap. The hand made a snatching clutch at the coin. She was evidently afraid that he was either not in earnest or would repent. The next second she was on her feet and ready ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the sentence shows that it is reported speech, and not the actual words of the speaker Centenius, who is still the principal subject, and dixit, understood, the principal verb, and se peritum ... usurum the object of dixit. You should now be able to translate without any difficulty, and the logical common-sense ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce

... which really makes me melancholy. Come, my son, and see me anoint myself; for there is a cure for every sorrow; and though the pleasures which the devil affords us are illusive and fictitious, yet they appear to us to be pleasures; and sensual delight is much greater in imagination than in actual fruition, though it is otherwise ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... Germany, or the Agricola; and this can be predicted with just as much confidence, as an astronomer predicts eclipses of the sun and the moon, and, for their verification, needs not wait to see the actual obscuration ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross

... over a reader—no more foothold among his sympathies—than a proposition in mathematics would have. Of all stupid creations that the brain of man has given birth to, there are none so stupid as the perfect men and women whom we find upon the pages of fiction. Sometimes we find in actual life a character so symmetrical, so rounded off at the corners, and smoothed at the edges, and polished on the sides, and unexceptionable in all its manifestations, that we cannot find fault with it; yet we find it impossible ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... pleasant places and meetings; drinking tea and chatting with the Man-in-Charge between whiles, extracting a maximum of pleasure from a minimum rate of speed: for travelling in the Territory has not yet passed that ideal stage where the travelling itself—the actual going—is all pleasantness. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... in this basin, I enclose two beautiful drawings, prepared under the directions of Major Turnbull, mostly from actual surveys. ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat

... now, he no longer hesitated, but pressed his lips to hers and kissed her again and yet again. It was perhaps as wild and pathetic a love scene as ever the old moon above has witnessed. There they clung, those two, in the actual shadow of death experiencing the fullest and acutest joy that our life has to offer. Nay, death was present with them, for, beneath their very feet, half-hidden by the water, lay the stiffening ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard

... been but guessing at the height; but it now occurred to him that he should throw conjecture aside, and ascertain by actual measurement the distance from the ground to the first ledge. This might be easily accomplished—Karl saw that,—and once done, it would give him a better idea of the distance between ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid

... I don't see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can well be otherwise—most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side of life. Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it. That's the crux. It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes all the difference and all the trouble. In a vast number of marriages-and your mother's was one—girls are not and cannot be certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they do not know until after that act of union which ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... We observed, in the second chapter, that the proposition "the earth moves in an ellipse," so far as it only serves for the colligation or connecting together of actual observations (that is, as it only affirms that the observed positions of the earth may be correctly represented by as many points in the circumference of an imaginary ellipse), is not an induction, but a description: it is an ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... experience teaches that where the reaction manifests itself all too strongly this happens because it is not merely a reaction to a present, but above all to a long past experience, which stands behind the other and offers first the original actual tonal background. Only apparently is the effect too strong, if we measure it merely by the actual cause, in truth however the action corresponds to all the causes, that is the ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger

... emergency. The cradle was supposed to be used on the occasion of a member of the club being found guilty of ill-treating his wife. The cradle was made by a practical wag, known as Billy Bradley, who attended to it every Show Day. When there was a clean sheet of actual offenders, Bradley contented himself with "rocking" men who volunteered just for the fun of the thing. Finish was imparted to the performance by a fiddler, named Smith Keighley, playing "Rock'd in the cradle of the deep" during the operation. Many were ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End

... that Comstockery has us to designate our legs, limbs, though not at the present time with any legal penalty for not doing so; it prescribes the word stomach for polite usage in describing that part of the body which lies subjacent to the actual stomach, anterior to the spinal column and posterior to the abdominal wall; it forbids a visible bifurcated garment for the "limbs" of a female; and it does a variety of other absurd things, all going to show that ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various

... was limping, that he seemed in actual pain; he was anxious to know how this was, yet he did not say so. He asked rather if Robert thought that the old man had consciously awakened from his trance of expectation, and they both, in spite of all that pressed, stooped with a lantern some one had lit to look again at the dead face. Just ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... Brunswick in General, according to hope; but only for a few months, having himself died that same year. Poor Duke; rather a good man, by all the accounts I could hear; though not of qualities that shone. He is at present "Duke of Brunswick-Bevern,"—such his actual nomenclature in those ever-fluctuating Sibyl's-leaves of German History-Books, Wilhelmina's and the others;—expectant Duke of Brunswick in General; much a friend of Friedrich Wilhelm. A kind of Austrian soldier he was ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... his form or last, the latter must not consider himself cudgelled. The reverse in the East where a blow of a pipe stick cost Mahommed Ali Pasha's son his life: Ishmail Pasha was burned to death by Malik Nimr, chief of Shendy (Pilgrimage, i., 203). Moreover, the actual wound is less considered in Moslem law than the instrument which caused it: so sticks and stones are venial weapons, whilst sword and dagger, gun and pistol are felonious. See ibid. (i., 336) for a note upon the weapons with which ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... only a segment is given. The visible and the invisible make up one sphere of which each is a part. We are related to both; our root is in one, our top in the other. Our ideas date from spirit and appear in fact. The ideal informs the actual. This is the way the intellect detaches and gets expressed. It is not its own interpreter, and, like everything else, is only one side of a law which is explained by the other side. The mind is the cope and the world the draw, to use the language ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... young man was in eternal conflict (a bear with little ears and big teeth); not open conflict, for that would have meant instant dismissal (not hairy at all—a long slimy eel with a lot of sense), but a veiled unremitting warfare which occupied all their spare attention. The young man knew for an actual fact that some day he would be compelled to hit that chap, and it would be a sorry day for the fellow, because his ability to hit was startling. He told Mary of the evil results which had followed some of his blows, and Mary's ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... within touch of him, then her courage failed her; they stood a second or two gazing at one another, the girl with heaving breast and cheeks burning with indignation, the man with cynical watchfulness. Suddenly, shrinking from actual contact with him, she sprang aside, and was at the door before he could intercept her. But with a rapid movement he turned on his heel, seized her round the waist before she could open the door, dragged her shrieking from it, and with an oath—and not without an effort—flung ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... of her long life; she had not left her bed for some time, and the young woman could see that her aged grandparent was not long for this world. During her illness (which, however, was more a gradual breaking down and dying of her strength than actual illness; for her mind seemed to be as clear as ever) she had given evidences of having something in her thought, some instruction or advice she desired to impart to her children, but which, so feeble was she, was beyond her strength to utter. ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter

... she had never been quite the same woman since she lived by Griffith's blood; she was turned jealous; and moreover it had given him a fascinating power over her, and she could tell blindfold when he was in the room. Which last fact, indeed, she once proved by actual experiment. But all this I leave to such as study the occult sciences in this ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... et Cie, 1878 (a review of which was given in the Quarterly Review for July, 1880), and in the "Memoirs of the Marquis de Bouille", London, Cadell and Davis, 1797; Count Fersen being the person who planned the actual escape, and De Bouille being in command of the army which was to receive the King. The plan was excellent, and would certainly have succeeded, if it had not been for the royal family themselves. Marie Antoinette, it will have been seen ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... avenues street peddlers besought us to purchase canes, matches, coral beads, and souvenirs cut out of lava, but asked prices four or five times their actual value. On the narrow streets dealers in cooked viands for the home trade did an active business at low prices, but did not think it worth while to offer us the hot potatoes, maccaroni, fried fish, and stewed meats which they ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... it is not. It is not to prevent animal experimentation, but only to prevent the abuse of it. It is not an antivivisection body, ut it is a body to control the work of vivisection within the confines of actual necessity, and to bring the work under accountability to law as affected by a relation to reason, to humanity, and to the mercy which is mightiest in the mighty, and which becomes a State more than its sovereignty, and a monarch ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell

... to her further indignation, she found there was to be an hour of reading aloud and of needlework-actual plain needlework. The three girls were making under-garments for themselves; and on Dolores proving to have no work of any sort, her aunt sent Gillian to the drawer, and produced a child's pinafore, which she was desired to hem. Each, however, had a ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... who illuminate your view of the universe. It is difficult to express one's relation to them; the whole Venetian art-world is so near, so familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of the spreading actual, that it seems almost invidious to say one owes more to one of them than to the other. Nowhere, not even in Holland, where the correspondence between the real aspects and the little polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite, do art and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... other side sat the hunters quivering under a double indignation. I say double. I can hardly explain what I mean. They had never before been so braved by Indians. They had, all their lives, been accustomed, partly out of bravado and partly from actual experience, to consider the red men their inferiors in subtilty and courage; and to be thus bearded by them, filled the hunters, as I have said, with a double indignation. It was like the bitter anger which the superior feels towards his resisting inferior, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... not himself see or hear, the part of the Memoirs which are of least valve and of which Marmont's opinion has just been quoted. But in the personal and more valuable part of the Memoirs, where we have the actual knowledge of the secretary himself, the original text has been either fully retained, or some few passages previously omitted restored. Illustrative notes have been added from the Memoirs of the successor of Bourrienne, Meneval, Madame de Remusat, the works of Colonel Iung on ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... uneasiness with which my mind struggles? And faint indeed it must be; for nothing but outrageous madness can exceed it; and that only in the apprehension of others; since, as to the sufferer, it is certain, that actual distraction (take it out of its lucid intervals) must be an infinitely more happy state than the state of suspense and anxiety, which often brings ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson

... getting matters in this direction to his mind, he had gone up into the fore-top with his telescope and spent fully half an hour there inspecting the stranger; and when he descended and met his passengers on the poop, he announced that though still too far distant to permit of actual identification, he was convinced that his first supposition was correct, and that the stranger ahead was none other ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... proof of how completely the opium-dreams had passed out of the minds of both Simmonds and myself, that even when rumours of general disaffection among the Sepoys began to be current, they never once recurred to us; and even when the news of the actual mutiny reached us, we were just as confident as were the others of the fidelity of our own regiment. It was the old story, foolish confidence and black treachery. As at very many other stations, the mutiny ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty

... contemporaries would have endorsed this opinion is the real question; for on such a point the judgment of Thackeray, who lived a century after them, cannot be conclusive. It is probable that to an Englishman of that day the novels of these two authors appeared to be extraordinary caricatures of actual society, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... provided by elephantine Flemish horses. Even if the weapons had not been purposely blunted, and if the champions had really desired to slay one another, they would have found the task very difficult, as in effect they did in the actual game of war. But the spectacle was a splendid one, and all the apparatus was ready in the armourers' tent, marked by St. George and the Dragon. Tibble ensconced himself in the innermost corner with a "tractate," borrowed from ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... with one of these regiments, and it was the most spiritless march I have ever been in. The men didn't want to march. It was the Social Service darlings who wanted to form them into a pretty procession, and lead them all round London as actual proof of the Good that was being done among the Right People. We started at nine o'clock on a typically London morning. The day was neither cold nor warm, neither light nor dark. The sky was an even stretch of watery grey, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... standard of value in Jersey. The livre tournois could scarcely be called a standard of value, and yet it was that by which the market price of commodities was known. It was the ideal currency of the island, that in which accounts were kept. The actual current money was French; and any variation in its value compared to the livre tournois would have, of course, ...
— The Coinages of the Channel Islands • B. Lowsley

... carry on his wars against France. The Italian banking houses had branches in the principal cities of Europe. [19] It became possible, therefore, to introduce the use of bills of exchange as a means of balancing debts between countries, without the necessity of sending the actual money. This system of international credit was doubly important at a time when so many risks attended the transportation of the precious metals. Another Florentine invention was bookkeeping ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... until late afternoon. Then he felt forced to return to the cottage. The look of the whole world seemed changed. All was actual, vivid, striking. Mel's loveliness burst upon him as new and strange and terrible as the fact of his recovery. He had hidden his secret from her. He had been like a brother, kind, thoughtful, gay at times, always helpful. But he ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... shalt not suffer a witch to live," was a text, which at once (as they conceived) authorized their belief in sorcery, and sanctioned the penalty which they denounced against it. The Fairies were, therefore, in no better credit after the Reformation than before, being still regarded as actual daemons, or something very little better. A famous divine, Doctor Jasper Brokeman, teaches us, in his system of divinity, "that they inhabit in those places that are polluted with any crying sin, as effusion of blood, or where ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... the knight at a speed which soon showed a Saracen cavalier. The Crusader, whose arms were a couchant leopard, disengaged his lance, and well acquainted with the customs of Eastern warriors, made a dead halt, confident that his own weight would give him the advantage if the enemy advanced to the actual shock; but the Saracen, wheeling his horse with inimitable dexterity, rode round the Christian, who, constantly turning, frustrated his attempts to attack him in an unguarded point, until, desirous ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... —when he happens to have a job; but that was one age, this quite another. Progress gives no man new wants, and the luxuries of one generation become the necessities of the next. To deny this—to limit the laborer to actual necessaries as measured by a former age—were to relegate him back to barbarism, to nomadism and nakedness. If we should be content with what our fathers had, then they should have been satisfied with the comforts enjoyed by THEIR progenitors, and so on back until ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... the debtor is too ignorant and stupid to be able to show that he did not understand the bargain or that it was unconscionable. In any case the court has little or no power to go behind a properly executed contract without any actual evidence of fraud, and has no option but to decree it in terms of the deed. This evil is likely to be remedied very shortly, as the Government of India have announced a proposal to introduce the recent English Act and allow the courts the discretion to go behind contracts, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... stillness, the quiet precision of all the domestic arrangements, would have been to let her mind dwell on just what she had to avoid. She was sick to her very soul of all that the words "domestic arrangements" implied; sick with an actual spiritual nausea. It was honestly no exaggeration to say that she would gladly have died rather than take the trouble to arrange ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... he was not unlike his poor poet of Valladolid who, with his "scrutinizing hat," went about the streets, absorbed in watching all kinds of people, all sorts of occupations, "scenting the world, looking it full in the face." He chose to set forth "the wants and ways" of actual life. He summed up his work in the "Epilogue ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... is based upon actual events which occurred during the British occupation of the waters of Narragansett Bay. Darius Wale and William Northrop belong to "the coast patrol." The story is a strong one, dealing only with actual events. There is, however, no lack ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne

... increasing or decreasing ambition to better their condition, the proportion between the population and the quantity of land cultivated or capable of cultivation, the difference between the profits of the husbandman and the artificer, the relation between the nominal wages of labour and the actual command over the necessaries of life;—these were questions wholly foreign to my thoughts, and, at this period of my life, absolutely beyond the range of my understanding. I had travelled through my own country without making even a single remark ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... England girls of that period, I knew how to make quince jelly and floating islands, but of the actual, practical side of cooking, and the management of a range, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes

... system, or the blood, consists of an "enormous mass of minute centres of action.... Every element has its own special action, and even though it derive its stimulus to activity from other parts, yet alone effects the actual performance of its duties.... Every single epithelial and muscular fibre-cell leads a sort of parasitical existence in relation to the rest of the body.... Every single bone-corpuscle really possesses conditions of nutrition peculiar to itself." Each element, as ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin

... nationality problems have been dislocating regional patterns of economic specialization and pose a further major threat to growth prospects over the next few years. Official Soviet statistics report GNP fell by 2% in 1990, but the actual decline was substantially greater. Whatever the numerical decline, it does not capture the increasing disjointures in the economy evidenced by emptier shelves, longer lines, increased barter, and ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... it was about the piano that the evidences of real life and actual enjoyment were gathered. Flowers filled a dozen vases grouped on tables, ornamenting brackets, flower-stands, and pedestals of various kinds. The grand piano seemed the base of a glowing and fragrant pyramid; and there, it was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... recovered his full strength, much more owing to the force of his own strong will than to actual aid; and he was calculating how long the formalities of the law would still detain ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... for a son," said the elder lady, "is an actual advantage. The title is a fortune that we secure to our children without the ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac

... all blow over, of course, as the Stamp Act trouble had done; the seditious class in Boston would soon be overawed, and the king would then concede, of his gracious will, what the malcontents had failed to obtain by their violent demands. Such a thing as actual rebellion, real war, was to us simply inconceivable. I believe now that Philip had earlier and deeper thoughts on the subject than I had: indeed events showed that he must have had: but he kept them to himself. And far other and lighter ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... Considerable and continuous pressure had to be brought to bear on the civic authorities at Newcastle before they finally took action; but having once done so, the future of the Tyne was assured. Now it ranks second only to the Thames in the actual number of vessels entering and leaving, and owns only the Mersey its superior in ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... they must have looked in about Julia Cloud's fireplace on Sabbath afternoon, and seen the four earnest young people with their Bibles, and Julia Cloud in the midst, spending the long, beautiful hours in actual spiritual study of God's word, and then kneeling and communing with God for a little while, all of them on intimate terms with God. They were actually learning to delight themselves in the Lord. It was no wonder that other people, even outside the church and ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... pervading source of imperfect comprehension of the poem than any verbal difficulty exists in the double or triple meaning that runs through it. The narrative of the poet's spiritual journey is so vivid and consistent that it has all the reality of an account of an actual experience; but within and beneath runs a stream of allegory not less consistent and hardly less continuous than the narrative itself. To the illustration and carrying out of this interior meaning even the minutest details of external incident are made to contribute, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... not possibly apply to Great Britain or to any other country open to commercial intercourse with the world; because there is no evidence that the supply of food in the world either cannot or will not be increased to meet any actual or possible demand. Within the British Empire alone there was an increase of 75 per cent. in the production of wheat between 1901 and 1911. [15] In Great Britain there has been not only an increase of population but also an increased consumption ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... a tobacconist's—and sold cigarettes. Sometimes she suffered from actual want, and ate fried fish. "Do you know how nice fried fish tastes in London,—you on 'the Oilan'?" she wrote gayly. "I'm getting on splendidly; so's John Gale, I suppose, though he's looking cadaverous from starving himself all round. Tell aunty I haven't ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte

... If it hadn't been for Aunt Charlotte and Lindley Vickers she might have died without knowing anything about the exquisite movements and connections of the live world. She had spent most of her time in the passionate pursuit of things under the form of eternity, regardless of their actual behaviour in time. She had kept on for fifteen years trying to find out the reality—if there was any reality—that hid behind appearances, piggishly obtuse to the interest of appearances themselves. She had cared for nothing in them but their beauty, and its exciting ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... its modernism, culture, and arrived-ness is a source of recurring marvel and pleasure. If a handful of people four hundred miles from a railway, as the crow flies, and seven hundred miles by actual practicable trails, can accomplish what has been done, into what status of producing activity will this whole country spring when it is given rail communication with the ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron

... The motive usually starts at the bottom and grows continuously to the top, with the base, whether a mass of leafage, a vase, or other unit of ornament, well defined and the crowning unit strong and rich. The central axis can be actual or merely evidenced by the symmetry of the sides, preferably actual. To prevent an effect of absolute perpendicular division or of stringiness, this axis, between its base and crown, is divided either by knots of ornament, concentrated masses, ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 06, June 1895 - Renaissance Panels from Perugia • Various

... the misty wreaths of vapor—all, all was dreamy, delightful, soothing, all save his heart—there was the conflict—there the change. Was it a troubled dream, with the dark oppression of which he was struggling, or was it stern, waking, actual life? That moment's review of his wild career was terrible. He saw to what extremes his ungovernable passions had hurried him; he saw their inevitable consequences; he saw also his own fate; ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... interminable twisting and turning of the universe; that acute analysis for which centuries of over-subtlety had prepared the Polish Jew's brain, and which was now for the first time applied scientifically to the actual world instead of fantastically to the Bible. And it was perhaps when he was lying on the bare earth that the riddle of existence—twinkling so defiantly in the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... been taken locally in our long walk, for we had been absent from our customary haunts for seventy-five days, having travelled by land and sea—apart from the actual walk from John o' Groat's to Land's End—a distance nearly a thousand miles. Everybody wanted to be told all about it, so I was compelled to give the information in the form of lectures, which were repeated in the course of many years in different parts of the country ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor

... John and Lord Palmerston was a calamity to the country, to the Whig party, and to themselves. And although it had for some months been a threatening danger on the horizon, I cannot but feel that there was accident in its actual occurrence. Had we been in London, or at Pembroke Lodge, and not at Woburn Abbey at the time, they would have met and talked over the subjects of their difference. Words spoken might have been equally ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell

... had been bad blood between him and Braddish for some time over political differences of opinion and advancement. But into these Hagan had carried a circumstantial, if degenerate, imagination that had grown into and worried Braddish's peace of mind like a cancer. Details of the actual killing were kept from us children. But I gathered, since the only witnesses of the shooting were heelers of Hagan's, that it could in no wise be construed into an out-and-out act of self-defence, and so far as the law lay ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... like life. Oh, that she were here, as this wonderful image of hers is. I would speak to her. I am not wise or learned; but orators never pleaded as I would plead to her for my Ernest's heart." Still her eye glanced upon the picture; and I suppose her heart realized an actual presence, though her judgment did not; for by some irresistible impulse she sank slowly down and stretched her clasped hands toward it, while sobs and words seemed to break direct from her bursting heart. "Oh, yes! you are beautiful, you are gifted, and the eyes of thousands wait upon your very ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... arguments urged by Washington in his letter to Colonel Laurens. Its able exposition of the actual state of the country, and his arguments in support of the application of Congress for a fleet and army as well as money, when laid before the King and the ministry, decided them to afford the most ample aid to the American cause. A ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... other birds are as unusual as they are delightful, since this is almost the first time these feathered friends of the kiddies have appeared in print. These bird stories, like the Sleepy-Time animal stories, are based upon actual natural history facts, but while the youngster eagerly listens to them, a moral foundation, of deeper importance than that in ...
— The Tale of Grandfather Mole • Arthur Scott Bailey

... that a definitive threat by our plenipotentiaries would not be taken seriously, and that on this very account any attempt energetically to maintain our position could produce the requisite effect only by actual war. And a war it was that confirmed our position everywhere abroad, though not with either an European or an Asiatic, but with an African power—a war which, though it had a very indirect bearing upon the subject in question, yet brought this ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... of Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne have been so often connected without due discrimination, that it is imperative to consider here the actual relation between the three men. Inquiry might naturally be roused by the circumstance that, although Hawthorne has freely been likened to Irving in some quarters, and in others to Poe, the latter two are never supposed to hold anything in common. Indeed, they might aptly ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... one point," Harry said. "It can't be half and half in terms of actual bisection. Look, Rosalie, in this matter of running the home we're making a contract between two parties and—don't forget I'm a lawyer—it has to be an equable and just contract, and to be that it has to be based ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... become inoculated with the nihilistic bacilli and although I had no doubt that many of them were at heart loyal to the emperor, I already knew better than they did the immensity of the obligation they had undertaken in swearing allegiance to an association of persons dominated by fanatics and by actual criminals whose trade was murder and whose chiefest pleasures and relaxation was the study of how best to ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... a rock, and split into mere planks and beams of rhyme. The Captain sat in the dark shop, thinking of these things, to the entire exclusion of his own injury; and looking with as sad an eye upon the ground, as if in contemplation of their actual fragments, as ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... "No actual harm. But in the circumstances, why be conspicuous? Weren't you comfortable with Mrs. Middleton? She seemed a miraculously nice old body for a lodging-house keeper, and fussed over you ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... the tales of spirit manifestation in America,—musical or other sounds; writings on paper, produced by no discernible hand; articles of furniture moved without apparent human agency; or the actual sight and touch of hands, to which no bodies seem to belong,—still there must be found the MEDIUM, or living being, with constitutional peculiarities capable of obtaining these signs. In fine, in all such marvels, supposing ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... of the current descriptions of heaven approached the actual grandeur and beauty of the blue sky, flecked with ruby and gold, and its liquid mirror that lay below, calm, dimpled and glorified by that translucent, ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... all, and so like a flash of unreal fancy, that but for a flake of white foam left quivering and perishing on a mail sack after the vision had flashed by and disappeared, we might have doubted whether we had seen any actual horse and man ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley

... own fancy, language, melody, and purpose; a lofty ideal of man the spirit, to a deep sympathy with man the worm, toiling, eating, drinking, struggling, falling, rising, and progressing, amidst his actual environments; and become the Magnus Apollo ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... terrible struggle against brute force are shown in the excessive nervousness of the combatants, who have become delirious with their aspirations towards liberty. Hatred of actual reality and distrust of those who have resigned themselves to it have made them accept sympathetically the most extreme and uncompromising measures, and one often thinks one sees a certain generosity among the people who are at war with society,—often, ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... bringing any material change to the parties involved in this narrative, except those which time brings ordinarily in his train. Young Robert Arbuthnot was a healthy, tall, fine-looking lad of his age; and his great-grandpapa, the rector, though not suffering under any actual physical or mental infirmity, had reached a time of life when the announcement that the golden bowl is broken, or the silver cord is loosed, may indeed be quick and sudden, but scarcely unexpected. Things had gone well, too, with the nurse, Mrs Danby, and her husband; well, at least, after a fashion. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438 - Volume 17, New Series, May 22, 1852 • Various

... Unitarian Deist like Voltaire or Tom Paine, or the more modern sort of Anglican Theosophist to whom the Holy Ghost is the Elan Vital of Bergson, and the Father and Son are an expression of the fact that our functions and aspects are manifold, and that we are all sons and all either potential or actual parents, in which case he is strongly suspected by the straiter Salvationists of being little better than an Atheist. All these varieties, you see, excite remark. They may be very popular with their congregations; but they are regarded ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw

... Augustin. At Ostia itself I was obliged to give up this too literary notion; the sea is not visible there. No doubt at that time the channel was not so silted up as it is to-day. But the coast lies so low, that just hard by the actual mouth of the Tiber, the nearness of the sea can only be guessed by the reflection of the waves in the atmosphere, a sort of pearly halo, trembling on the edge of the sky. At present I am inclined to think that the window of the house at Ostia was very likely turned towards the ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... this list, a good many families were evicted a year after the Act was enforced, and many more were at that time under notice to quit. Mr. Msimang, modestly states in an explanatory note, that his pamphlet contains "comparatively few instances of actual cases of hardship under the Natives' Land Act, 1913, to vindicate the leaders of the South African Native National Congress from the gross imputation, by the Native Affairs Department, that they make general allegations of hardships without producing any specific cases that can bear examination." ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... a congressman, he made his first actual effort toward the abolition of slavery by drawing up a bill for the freeing of slaves in the District of Columbia and paying their owners a good price from the coffers of the Government. This bill had many supporters, but it was obstructed ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards

... military training, being born at a time when Rome was engaged in most important wars, and when young men learned how to act as officers not by theory but by actual service in the field. He first served as military tribune under the consul Marcellus in the war with Hannibal. Marcellus perished in an ambuscade, but Titus was made governor of Tarentum after its recapture, and of the surrounding territory. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long

... slow. Ibsen's nature was not in any sense precocious, and even if he had not languished in so lost a corner of society, it is unlikely that he would have started prematurely in life or literature. The actual waking up, when it came at last, seems to have been almost an accident. There had been some composing of verses, now happily lost, and some more significant distribution of "epigrams" and "caricatures" to the ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out. The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment, to protect ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... thing from its rightful owner, or who had been legitimately relieved from all obligations, would, on losing his title, be liable to be dispossessed or subjected again,—the public welfare demanded that a term should be fixed, after the expiration of which no one should be allowed to disturb actual possessors, or reassert rights too long neglected.... The civil law, in regulating prescription, has aimed, then, only to perfect natural law, and to supplement the law of nations; and as it is founded on the public good, which should always be considered before individual welfare,—bono ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... moneylenders. Bankers and financiers were known in Rome and Athens, and we know that some machinery existed by which the monetary claims of one country on another could be settled by something that fulfilled the functions of the modern bill of exchange. The actual provision of metallic currency has from the earliest times been almost entirely under the control of the government which took into its own hands, as an essential part of the police protection which it gives to the people, the coining ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... No considerations of place or person hinder him from indulging in his favourite pastime. In steam-boats, in diligences, in the public walks and promenades, into the dining-rooms of hotels, every where does the pipe intrude itself; carried as habitually as a walking-cane; and even when not in actual use, emitting the most evil odour from the bowl and tube, saturated as they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various

... 30.1 degrees; yet the mean temperature of the whole year is 53.2 degrees, affording no indication of these extremes. The mean annual temperature alone, therefore, would be entirely misleading, as it would give no idea of these alternations of heat and cold. Such being the case, the actual character of any climate will be far better realized by placing in juxtaposition the mean annual temperature, the mean temperature of the hot, and the mean temperature of the cooler months. First of all, then, I purpose showing the mean annual temperature, and also the ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)

... becomes visible—I might say only becomes actual—by the fire kindled through the meeting of a perfection out of us and an inward appetite therefor. And it is the flaming of this fire, thus kindled, that lights up to us the whole world wherein we live, the ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... and of polarization observable in the case of skylight are manifested by those actinic clouds; and they exhibit additional phenomena which it would be neither convenient to pursue, nor perhaps possible to detect, in the actual firmament. They enable us, for example, to follow the polarization from its first appearance on the barely visible blue to its final extinction in the coarser cloud. These changes, as far as it is now necessary to refer to them, may ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... was to reach only such sections as were then in revolt. If the proclamation had been immediately operative, and had liberated every bondman in the jurisdiction to which it applied, it would have left over a million slaves in actual thraldom. Indeed, Earl Russell, the British premier, was quite correct when, in speaking of the proclamation, he said: "It does not more than profess to emancipate slaves where the United States authorities cannot make emancipation a ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume

... dreams which we have at our disposal for answering this question, we are at once moved to add as a fourth source of the dream-wish the actual wish incitements arising during the night, such as thirst and sexual desire. It then becomes evident that the source of the dream-wish does not affect its capacity to incite a dream. That a wish suppressed during the day asserts itself in ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud

... rational considerations, are fittest for young students whose reasoning powers are acute, but who have not the knowledge of law necessary for enabling them to treat controversiae which hinge on legal questions. These last are intended as a preparation for the pleading of actual causes in court, and should be regularly practised even by the most accomplished pleader during the spare moments ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... of such portraits—embracing a few of the earlier characters, whose "mark" is traceable in the growing civilization of the West and South—is the design of the present work. The reader will observe that its logic is not the selection of actual, but of ideal, individuals, each representing a class; and that, although it is arranged chronologically, the periods are not historical, but characteristic. The design, then, is double; first, to select a class, which indicates a certain stage of social or political advancement; and, second, ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... oppressive. But AGNES and EGERTON CASTLE are persons far too sympathetic not to avoid this danger. Instead of lecturing, they talk with an engaging discursiveness that lures you from page to page, as it might from bed to border, were you an actual visitor in the exquisite Surrey garden that is their ostensible subject. One thing with them leads to another. "Lilacs," they say. "Ah, lilacs—" and immediately one of them is started upon a whole series of rambling, DU MAURIERISH recollections ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various

... actual pain," replied Doctor Conrad, tactfully, "you are probably suffering more than she is at the ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... always been a province in which the consumption of liquor was large in proportion to its population. When it was first settled by the Loyalists, and for many years afterwards, the use of liquor was considered necessary to happiness, if not to actual existence. Every person consumed spirits, which generally came to the province in the form of Jamaica rum, from the West Indies, and as this rum was supposed to be an infallible cure for nearly every ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay

... of place to shoot by first sighting the object aimed at. This was usually impracticable in actual life, because the object was almost always in motion, while the hunter himself was often upon the back of a pony at full gallop. Therefore, it was the off-hand shot that the Indian boy sought to master. There ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... somewhat later in date. Another very early manuscript is the sixth century fragment of fifty-eight leaves of a Latin Psalter, styled the Cathach or "Battler." For centuries this fragment has been preserved in a beautiful case as a relic of Columba; as, indeed, the actual cause of the dispute between ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... that, you little old scrub!" cried the imperious Turk; "would you provoke me to soil my fingers by pulling that beastly snub nose?" For Mr Briggs had saved himself any actual mask, by merely blacking ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney

... so that we might experience the course and vicissitude of prices. We must keep books, and our ledgers were overhauled at the month's end by the principal or his assistants. To add a spice of verisimilitude, "college paper" (like poker chips) had an actual marketable value. It was bought for each pupil by anxious parents and guardians at the rate of one cent for the dollar. The same pupil, when his education was complete, resold, at the same figure, so much as was left him to the college; and even in the midst ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... in the position of a husband, there are circumstances which have led us to consider the nuptial couch as an actual means of defence. For it is only in bed that a man can tell whether his wife's love is increasing or decreasing. It is the conjugal barometer. Now to sleep in twin beds is to wish for ignorance. You will understand, when we come to treat of civil war (See Part Third) of what extreme ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... said to himself, striking out his hands in a kind of feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own powerlessness, against that weight of the present and the actual which seems to the enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy as the mass of AEtna ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... exercised in the selection of the timber, it being necessary to choose not only that which was thoroughly sound, but also such as could without very much labour be conveyed to the saw-mill. This latter necessity, or rather the actual labour of conveying the timber to the mill, caused their progress to be somewhat less rapid than they had anticipated, especially as Nicholls was now busily engaged at the smithy preparing the bolts, fastenings, and other iron work for the little ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... directly upward to a height of 1-1/2 to 2 feet, often with no apparent reason other than play. This is, however, a fighting or guarding movement, though indulged in for play. The play instinct seems to be well developed, and in evidence on any moonlight night when actual harvesting operations are ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor

... of the conditions we have mentioned, it goes without saying that there is either a simple congestion or an actual inflammation, localized or general, of the laminae of the injured foot. In neither case, however, can the resulting mischief be closely compared with the lesions attending an attack of laminitis proper, a disease which appears to have an almost specific cause, ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks

... mergings of the personal with the general life that one felt one's self a mere wave on the wild stream of being, yet thrilled with a sharper sense of individuality than can be known within the mere bounds of the actual. But now he knew the sensation in its fulness, and with it came the releasing power of language. Words were flashing like brilliant birds through the boughs overhead; he had but to wave his magic wand to have them flutter down to him. Only they were so beautiful up there, weaving ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton

... stories, based on the actual doings of grammar School boys, comes near to the heart of the average ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower

... pass on. In spite of the horror and misery that pervade all of his later work, there is in it much less of actual melodrama than here, and rarely, I should say never, that sort of brutality, that useless insufferable violence to the feelings, which is the last distinction between melodrama and true tragedy. Now, in NOTRE DAME, the whole story of Esmeralda's passion ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... intrinsic desirability of coffee—the actual pleasure to be derived from the act of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers



Words linked to "Actual" :   actuality, current, literal, actual eviction, actual sin, real, actual possession, actual damages, factual



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