United States or Malaysia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is a breach of etiquette to wear an air of abstraction in society if your mind is really so absorbed that you cannot pay attention to what is going on around you, you had better stay at home. An absent mind is much more frequently a proof of self- conceit than of genius. Eccentricity of any kind is in bad taste.
In the profound abstraction in which he lived every impression appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous impression of whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured except the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words.
The intense mental application required by philosophical abstraction forcibly determines the nervous fluid towards the intellectual organs, and hinders it from being directed towards those of reproduction.
You could hardly have brought more food if you fancied we might be kept here a week." The sustained physical effort called for during the last part of the climb seemed to have dispelled his fit of abstraction. Being an eminently adaptable man, he responded to her mood.
He did so, at first, in pure abstraction, but they presently became the subject of his thoughts. 'Another will made and destroyed, he said, 'nothing determined on, nothing done, and I might have died to-night!
The lake, fed by a natural spring, was a liberal sheet of water, measured by the scale of park scenery; and though its principal merit was that, taken at a distance, it gave a gleam of abstraction to the concrete verdure, doing the office of an open eye in a dull face, it could also be approached without derision on a sweet summer morning when it made a lapping sound and reflected candidly various things that were probably finer than itself the sky, the great trees, the flight of birds.
He seemed a man born after his time, and worthy to have lived and acted in the high and palmy days of Venice. After attending the archduke to the steps of the dais at the upper end of the hall, he made his bow, and began to pace the floor in seeming abstraction from the gay scene around him.
Frequently, when winding through some dense forest, or moving over some extensive plain where nothing beyond themselves told of the existence of man, his companion would endeavour to divert him from the abstraction and melancholy in which he was usually plunged, and, ascribing his despondency to an unreal cause, seek to arouse him by the consolatory assurance that he was not the first man who had been taken prisoner adding, that there was no use in snivelling, as "what was done couldn't be undone, and no great harm neither, as there was some as pretty gals in Kaintuck as could be picked out in a day's ride; and that to a good looking young fellow like himself, with nothing to do but to make love to them, THAT ought to be no mean consideration, enabling him, as it would, to while away the tedium of captivity."
If he gives his mind to the column and lets the column take hold of his mind, allowing his psychological mechanism to work unhampered, he will commit it. The aesthetic intuition of force the human way of appreciating it is, in fact, primary; the purely mechanical and mathematical is an abstraction, superimposed for practical and scientific purposes.
"Good-day, sir," I said, and before he could have known what I was doing I had leapt up, left the room, and was hurrying downstairs. My heart was in still fiercer rebellion now. I would go home. I would appeal to my father. Hard as he had always been with me he was at least a man, not a cold abstraction, like the Church and the law, without bowels of compassion or sense of human suffering.
Word Of The Day