contexture

Updated: May 3, 2025

I present it to you, not that you may kiss it, but that you may observe the contexture of the sinews, the close network of the muscles, the breadth and capacity of the veins, whence you may infer what must be the strength of the arm that has such a hand."

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra - The History of Don Quixote, Volume 1, Part 14

The unity and contexture of this monarchy, of this grand edifice, having been ripped and torn in her old age, by this thing called innovation, has since laid open a rent, and given sufficient admittance to such injuries: the royal majesty with greater difficulty declines from the summit to the middle, then it falls and tumbles headlong from the middle to the bottom.

Michel de Montaigne - The Essays of Montaigne — Volume 04

Lovers then expressed the passion of their souls in the unaffected language of the heart, with the native plainness and sincerity in which they were conceived, and divested of all that artificial contexture which enervates what it labours to enforce.

Earl of Beaconsfield Benjamin Disraeli - Venetia

For the most part, and especially in these latter ages, persons are culled out for this work from amongst the common people, upon the sole consideration of well-speaking, as if we were to learn grammar from them; and the men so chosen have fair reason, being hired for no other end and pretending to nothing but babble, not to be very solicitous of any part but that, and so, with a fine jingle of words, prepare us a pretty contexture of reports they pick up in the streets.

Michel de Montaigne - The Essays of Montaigne — Volume 10

For there is a strange connection between emotional Christianity and a want of straightforwardness in daily business life, and of self-control and government of the appetites and the senses. That has been sadly shown, over and again, and if we had time one could easily point to the reasons in human nature, and its strange contexture, why it should be so.

Alexander Maclaren - Expositions of Holy Scripture: Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John

I like not a contexture, where the seames and pieces may be seen: As in a well compact bodie, what need a man distinguish and number all the bones and veines severally? That eloquence offereth injurie unto things, which altogether drawes us to observe it.

Michel de Montaigne - Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian

The native and proper habitation of Odin is distinguished by the appellation of As-gard. The happy resemblance of that name with As-burg, or As-of, words of a similar signification, has given rise to an historical system of so pleasing a contexture, that we could almost wish to persuade ourselves of its truth.

Edward Gibbon - History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 1

SECT. XL. Of the Tongue and Teeth. The tongue is a contexture of small muscles and nerves so very supple, that it winds and turns like a serpent, with unconceivable mobility and pliantness. It performs in the mouth the same office which either the fingers or the bow of a master of music perform on a musical instrument: for sometimes it strikes the teeth, sometimes the roof of the mouth.

François de Salignac de la Mothe- Fénelon - The Existence of God

But it was not so with Perrier. His dissimulation was of a stronger contexture, and not to be broken even by sorrow and confinement.

Arthur L. Hayward - Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences

Now this hypothesis is as directly opposed to my view as supervention is to evolution, inasmuch as I hold the organized body itself, in all its marvellous contexture, to be the PRODUCT and representant of the power which is here supposed to have supervened to it.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life.