"Adumbration" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... etc. He has a humorous fashion of giving his little boys comic names; later to appear in his stories. Thus, one known as 'Plorn,' which later appeared as 'Plornish.' This is a pleasant picture of the great writer's domestic life, and it gives also a faint 'adumbration' of what is now forgotten: the intense curiosity and eager anticipation that was abroad as to what he was doing or preparing. Hints of his characters got known; their movements and developments ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... they explain our primary feelings, which they cannot do, but because they express, and in fact constitute, some of our later appreciations. There is no explanation, for instance, in calling beauty an adumbration of divine attributes. Such a relation, if it were actual, would not help us at all to understand why the symbols of divinity pleased. But in certain moments of contemplation, when much emotional experience lies behind us, and we have reached very general ideas both of nature and of life, our ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... relations to the conditions which surround them, their mutual harmonies and discordancies of structure, the bond of union of their present and their past history, he finds himself, according to the received notions, in a mighty maze, and with, at most, the dimmest adumbration of a plan. If he starts with any one clear conviction, it is that every part of a living creature is cunningly adapted to some special use in its life. Has not his Paley told him that that seemingly useless organ, the spleen, is beautifully adjusted as so much packing between the other ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... overruling, concurrent action of God in the order of nature; which is no miraculous action, but the operation of laws which owe their foundation, institution, and maintenance to an omniscient Creator of whose intelligence our own is a feeble adumbration, inasmuch as it is created in the "image and likeness" ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... and chestnut of her thick hair was dank and sodden with brine, the wistful face that she turned up to him was pinched and colorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a sudden, as she leaned heavily on his arm, a presaging apparition out of the dim future, an adumbration of her own body grown frail and old, looking up to him for help, calling forlornly to him for solace. And in that impressionable moment his heart had gone out to her, in a burst of pity that seemed deeper and stronger ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... will be seen from a passage which will be quoted by and by, his leanings were towards that vague and indefinable doctrine which identifies God with all the forces and their manifestations in the universe. Afterwards even this adumbration of a theistic explanation of the world seems to have passed from him, and he lived, as many other not bad men have lived, with that fair working substitute for a religious doctrine which is provided in the tranquil search, or the acceptance in a devotional spirit, of all larger ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... Philosophy" which deals with Socrates, "The highest activity does not always take the form of conformity to rule. There are critical moments when rules fail, when, in fact, obedience to rule would mean disobedience to that higher law, of which rules and formulae are at best only an adumbration." ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde |
