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Narrowness   /nˈɛroʊnəs/   Listen
Narrowness

noun
1.
The property of being narrow; having little width.
2.
An inclination to criticize opposing opinions or shocking behavior.  Synonym: narrow-mindedness.
3.
A restriction of range or scope.  "The attraction of the book is precisely its narrowness of focus" , "Frustrated by the narrowness of people's horizons"
4.
A small margin.  Synonyms: narrow margin, slimness.  "The landslide he had in the electoral college obscured the narrowness of a victory based on just 43% of the popular vote"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Narrowness" Quotes from Famous Books



... said that there was narrowness and provincialism in this; But when young men are thrown into the world, with all its temptations and snares, it is well that the recollections of home and kindred should survive to hold them in the path of rectitude, and cheer them in their onward and upward ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... of the Gospels notes two seemingly opposing characteristics of Christ's invitations,—their wideness and their narrowness. They were broad enough to include all men; yet by their conditions they were so narrowed down that only a few seemed able ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller

... Unconsciously Jean began to compare the two men, and to weigh their types of character. There was nothing to choose between them in honor or in manliness, though the one was a minister of the Evangel and the other a colonel of his Majesty's Horse, but they were different. Pollock, with all his narrowness of faith and extravagance of action, was a saint, and no one could say that of Claverhouse, even though they might admit he was not the devil of the Covenanting imagination. But John Graham was more human: ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... up but a short time before, now bored him. They were no longer exalted. He was nervous and irritable, what of his hard times, disappointments, and close application to work, and the conversation of such people was maddening. He was not unduly egotistic. He measured the narrowness of their minds by the minds of the thinkers in the books he read. At Ruth's home he never met a large mind, with the exception of Professor Caldwell, and Caldwell he had met there only once. As for the rest, they were numskulls, ninnies, superficial, dogmatic, and ignorant. ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... at the same time, an appearance of avarice and mystery, as in a miser's home, and the dank scent of cold incense which gives a chill to the stale atmosphere of a chapel. This methodical meanness, this narrowness of thought, which is visible in every detail, can only be expressed by one word—Bigotry. In these sinister and pitiless houses Bigotry is written on the furniture, the prints, the pictures; speech is bigoted, the silence is bigoted, the faces are those of bigots. The transformation ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac

... this day forth, and in which I accustomed myself to look upon the outward circumstances of my existence as being merely subservient to my will. And by this means I was able to escape from the hampering narrowness of ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... sensuous surrounding, but a religion that maintained its vitality despite a repelling plainness, not to say a repulsive ugliness, in its external forms. For could he doubt the force of a religious principle that had divested every woman in the little church of every ornament? Doubtless he felt the narrowness that could read the scriptural injunction so literally, but none could doubt the strength of a religious conviction that submitted to such self-denial. And then there was Priscilla, with all her gifts, sitting in the midst of her boys, gathered from that part ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... counter-suggestion works when a stimulus (what is suggested, again) is itself prevented from contributing to the response. In counter-suggestion, response to the suggestion itself is inhibited, and in positive {550} suggestion response to other stimuli is inhibited. Both involve narrowness of response, and are opposed to what we commonly speak of as "good judgment", the taking of all relevant stimuli into account, and letting the response ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... circumstance. The reason would seem to be that his sense of the relations of men with one another was not virile enough to comprehend the deep austerer lines which mark the brow of the benignant divinity of Justice. In the one place in his writings where he speaks of justice freely, he shows a narrowness of idea, which was perhaps as much due to intellectual confusion as to lack of moral robustness. He says excellently that "love of the human race is nothing else in us but love of justice," and that "of all the virtues, justice is that which contributes ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... various as was the King's temper, its range was less wonderful than its harmony. Of the narrowness, of the want of proportion, of the predominance of one quality over another which go commonly with an intensity of moral purpose Alfred showed not a trace. Scholar and soldier, artist and man of business, poet and saint, his character kept that perfect balance which charms us in no other ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... thus unexpectedly found I supposed must be Westernport; although the narrowness of the entrance did by no means correspond with the width given to it by Mr. Bass. It was the information of Captain Baudin, who had coasted along from thence with fine weather, and had found no inlet of any kind, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... being stranded on the ignorance of those who surrounded her, and found herself isolated as a sort of pedant; and as time went on, the narrowness of interests chafed her, and in like manner left her alone. As she grew past girlhood, the cui bono question had come to interfere with her ardour in study for its own sake, and she felt the influence of an age eminently practical and sifting, but with ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... is distinct cranially from all other subspecies of P. fasciatus in the narrowness of the interparietal, the greater length of the tympanic bulla and the greater mastoidal breadth. The fine, silky nature of the pelage is shared, to some ...
— Geographic Distribution of the Pocket Mouse, Perognathus fasciatus • J. Knox Jones, Jr.

... would be 1,000 miles an hour, and the height of tide inconsiderable. But even the Atlantic is not broad enough for the formation of a powerful tide wave. The continents, the variation in the direction of the coast line, the different depths of the ocean, the narrowness of channels, all interfere to modify it. At first it is affected with only a slight current motion toward the west—a motion which only acquires strength when the wave is heaped up, as it were, by obstacles to its progress, as happens to it over the shallow parts of the sea, on the coasts, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various

... and in which the Natives are very curious and expensive, both in Furniture and Ceilings; and by this means the City was in a Blaze in different Parts at once. The Conflagration lasted a whole Week.—What chiefly contributed to the Destruction of the City, was the Narrowness of the Streets. It is not to be expressed by Human Tongue, how dreadful and how awful it was to enter the City after the Fire was abated: when looking upwards one was struck with Terror at beholding frightful Pyramids of ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... The narrowness of my sphere of observation only concentrated the faculty into greater strength. The few natural objects which I met—and they, of course, constituted my whole outer world (for art and poetry were tabooed both by my rank and my mother's sectarianism, and the study of human ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... delicate as if his limbs had been carved by art in the most accurate proportions. He was not a great orator, but winning and persuasive, as may be seen in his letters. The greatest distress of the besieged was the narrowness of the place they were in, their quarters being very confined, and the whole place but two furlongs in compass; so that both they and their horses fed without exercise. Accordingly, not only to prevent the listlessness of such inactive living, but to have them in condition to fly if occasion ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough

... as every traveller has observed, and as all the world knows, are in general mean and uncomfortable. The height and gloomy aspect of the houses; the narrowness of the streets, and the want of pavement for foot passengers, convey an idea of antiquity, which ill accords with what the imagination had anticipated of the modern capital of the French empire. This circumstance renders the admiration of the spectator ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison

... first, soldiers were landed with some difficulty, with the intention of marching along the shore (which was a very close and narrow stretch) to the fort, in order to plant the artillery, with which to bombard it. As the governor thought that mischief would ensue because of the narrowness and closeness of the pass, he landed a number of pioneers on the high ground, to open another road, so that the remainder of the army might pass, and the enemy be diverted in several directions. By these efforts, ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga

... thought. They studied Homer and Hesiod, Empedocles and Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle, and they were startled by the discovery that in Greek thought there were many elements, moral and religious, familiar to them: this enhanced the attraction. The narrowness and exclusiveness to which strict nationality always gives rise, engendering contempt and hatred for everything foreign—which made even the Greeks, with all their intellectual culture, draw a line of demarcation between Greek and barbarian—gave way to a spirit of cosmopolitan breadth of view which ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... this narrowness of the law was afterwards amended, the Emperor Claudius being the first to confer on a mother, as a consolation for the loss of her children, a statutory right ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian

... as the eternal school-boy. I mean no insult; I mean to express his qualities as well as his defects. He has the pluck, the zest, the sense of fair play, the public spirit of our great schools. He has also their narrowness and their levity. Enter his office, and you will find him not hurried or worried, not scheming, skimping, or hustling, but cheery, genial, detached, with an air of playing at work. As likely as not, in a quarter of an hour ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... edge my thoughts to action, When the miserly press of each day's need Aches to a narrowness of spilled distraction My soul appalled at the world's work's time-greed? How can I pause my thoughts upon the task My soul was born to think that it must do When every moment has a thought to ask To fit the immediate craving of its cue? The coin I'd heap for ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa

... Mandeville's rigorism, the narrowness with which he defines "virtue," the broadness with which he defines "vice," his failure to recognize any intermediate ground between "virtue" and outright "vice," or any shades or degrees of either, the ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville

... specialists, but the only addition which the writer sees as necessary in consequence of the study of taboo is the fact that the way of the woman transgressor is peculiarly hard because of the sex taboo, the ignorance and narrowness of good women, and the economic limitations of all women. Ignorance of the results of entrance into a life which usually means abandonment of hope may be a contributing cause. Boredom with the narrowness of family life and desire for adventure are ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard

... maps and illustrations finely engraved. Then he had laid before the secretary of the King the urgent need of some religious instruction. Acadia had quite a thriving Jesuit mission. This order was not in high favor with Champlain, who deprecated their narrowness. The Sieur Houel recommended the Recollets, and four willing missionaries were finally chosen. The company had fitted up a large vessel and were taking all the stores they could purchase or beg, and quite a number of emigrants of a better ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas

... life; money but a mere accident. A horrible sense of the unreality of everything that surrounded her began to oppress Susan. She saw the poisoned undercurrent of this glittering and exquisite existence, the selfishness, the cruelties, the narrowness. She saw its fundamental insincerity. In a world where wrongs were to be righted, and ignorance enlightened, and childhood sheltered and trained, she began to think it strange that strong, and young, and wealthy men and women should be content to waste enormous sums of money upon ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris

... himself enrolled with the Parisian clergy, hoping thus to obtain a curacy and eventually a bishopric. He became again the confessor of Mlle. Bontems, now the wife of M. de Granville, and contributed to the trouble of that household by the narrowness of his provincial Catholicism and his inflexible bigotry. He finally disclosed to the magistrate's wife the relations of Granville with Caroline Crochard. He also brought sorrow to the last moments ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe

... sounds unpleasantly in the ears of those who adore him as their divine Lord and Master. Nevertheless it is in an important sense true. He was educated among the common people of Galilee, and had no special human training. It was an age of narrowness and formalism. The scribes and Pharisees, who sat in Moses' seat, had covered up the true meaning and spirit of the Old Testament beneath a mass of human traditions that substituted "mint, and anise, and cummin" for "the weightier matters of the law." Yet in such an age Jesus came forth a perfect ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... Councillor ordered him to be prosecuted in the Star Chamber for riotously breaking open men's doors to get his daughter. The two men thoroughly disliked and undervalued one another. Coke made light of Bacon's law. Bacon saw clearly Coke's narrowness and ignorance out of that limited legal sphere in which he was supposed to know everything, his prejudiced and interested use of his knowledge, his coarseness and insolence. But now in Parliament Coke was supreme, "our Hercules," as his friends said. He posed as the enemy of all ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church

... man's hat of the highest gloss and latest form; and on the next peg a smart evening overcoat. They had belonged to Robert Gareth-Lawless who was dead and needed such things no more. The same dim light showed the steep narrowness of the white-railed staircase mounting into gruesome little corners of shadows, while the miniature drawing-rooms illumined only from the street seemed to await an explanation of dimness and chairs unfilled, combined with ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... degree of finish characterizing many of the remains; but as already seen in the discussion of masonry, the latter results were attained by the patient industry of many hands, although laboring with but little of the spirit of cooperation. The narrowness of the largest doors and windows in the ancient pueblos suggests timidity on the part of the ancient builders. The apparently bolder construction of the present day, shown in the prevailing use of horizontal openings, is not due to greater constructive ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff

... characteristics of the man of culture is freedom from provincialism, complete deliverance from rigidity of temper, narrowness of interest, uncertainty of taste, and general unripeness. The villager, or pagan in the old sense, is always a provincial; his horizon is narrow, his outlook upon the world restricted, his knowledge of life limited. He may know a few things thoroughly; he cannot ...
— Books and Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... learned their symptoms far too quickly; she learned to know the depression and irritability which greeted her every effort to rouse and to please him. It was at such times that Lorimer made bitter revolt against what he termed her narrowness and prejudice, or burst into occasional angry petulance, if she tried to urge him to cut loose from the club and from the constantly-growing influence of Lloyd Avalons who was discerning enough to discover that Lorimers appetite ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray

... glory in things out of Me, or to take pleasure in some private good, shall not be grounded in true joy, nor be enlarged in his heart, but shall many ways be encumbered and straitened.... And if heavenly grace enter in and true charity, there will be no envy nor narrowness of heart, neither will self-love busy itself. For Divine charity overcometh all things and enlargeth all the powers of the soul."—De Imitatione Christi, ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris

... middle ward. This completely encircles the inner ward, on a much lower level; it is a narrow space bounded by a wall, with low, semi-circular bastions at the corners; it is commanded at every point from the inner ward; the narrowness of the space would prevent the concentration of large bodies of assailants or the use of battering-rams, and communication is at several points stopped by walls or buildings jutting out from the ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little

... indignity and insult to Mr. Polk. He denied with emphatic iteration that the Speaker had been "impartial." On the contrary he had been "the tool of the Executive, the tool of his party." He analyzed Mr. Polk's course in the appointment of committees, and with much detail labored to prove his narrowness, his unfairness, his injustice as a presiding officer. For one, he said, he was "not wiling to give to Mr. Polk a certificate of good behaviour, to aid him in his canvass for the governorship of Tennessee, for which he is known to be a candidate." He believed "this vote of thanks was to ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... determined enmity. The fact of Thyrza's love in no way influenced her: her imagination was not strong enough to enable her to put herself in Thyrza's place and see Egremont as her sister saw him. With the narrowness of view which is common enough in good and warm-hearted women, she could only regard him as the disturber of happiness, the ruin of Thyrza's prospects. Lydia was not ambitious; she had never been enthusiastic about Gilbert's promotion to the librarianship, and ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing

... His mind was in an uproar with this whirl of new ideas. As he came in sight of the venerable mansion of his forefathers, and the little realm where the Webbers had so long and so contentedly flourished, his gorge rose at the narrowness ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... a letter written by a friend of many years' standing: "In the councils (of the various societies) he has always been distinguished by his sound judgment and his deep sympathy with their purest and highest aims. There never was a trace of partisanship in his action, or of narrowness in his sympathies. On the contrary, every one engaged in thoroughly scientific work has felt that he had a warm supporter in Spottiswoode, on whose opportune aid he might surely count. The same breadth of sympathy and generosity of sentiment has marked also his relations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various

... anticipated, objection has been made to the narrowness of my definition of romanticism. But every writer has a right to make his own definitions; or, at least, to say what his book shall be about. I have not written a history of the "liberal movement in English ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... creates within its members the belief that their lot is much to be preferred to that of other comradeships and associations. Western Americans take satisfaction in living in a free, progressive, hospitable way in "God's country." They try not to be pharisaical about the narrowness of the East, but they achieve a sincere scorn for the hidebound conventions of an effete society. Easterners in turn count themselves fortunate in having a highly developed civilization, and they usually attain real pity for those who seem to live upon a psychic, ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... serious faults with which Leopold II. was chargeable were due to the narrowness of his religious bigotry, and, in the difficult and trying circumstances of the latter years of his reign, the lack of the courage needed to enable him to be truthful and to keep faith with his people. When the frightened and fickle pope ran away from Rome, strong influences ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various

... The sky was rainy and dark, and completed the desolateness of the scene, which in nowise heightened our anticipations of the renowned glen. At length we rejoined the Sorgues and entered a little green valley running up into the mountain. The narrowness of the entrance entirely shut out the wind, and, except the rolling of the waters over their pebbly bed, all was still and lonely and beautiful. The sides of the dell were covered with olive trees, and a narrow strip of emerald ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... functional character. Under deep general anesthesia, however, it is impossible to differentiate between the normal reflex and a spasmodic condition, since both are abolished. Many cases of intermittent esophageal stenosis supposed to be spasmodic are due to organic narrowness of lumen plus lodgement of food, obstructive in itself and in the esophagitis resulting from its presence. The organic narrowing, congenital or ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson

... banks, so that none could dream of fording, and not so many of swimming its dark green dangerous waters. And the day wore on towards evening and the glory of the western sky was unseen because of the wall of high trees. And still the host made on, and because of the narrowness of the space between river and wood it was strung out longer and looked a very great company of men. And moreover the men of the eastern-lying part of Mid-mark, were now marching thick and close on the other side of the river but a little way from the Wolfings and their fellows; ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris

... came sparingly. In a corner many women were sitting silently. Near them stood one of the beautiful red baskets for which the Katingans higher up the river are famous. As I proceeded a little further an extremely fine carved casket met my astonished eyes. Judging from its narrowness the deceased, who had been ill for a long time, must have been very thin when she passed away, but the coffin, to which the cover had been fastened with damar, was of excellent proportions and symmetrical in shape. The material was a lovely white wood of Borneo, on which were drawn large round flowers ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz

... ideal husband; tender and affectionate as a woman, but withal firm and steady as steel; a strong support in worldly as well as spiritual affairs. Latterly the extreme narrowness of the Calvinistic doctrines, which had made his sermons so unlike his daily practice, had given place to broader views, and a more elevating realisation of the Creator's love. Many hours he spent with Sara in her herb garden, on the moor, or sitting by the crackling fire, conversing ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... Cologne, Frauenkirche at Treves), Spain (Toledo, Leon, Barcelona, Segovia, etc.), and Belgium (Tournay, Antwerp). In England the choir had more commonly a square eastward termination. Secondary transepts occur frequently, and these peculiarities, together with the narrowness and great length of most of the plans, make of the English ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin

... thoughtfully, "but, speaking frankly, this limitation of your powers to the chemical action of your body only shows the narrowness of your scientific training. Had men been taught the power of the will as the underlying principle of every effect, one drug would have proved quite as efficacious as another, and bread pills would have met the ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale

... Dol certainly—rank with our smaller English cathedrals, allowing for a greater effect of height, partly positive, partly produced by narrowness. They are, in fact, English second-class churches with the height of English first-class churches. Bayeux, in every way the largest of the three, perhaps just trembles on the edge of the first-class. Coutances, the ...
— Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine • Edward A. Freeman

... have already surveyed to so much advantage from the top of Ben Muich Dhui. We are here in the spot which to us, of all this group of scenery, appears to be the most remarkable, as being so unlike any other part of Scotland, or any place we have seen elsewhere. The narrowness of the glen and the height of its walled sides are felt in the constrained attitude in which we look up on either side to the top, as if we were surveying some object of interest in a tenth story window of our own High Street. This same narrowness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various

... tales give us a very sound sense of their reality. It may seem paradoxical to attribute this to the narrowness of the author's imagination; but we cannot help doing so. On reflection, we shall see that it is not so much persons as events that Mr. Trollope aims at depicting, not so much characters as scenes. His pictures ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... narrow cañon. Through this cañon, after making a detour to avoid some very difficult ground, the wagon-road passes for three or four miles. Along the stream is a growth of cottonwood trees; but its great advantage as an ambuscade lies in the narrowness of the cañon. On the top of the two ranges of bluffs the Indians had intrenched themselves in a series of pits, so that when the troops halted at the first volley, they stood between two fires at a range of only six hundred and fifty yards ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... progressing from narrowness, bigotry, selfishness and envy, to broadness, reason, brotherly love and contentment, and we shall progress from the narrow confines of obstinate orthodoxy or bulldogmatics, by breaking down the sect, cult, ism, and doxy barriers ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... the two lads could only think of their attempt with a shudder, for their efforts, though they did not quite grasp the narrowness of their escape from death, had resulted in a peculiar shock to their system, one effect of which was to make then disinclined to do anything more than sit and lie in the darkness watching the faint ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn

... than good. There was far greater reason to fear that too much would be attempted, and that violent movements would produce an equally violent reaction, than that too little would be done in the way of change. But narrowness of intellect, and flexibility of principle, though they may be serviceable, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... their experiences or gathered news from every passer-by; for they feared to separate from their families, lest a worse shock might overtake some one of them apart from the rest. Besides this, the danger in the streets was greater than at home, because of their narrowness and the likelihood of the walls on either side toppling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... was flooded with fugitives from France, emigrants who presented in themselves moving pictures of the sufferings of those who were opposed to the Revolution, and who were not slow to express their sense of the ruin that had fallen upon their country. King George's native shrewdness and native narrowness of mind had made him from the first an active opponent of the Revolution. He declared that if a stop were not put to French principles there would not be a king left in Europe in a few years. To him, whose business above ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... law on any subject concerning the relations between the sexes from the corrupt society of the Roman Empire.] Roman morality was in the main a rational rule of duty, the shortcomings and aberrations of which arose not from superstition, but from narrowness of perception, peculiarity of sphere, and the bias of national circumstance. The auguries, which were so often used for the purposes of political obstruction or intrigue, fall under the head rather of trickery ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... produce the civilization which he enjoys. Every person needs to extend his thought and appreciation until it is large enough to include other peoples and times than his own. For only in this way can he come to feel kinship with the race at large, and thus save himself from provincialism and narrowness. ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts

... The narrowness of the arches and the rush of the flowing or the ebbing tide made the 'shooting' of the Bridge a matter of great danger. The Duke of Norfolk in 1429 was thrown into the water by the capsizing of his boat and narrowly escaped with his life. Queen Henrietta, in 1628, was nearly ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... a mile wide, and lies five or six miles, nearly E. N. E., from the largest of Murray's Islands; it would consequently be more direct to pass through it than to follow the Investigator's track round the north-eastern reefs; but from the narrowness of the opening and the many green spots where the depth is unknown to me, I dare not recommend it to a ship, though very practicable for small vessels in fine weather. The dry bank on the south side of the opening will probably be covered at ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... in that my sixteenth year I lived with my parents, leaving all school for a while (a season of idleness being interposed through the narrowness of my parents' fortunes), the briers of unclean desires grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to root them out. When that my father saw me at the baths, now growing towards manhood, and endued with a restless youthfulness, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine

... him, none has met with such scant mercy from posterity as Laud, who has been gibbeted as the impersonification of narrowness, of bigotry, and of cruelty. The judgment is unscientific, for whatever may be thought of the humanity or wisdom of his policy, he only did what all have done who have attempted to impose ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... I never was in. It seems all the drains and sewers of the place run into that same salt basin, voiding into it all their impurities, which, not being able to escape into the sea in any considerable quantity, owing to the narrowness of the entrance, there accumulate, filling the whole atmosphere with these same outrageous scents, on which account the town is a famous lodging-house of the plague. The ship in which we embarked was bound for a place in Italy called Naples, where we were to stay some time. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... sacred marks of toil mean? They mean all the gossip of the workroom, the whispered scandal, the mind soiled by all the filth that is talked; they mean lost chastity, foolish chatter, all the wretchedness of their everyday life, all the narrowness of ideas which belongs to women of the lower orders, combined to their fullest extent in the girl whose fingers bear the sacred ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... am more and more grieved, as I re-read this and other portions of the most affected and weak of all my books, (written in a moulting time of my life,)—the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'—at its morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book was, like my others, honest; and in substance it is mostly good; but all boiled ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... to raise her spirits in the confined and scantily furnished chamber that she was to share with Susan. The smallness of the rooms above and below, indeed, and the narrowness of the passage and staircase, struck her beyond her imagination. She soon learned to think with respect of her own little attic at Mansfield Park, in that house reckoned too small for ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... or jokes or anything of the kind—except the illustrated ones—but what relied more or less upon prurient matter to tickle the fancies of prurient minds. Besides, my idea is that, just at present, the Board Schools tend to a certain hardness and narrowness of character, which is perhaps softened down by the development by these papers of the lighter side of human nature. Tit-Bits, I have reason to know, has in many cases induced the study of some science ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... island before I saw him, and that it wanted now but ten minutes to five o'clock, the hour at which the punt made its last trip with visitors. And in almost the same moment joy shook and thrilled me as I realised the romantic hazard of our meeting at all, which was accentuated really by the narrowness of our margin of time. A matter of minutes and he would be gone. A matter of minutes and I should never have seen him at all. But that could not have been. I refused to contemplate a life at St. Peter's in which this inestimable amelioration (now nearly five minutes ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... morning with Miss Mirvan, down a lane about a mile from the Grove, when we heard the trampling of horses; and, fearing the narrowness of the passage, we were turning hastily back, but stopped upon hearing a voice call out, "Pray, Ladies, don't be frightened, for I will walk my horse." We turned again, and then saw Sir Clement Willoughby. He dismounted; and approaching us with the reins in his hand, presently recollected us. "Good ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney

... Niagara river is 1,250 feet in breadth, and from 2 to 300 in depth. The current is very rapid, and the wreathing and perturbed appearance of the water shews that its course is much impeded by the narrowness of the channel, which must be entirely composed of rocks; for, otherwise, the continual and rapid attrition of such a large river as that which flows through it, would undermine and wear away the banks, and thus gradually enlarge and widen ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper

... sequestered valley lost something of their grey monotony now that she had a companion in all her intellectual occupations. Fondly as she loved her father, she had not been able to hide from herself the narrowness of his education and the blind prejudice which governed his ideas upon almost every subject, from politics to natural history. Of the books which make the greater part of a solitary life she could never talk to him; and it was here that she had so sorely missed the counsellor and friend, who had ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... already been done, the reader is referred to the Catalogue of the Educational Series, published at the end of the Spring Term; of what remains to be done I will make no anticipatory statement, being content to have ascribed to me rather the fault of narrowness in design, ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... average youth finds out in his teens—that grave eyes and silent aloofness and lofty self-will and icy pietism in a maiden do not always signify that she is a saint and that she must be worshiped as such. Ferris had no one to tell him that far oftener these signs point merely to stupid narrowness and ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune

... Walnuts and other fruit trees grow in the orchards; and the wine of Patmos is the strongest and best flavoured of any in the Greek islands. The view of Patmos from the highest point is said to be very curious. The eye looks down on nothing but mountains below it; and the excessive narrowness of the island, with the curious form of its coast, have ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... ignorance will be a better education, provided it be a principled ignorance, than much which secures a local examination certificate or a degree. At the same time, if any study fits us, it should be pursued unflaggingly. We must not be afraid of the imputation of narrowness. Our subject will begin to be of most service to us when we have passed the threshold and can think for ourselves. If we devote ourselves, for example, to the works and biography of any great man, the pleasure and moral ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford

... and so on, till only Tyee remained. He received the call of the last man, but a quick doubt assailed him and he stayed to ponder. Half an hour later he swung up to the opening and peered in. He could feel the narrowness of the passage, and the darkness before him took on solidity. The fear of the walled-in earth chilled him and he could not venture. All the men who had died, from Neegah the first of the Mandells, to Howgah the last of the Hungry Folk, came and sat with him, but ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London

... d'etat, which rapidly succeeded one another, were a form of government congenial to this gloomy, silent, friendless youth who blinked at the world through his spectacles and was incapable of seeing anything except the narrowness and the intrigues that were a part of his surroundings. More and more he showed himself a despot; he persecuted and imprisoned hundreds of Radicals, who were the overwhelming majority of the population. Espionage was rampant, the finances were in a state of chaos and Serbia's prestige ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... sir. You have always been grumbling about the narrowness of your sphere, and envying men abroad who send and bring such fine collections home. Be off together, and make a big collection for yourselves of everything ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... of light and shade, on the other hand, are partly, in their academical formulas, too haughty, and partly, in their narrowness of imagination, too weak, to learn much from the schools of colour; and pass into a state of decadence, consisting partly in proud endeavours to give painting the qualities of sculpture, and partly ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... as Alfieri would speak and act, could he, without losing his peculiar characteristics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues which would become quite secondary matters by the side of his essential qualities of pride, narrowness, decision, violence, and self-importance. Whether he paint his face into a smile or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig of innocence, or the black wig of villainy, the man's movement and gesture, the tone of his voice, the accent of his words, the length ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.' There is so much in this time to break down the separation between him that believeth in Christ and him that doth not; narrowness has come to be thought such an enormous wickedness, and liberality is so lauded by all sorts of superficial people, that Christian men need to be summoned back to their standard. 'Being let go, they went to their own company'—there is a natural affinity which should, and will, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... my restless mind, and my heart is radiant: for in Thatness I have seen beyond That-ness. In company I have seen the Comrade Himself. Living in bondage, I have set myself free: I have broken away from the clutch of all narrowness. Kabr says: "I have attained the unattainable, and my heart is coloured with the ...
— Songs of Kabir • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)

... Matilda had been annoyances to her ever since she could remember. Their continual nagging had fretted her, their constant restraint had chafed her, their narrowness had cramped her. To-day she saw them from a new ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... Shipping is not quite so broad by reason of Sunken Rocks laying off each of the Forts; these rocks may not be properly placed in the plan, being only laid down from the information of the Pilot. The Narrowness of the Channell here causeth the Tides both Flood and Ebb to run pretty strong, insomuch that you cannot Stem it without a fresh breeze of Wind, nor is it safe Anchoring because the bottom is foul and ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook

... no intention of reporting him, and did so only in obedience to positive orders. There surely was nothing malicious or retaliatory in that; and to condemn me for discharging the first of all military duties—viz., obedience of orders—is but to prove the narrowness of the intellect and the baseness of the character which are vaunted as so far superior to those of the "negro cadet," and which condemn him and his actions for no other reason than that they are his. How could it be otherwise than that ...
— Henry Ossian Flipper, The Colored Cadet at West Point • Henry Ossian Flipper

... cheerfully have gone to China, had the sloop been bound thither, came back to his bunk on the first night after a wandering stroll through the lower part of the city. It is quite possible that he would have done the same, viewing the narrowness of his purse, upon the second night, had he not encountered at noon a gentleman in close conversation with the Captain, whom he immediately recognized—though he had seen him but once before—as Mr. Brindlock. This person met him very kindly, and with a hearty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... and thame, so that in no wise we could charge thame; and we war inclosed by the park dyke,[1042] so that in nowyse we could avoid thair schott. Thair horsmen followed upoun our taillis, and slew diverse; our awin[1043] horsemen over-rode our futemen; and so be reassoun of the narrowness of the place, thair was no resistance maid. The Erle of Arrane, and Lord James, in great danger, lyghted amanges the footmen, exhorting thame to have some respect to ordour, and to the saiftie of thair brethren, whome, by thair fleying, thei exponed ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... reality wrong, and that another which he had loathed is in reality right, a tremendous intellectual conversion will have taken place; his own case will constantly act as a warning to him whenever he is again tempted to prejudice or narrowness of outlook. ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... street, properly so called, in Genoa—the Strada Nuova; the others are little paved alleys, most of them impassable to carriages, both from their narrowness and the irregularity of the ground on which the city ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson

... short of its well-meant original purpose is beyond dispute. We see its baneful effect in municipal, State and national government. The unparalleled political corruption in most of our large cities, the narrowness of public men in State and nation, whose horizon is bounded by the limits of their home districts or their own sordid purposes, regardless of public interests, find their culmination in the highest ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... for the tendency backed by natural selfishness towards undue devotion to gain: such narrowness simply does not work, it is crowded out by competition with the superior efficiency of broader motives. And while, here and there, the type continues to exist, its development in new cases is discouraged by every instance illustrating the relative success—in all senses—attained by those ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman

... it one of the highest places in the hierarchy of the sciences; and its persistent neglect and obloquy during the last sixty years of the nineteenth century will be referred to as an example of the almost incredible narrowness and prejudice which prevailed among men of science at the very time they were making such splendid advances in other ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant

... Attorney-General of England, with a dash of his pen, can reverse, alter, or entirely do away the matured result of all the eloquence, and all the abilities of this whole assembly. Before I conclude with Dublin I shall only remark, that walking in the streets there, from the narrowness and populousness of the principal thoroughfares, as well as from the dirt and wretchedness of the canaille, is a ...
— A Tour in Ireland - 1776-1779 • Arthur Young

... is no consecration in your Puritan burial-grounds," said the dying youth, some of that queer narrowness of English Churchism coming into his mind. "So bury me here, in my soldier's dress. Ah! and my watch! I have done with time, and you, perhaps, have a long lease of it; so take it, not as spoil, but as my parting gift. And that reminds me of one other thing. Open that pocket-book ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... true, but it paid a price for the immunity. The people whom an open split would have taken away remained to leaven and dominate the whole lump. This small advanced section, with its men of a type all the more aggressive from its narrowness, and women who went about solemnly in plain gray garments, with tight-fitting, unadorned, mouse-colored sunbonnets, had not been able wholly to enforce its views upon the social life of the church members, but of its controlling influence upon their official and ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... Gloucester and Hereford, who also had a fine body of men at arms to support their column. All the remainder of the English troops, consisting of nine battles, or separate divisions, were so straitened by the narrowness of the ground, that, to the eye of the Scots, they seemed to form one very large body, gleaming with flashes of armour, and dark with the number of banners which floated over them. Edward himself commanded this tremendous array, and, in order to guard his person, was attended by four hundred ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 406, Saturday, December 26, 1829. • Various

... hardness and narrowness of their daily life, and the cold calculation, the lack of sentiment displayed in wooing, I think Puritan husbands and wives were happy in their marriages, though their love was shy, almost sombre, and "flowered out of sight like the fern." A few ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle

... she was Graham's wife. And if he had gone to her in that moment of glorious confession when she had stood at Nawadlook's door, if he had violated her faith when, because of faith, she had laid the world at his feet, he would have fallen to the level of John Graham himself. Thought of the narrowness of his escape and of the first mad desire to call her back from Nawadlook's room, to hold her in his arms again as he had held her in the cottonwoods, brought a hot fire into his face. Something greater than his own fighting ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood

... question that it is the actual church built by Ealdhelm at the beginning of the eighth century and dedicated by him to S. Lawrence. It consists of a chancel, nave and north porch, and among its remarkable features is its great height and the extreme narrowness of the round-headed arch between the nave and the chancel, a feature it has in common with the Saxon church of S. Martin at Wareham; the ground-plan measurements of both these churches are identical. At S. Lawrence's ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath

... devotion of her millions of peasants to the Czar, and in the patient, stubborn strength which is the outcome of long centuries of struggle with the yearly tyrant, winter. Her weakness lies in the selfishness, frivolity, corruption, and narrowness of outlook of her governing class—in short, in their incapacity for organisation. Against the steady resisting power of her peasants the great Napoleon had hurled his legions in vain. That campaign of 1812 exhibited the strength of Russia for ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose

... steadfastness. Of a sudden I could perhaps do something. I understand very well that life is difficult and narrow for every one of us. I know that my godfather sees that, too! But he profits by this narrowness. He feels well in it; he is sharp as a needle, and he'll make his way wherever he pleases. But I am a big, heavy man, that's why I am suffocating! That's why I live in fetters. I could free myself from everything with ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... they may be learned in the law; they may be versed in statistics; they are most useful in their own place; I should shrink from speaking disrespectfully of them; still, there is nothing in such attainments to guarantee the absence of narrowness of mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, or men of information, they have not what specially deserves the name of culture of mind, or fulfils ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... ear; in the dressing-room, listening to her soft words of encouragement to the excited leading-lady; on the narrow stairs leading up to the stage, assisting her to mount them,— and not in the least minding the narrowness; out in front for a jiffy, and then back again; and all the time he was dreading the moment when he would awake and find it ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... simply: "If to be a Russian is to be a bigot, like most of you Pan-Slav enthusiasts, then I am no Russian, but a European." Has he not put the whole gospel of Nationalism in half a dozen sentences in Rudin? He refused, however, to adopt along with his Nationalism the narrowness with which it has been too ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... not troubled by hypersensitiveness. Hearing of the "hall bedroom," the coldness of it in winter, and the breathless heat in summer, the utter loneliness of it at all times and seasons, one could not have felt surprise if the grown-up lad doomed to its narrowness as home had been drawn into the electric-lighted gaiety of Broadway, and being caught in its maelstrom, had been sucked under to its lowest depths. But it was to be observed that G. Selden had a clear eye, and a healthy skin, and a healthy young ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not lovable or hate what was not hateful out of deference for some general principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know not. After the middle turn of life's ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... consequence, and plunged into the effort of his life. He painted the character of Isom Chase in horrible guise; he pointed out his narrowness, his wickedness, his cruelty, his quickness to lift his hand. He wept and he sobbed, and ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... do so at my Request, because she knows I love her: She will dance with me rather than another, for the same Reason. My Fortune must alter from what it is, before I can speak my Heart to her; and her Circumstances are not considerable enough to make up for the Narrowness of mine. But I write to you now, only to give you the Character of Belinda, as a Woman that has Address enough to demonstrate a Gratitude to her Lover, without giving him Hopes of Success in his Passion. Belinda has from a great Wit, governed by as great Prudence, and both adorned ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... like our British cousins, content with the pleasing consciousness that we are the supreme of creation and under no necessity of forever proclaiming it. Our present experience, also, of the unsoundness of English judgment and the narrowness of English views concerning our policy and character may have the good result of making our independence in matters of thought and criticism as complete ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various

... him laughter. These necessary graces saved him from a nature that was essentially savage and that otherwise would have been cruel and bitter. The nose was lean, full-nostrilled, and delicate, and of a size to fit the face; while the high forehead, as if to atone for its narrowness, was splendidly domed and symmetrical. In line with the Indian effect was his hair, very straight and very black, with a gloss to it that ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London

... be an animosity arising from almost a personal feeling; it being a matter of party, a point of honour, the excitement of a game, or a satisfaction to the soreness or annoyance occasioned by the acrimony or narrowness of apologists for religion, to prove that Christianity or that Scripture is untrustworthy. Many scientific and literary men, on the other hand, go on, I am confident, in a straightforward impartial way, in their own province and ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... not upon principles of exclusionism—not from narrowness of view, or illiberality of sentiment—but because I believe that our admirable Constitution, on principles more exalted and under sanctions more holy than those which Owenism or Socialism can boast, proclaims between ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin

... follow, to be led, on the one hand; and on the other, a lively desire for independence and freedom. These feelings often exist in the greatest strength in the same individual; and when they are not each turned in their proper direction, ruin is the consequence. Nothing is more common than to see great narrowness of mind, great prejudices, and great disorderliness of conduct, united in the same person. Nothing is more common than to see the same mind utterly prostrated before some idol of its own, and supporting that idol with the most furious zeal, and at the same time utterly rebellious ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... Bottles, however, were as good as their word, for five minutes afterwards I was landed safe and sound at the Tower wharf. I thanked them all very heartily; but, as I had not enough money to treat them all, made bold to confess the narrowness of my means to the coxswain, begging that he, at least, would do me the honour to take a mug of flip—which could be had, double allowance, for fourpence. He clapped me, in reply, on the shoulder in the most friendly manner, and said, roast him, that he would not see me put upon; ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 2 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... Barnett. It was the first time in his life he would have willingly sacrificed his personal pride for money. He would have done almost anything to get that money for Imogene Chandler. But it was useless to try to persuade the widow that she was wrong. Back of her own narrowness was Reedy Jenkins. This was Reedy's move; he was using the widow's vanity and personal greed for his own ends; and his ends were the destruction of Rogeen and the capitulation of ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby

... having visited in the meantime Germany, Switzerland, and France, and spent the winter in Paris. This year among new scenes and surroundings seems to have brought home to Fredrika, upon the resumption of her old life in the country, its narrowness and its isolation. She was entirely shut off from all desired activity; her illusions vanished one by one. "I was conscious," she says in her short autobiography, "of being born with powerful wings, but I was conscious of their being clipped;" and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... heavy portals swung open. In another instant the door had closed noiselessly, and the three were shut off from the street by a barricade of iron grillwork and plate glass. Both Bob and Merkle were weak from the narrowness of their escape, but the way was still barred by another door, through which two elaborate H's worked into ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... sufferance, and any day the Certosa might be closed if its inmates offended the ruling powers. But the letter, nevertheless, lay like a stone on his heart. All the harshness, the narrowness, the disregard of the interests of the weak, the rude, rough, tyrannical pressing onward of the strong to their own selfish aims, all the characteristics of the modern world seemed to find voice in ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... to be considered that there are minds proportioned to intend many matters, and others to few? So that some can divide themselves: others can perchance do exactly well, but it must be but in few things at once; and so there cometh to be a narrowness of mind, as well as a pusillanimity. And again, that some minds are proportioned to that which may be dispatched at once, or within a short return of time; others to that which begins afar off, and is to be won ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon

... old brougham which he could remember, or so it seemed to him, all his life. But he did not utter his thoughts aloud; he still went in awe of his mother, and he was proud, in a whimsical way, of her old-fashioned austerity of life, of her narrowness of vision, of her dislike of modern ways ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... I've marked his slaves With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile The insensate mob, and whilst one hand was red With murder, feign to stretch the other out For brotherhood and peace; and that they now Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds Are marked with all the narrowness and crime That freedom's young ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... felt; whose mind met him even in the unhesitating confidence of knowledge—it is no wonder that he was in a dream. It turned his little world upside down: so brief a time had elapsed since he had cursed woman for bringing crime into his life, in the narrowness of his ignorance thinking them all alike. He was in the presence of a superior, and his own smallness came over him ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... later, when President Vanderveer realized the full extent of the threatened danger, and the narrowness of their escape, he again held the young ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe

... things we eat, by various juice control The narrowness or largeness of our soul. Onions will make e'en heirs or widows weep; The tender lettuce ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss

... Weymouth. Though its surroundings are pretty, the town itself is an ill-arranged collection of steep and narrow streets, one of which—Cheap Street—deserves notice for its quaintness. The spaciousness of the market-place redeems the narrowness of the streets. With the exception of a little faint-hearted sympathy shown to Monmouth, Frome has never helped to make history. Nowadays it does a brisk trade in woollen cloth, and possesses some large printing-works, breweries, and art-metal ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade

... and deeper life in which the emphasis is placed upon the good, the beautiful, and the true. In this way idealism has inspired many men to put forth their energies for the highest aims, has lifted the individual above the narrowness of a life devoted to himself alone, and has produced characters of exceptional beauty and strength. It claims, indeed, to be able to shape the world of man more satisfactorily than religion can, for it has no need for doctrines ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones

... are many of the essential elements in the Wagner school of musical composition, the bitterness and narrowness of spite with which its upholders have pursued the memory of Rossini is equally offensive and unwarrantable. Rossini, indeed, did not revolutionize the forms of opera as transmitted to him by his predecessors, but he reformed and perfected them in various notable ways. Both in comic ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... altogether of his position, amidst those wide-spreading morasses which cover the country about Arcola. This daring movement was devised to place Napoleon between Alvinzi and Davidowich; but the unsafe nature of the ground, and the narrowness of the dykes, by which alone he could advance on Arcola, rendered victory difficult, and reverse most hazardous. He divided his men into three columns, and charged at daybreak (Nov. 15) by the three dykes which conduct to Arcola. The Austrian, not suspecting ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... reason why patriotism and narrowness should go together, or why intellectual impartiality should be confounded with political trimming, or why serviceable truth should keep cloistered because not partisan. Yet the work of Reconstruction, if admitted to be feasible at all, demands little but common sense and Christian charity. ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville

... vanity he points out to the poor Briton, who shudders at five storeys, the size and grandeur of his imposing palaces. And his arrogance is just. The sky-scraper presents a new view of architecture. It is original, characteristic, and beautiful. Suggested and enforced, as I have said, by the narrowness of the rock, it is suitable to its atmosphere and environment. New York is a southern, sunlit city, which needs protection from the heat and need not fear obscurity. Even where the buildings are highest, the wayfarer ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... I found at Court gave my relatives some grounds to hope that I might have the coadjutorship of Paris. At first they found a great deal of difficulty in my uncle's narrowness of spirit, which is always attended with fears and jealousies; but at length they prevailed upon him, and would have then carried our point, if my friends had not given it out, much against my judgment, that it was done by the consent of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... stature, disappointment in his ambition for preferment, and a natural narrowness of soul, had turned Colonel Landcraft into a military martinet of the most pronounced character. He was the grandfather of colonels in the service, rank won in the old Indian days. That he was not a brigadier-general was a circumstance puzzling only to himself. He was a man of ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... evident that, by turning the sleeve, F, so that the screw works inward, the jaw and all its appendages will be moved bodily in corresponding direction. But its movement is limited by the arms of the washer, G, which, through the narrowness of the recesses, are allowed only just enough play to compensate for slight changes in the jaw. As the above device is applied to every jaw, it follows that any one of them may be nicely adjusted from the outside, so that all ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various

... sixty-five years without seeing a play, and I think I can go on to the end. It's not that it's wrong or that I think myself more virtuous than the rest of the world because I stay away. It's prejudice if you like, intolerance perhaps, narrowness, bigotry—" ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)

... is to hold in his own colony when he returns, and the stock he comes from, let me tell you, that he hath not means enough allowed him to support his station, and is likely to make the more depence from the narrowness of his income—from sheer despair breaking out of all bounds, and becoming extravagant, which is not his turn. But he likes to live as well as the rest of his company, and, between ourselves, has fell into some ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... objection is to the narrowness attributed in the tale to the river St. Clair. This was done in the license usually accorded to a writer of fiction, in order to give greater effect to the scene represented as having occurred there, and, of course, in no way intended as a geographical description of the river, nor was it necessary. ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... could I help being oddly affected by the suggestion that his horse had done double duty before. "On what occasion, and why?" was a question I kept to myself. We were ascending the long, rocky flank of the divide; the narrowness of the trail obliged us to proceed slowly, and in file, so that there was little chance for conversation, had he been disposed to satisfy ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte

... the book-worm awaited him but for an interference excellent and salutary and irresistible. This was the constant companionship of a sister whose nature enabled her to find its complete universe in the only world that she had ever known: she walking ever broad-minded through the narrowness of her little town; remaining white though often threading its soiling ways; and from every life which touched hers, however crippled and confined, extracting its significance instead of its insignificance, shy harmonies instead of the easy discords which can so palpably ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... distances on the one card appeared larger, and another pointed out how the spots were clustered in a certain region, a third how the dots were smaller in some parts, a fourth spoke about the optical illusions, a fifth about certain impressions resulting from the narrowness of the margin, and a sixth about the effect of certain irregularities in the distribution. In short, very different aspects were considered and very different factors emphasized. The discussion was sometimes quite excited, three or four men speaking at the same time. After exactly five ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg

... a certain air of patronizing superiority, boasting unduly of his wider experience and achievements in a way that somewhat nettled me at last, as I began to comprehend that he was merely showing off his genteel graces the better to exhibit his contempt for my provincial narrowness. I did not permit this really to anger me, for our views upon such matters were totally different, and I could not help feel admiration for the ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish

... the woods he went at a trot, leaping logs and splashing through a brook where it was broad; and I kept well up with him. Already my mind had ceased to dwell upon the narrowness of our escape; I was thinking of Guinea as she had stood, shielding ...
— The Jucklins - A Novel • Opie Read

... it was by the belief in the fixity of species, it remained almost entirely descriptive and consisted in the description and classification of the different groups of fossil organisms. As already intimated, this narrowness of view had its compensations, for it deferred generalisations until some adequate foundations for ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... followed, treading on his heels; nor a moment too soon. While they were still within the staircase, which their elbows rubbed on either side, they heard the enemy swarm into the room below. Cries of triumph, of "Savoy! Savoy!" of "Ville gagnee! gagnee!" hummed dully up to them, and proclaimed the narrowness of their escape. Then the night air met their faces, they bent their heads and passed out upon the leads; they had above them the stars, and below them all the world of night, with its tramp of hidden feet, its swaying lights so tiny ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... circumstance to the scoriae of the blackish basalts being often bright red. The ancient submarine orifices whence the porphyries and their fragments were ejected having been arranged in a band, like most still active volcanoes, accounts for the thickness, the narrowness, and linear extension ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin

... steamer acquaintance who is always at hand to prove the trite narrowness of the world, and Bainbridge kicked a chair ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde

... many proofs of discriminating and prayerful perusal. As in regard to reformatory movements so here, she joined no organized body of believers, sympathizing with all of them whose views were noble and Christian; deploring and bearing faithful testimony against anything she deemed narrowness or perversion in theology ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... the description of Codrington's assault on the Great Redoubt in the battle of the Alma; nor, when some high heroic action is in progress, do we often miss an illustration, or at least a metaphor, from the hunting-field. Undoubtedly he had the distinction of his class; but its narrowness was his as surely. Also the partisanship of the eight volumes grows into a weariness. The longevity of the English Bench is notorious; but it comes of hearing both sides ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... apparently an older contemporary of Hosea and Amos. The Assyrian power was looming threateningly on the northern horizon, and a flash or two had already broken from that cloud. No doubt terror had wrought hate and intenser narrowness. To correct these by teaching, by an instance drawn from Assyria itself, God's care for the Gentiles and their susceptibility to His voice, was the purpose of Jonah's mission. He is a prophet of Israel, because the lesson of his history was for them, though his message ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... missionaries, good men imbued with the narrowness of their age, branded us as pagans and devil-worshipers, and demanded of us that we abjure our false gods before bowing the knee at their sacred altar. They even told us that we were eternally lost, unless we adopted a tangible symbol ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... subsidise the work of the Society. I naturally refused to give any such undertaking.[73] I had followed the efforts of the Society very closely; I was deeply impressed with the value of the results which it had accomplished; but its field of activity was limited by the narrowness of its resources. In my opinion, a subsidy to the Society from the Endowment Fund of the Department would be a useful and proper application of public money. At the same time I pointed out that if the Agricultural ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... were wholly uninspired by religious motives. I need only mention Charles Darwin, and when we remember that not even sectarianism ventured to dispute his right to rest within the hallowed precincts of an abbey-cathedral, ecclesiastics themselves must be fast forgetting the deplorable narrowness of old views which made morality and ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... for the fancies of men. Well, how does Lord Elibank? and how does Lord Monboddo?' BOSWELL. 'Very well, Sir. Lord Monboddo still maintains the superiority of the savage life[432].' JOHNSON. 'What strange narrowness of mind now is that, to think the things we have not known, are better than the things which we have known.' BOSWELL. 'Why, Sir, that is a common prejudice.' JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir, but a common prejudice should not be found in one whose trade ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... Pope, in reply to the question which had been asked, even in his day, whether Pope was a poet? asks in return, 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' and adds that 'to circumscribe poetry by a definition will only show the narrowness of the definer, though a definition which shall exclude Pope will not readily be made.' Joseph Warton, too, Johnson's contemporary and friend, while preferring the Romantic School to the Classical, allows that in that ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis

... will certainly resist the valiant reconstruction of economic life with a vigour in exact proportion to their baseness, stupidity and narrowness of outlook. They will, as classes, come up for a moral judgment, on whose verdict the whole future of Western civilisation depends. If they cannot achieve a considerable, an unprecedented display of ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... was increased at such times, though it was risky, for the narrowness of the course, and the size of the steamer, rendered the greatest care necessary to avoid running her bows ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn

... [p.604] The narrowness of the valley of Feiran, which is not more than an hundred paces across, the high mountains on each side, and the thick woods of date-trees, render the heat extremely oppressive, and the unhealthiness of the situation ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... measurement in most of their calculations, which redounds greatly, in this calculating age, to the generosity of the sex. It is quite opposite to the self-measurement which they apply to themselves. Whereas the latter is distinguished by a narrowness of result which almost makes us suspect that Subtraction has been largely at work; the former is crowned with a roundness of figure which leads us strongly to accuse the sum total of having been gained by the corrupt agency of Addition. In fact ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... Even in matters ecclesiastical, the footsteps of the two friends had moved with one consent; each of them preferred a chapel to a church; each was Puritan in a love of simplicity in the things of religion; each disowned the Puritan narrowness, and the grey aridity of certain schools of dissent. On June 14—with the warranty of her published poem which had told of flowers sent in a letter—Browning encloses in his envelope a yellow rose; and again and again ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden



Words linked to "Narrowness" :   wideness, sectarianism, denominationalism, thinness, narrow margin, intolerance, limitation, narrow, parochialism, width, slimness, margin, provincialism, narrow-mindedness, pettiness, restriction, broad-mindedness, fineness, breadth



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