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Use nimble in a sentence

Definition of nimble:

  • (adjective) mentally quick
  • (adjective) moving quickly and lightly

Sentence Examples:

"Your wit is nimble and methinks most sound," said the Queen, decisively.

Looking carefully at my gun, I made for that part of the forest from whence came the sounds, trying to be as nimble and as noiseless as I could.

As they were nimble and well-acquainted with the locality, they effected their retreat without difficulty; whereas the Macedonians, on account of the heaviness of their arms and their ignorance of the roads, durst not pursue them vigorously.

She is sitting in majestic presence on her throne of office, with her gold-bowed spectacles astride her stately nose, and her devoted subjects clustering around her, their tongues and fingers nimble as ever in the good cause of universal philanthropy.

He had, not unnaturally, boundless confidence in his argumentative powers; they were subtle, piercing, nimble, never at a loss, and they included a power of exposition which, if it was not always succinct and lively, was always weighty and impressive.

A great deal was said here and there of her composure, her large studiously expressionless gray eyes, her nimble mind that so often routed her inquisitors, but was allied to a temperament of ice and a manifest power of cool and deliberate calculation.

There was no question as to the quality of Elizabeth's playing; she had authority, without which the most agile execution is no more than a mere facility of finger, acquirable like the nimble maneuvers of a conjurer, and in itself as devoid of artistic merit.

They are, as a rule, utterly uneducated, know nothing of books, are shut out from the world, and have no refuge from ennui in such employments as needlework, knitting, and embroidery, for which the nimble fingers of the sisterhood are so well adapted.

The coincidence of a florid girl and a pale horse is always exasperating, at least to the girl; a hurried retreat in the presence of a menacing enemy, naturally exasperates to full pitch of desperation the belligerent boss of the nimble, obedient Mule.

For a week, every day, at every meal, in every subtle form, in some ingenious disguise, still was forced upon our notice this omnipresent beef; it went through more changes than Harlequin in the Pantomime, and like that nimble individual came always out uninjured.

The birds, however, decked in the gayest plumage conceivable, must give unmixed delight; and a tropical forest, filled with parrots, macaws, and peacocks, and enlivened with the gambols of monkeys and other nimble quadrupeds, must be a very amusing spectacle.

The destroyers are like the forwards, quick, light and nimble, valuable chiefly because of their ability to run swiftly and to dodge cleverly, while the heavy, stolid backs represent the battleships in their ability to withstand the heavy shocks of the game.

Now, this heavy, bright, nimble metal is known by another name besides quicksilver; a chemist would call it mercury, and the astronomers use exactly the same word to denote a pretty, bright, nimble, and heavy planet which seems to try to elude our vision.

On the ground it is altogether as nimble and active, its creeping mouse-like motions, and the extreme facility with which it turns and bounds over the surface, enabling it easily to elude pursuit, and amply compensating for the paucity of its powers of flight.

His paramount claim to the gratitude of his countrymen rests upon his nimble perception of the nature of the task which he had been suddenly called upon to perform, and upon the speed with which he set every channel in motion to accomplish his purpose.

His mind was concrete and moved with difficulty in regions of the abstract; but, even when he could not follow the reasoning, it gave him a curious pleasure to follow the tortuosities of thoughts that threaded their nimble way on the edge of the incomprehensible.

I began to hope that the bear might be baffled after all, and finding the horse too nimble for him, might desist from his attacks, particularly as the horse had already administered to him several kicks that would have discomfited any other assailant.

Peace was gone almost before she had finished giving her directions, and as she watched the nimble feet skimming through the clover, she smiled tenderly, then sighed and looked sadly down at her own useless limbs which would never bear her weight again.

It stretches its strong iron arms in every direction throughout the building; and into whatever chamber you enter, as you climb stair after stair, you find its million hands in motion, and its fingers, which are as skillful as they are nimble, busy at work.

The rugged rock on which the Inn was perched dropped beneath him thirty feet to the moat below, and, though his eyes eagerly scanned the face of the cliff, he could see no possibility, even for one so nimble as himself, of climbing down it successfully.

Skilled backwoodsmen scattered out, Indian fashion, but their less skillful or more panic-struck brethren, and all regulars or ordinary militia, kept together from a kind of blind feeling of safety in companionship, and in consequence their nimble and ruthless antagonists destroyed them at their ease.

His gasps and grunts could already be heard in the distance, for, notwithstanding his various handicaps, he was surprisingly nimble, and in a few moments a round scarlet face hove into sight, and a round gray body rolled over on the ground by her side.

Perhaps it was too soon to be sure, but at all events a ride, a gentle amble on a nimble, easy horse over the elastic turf in the soft, summer moonlight would soothe and quiet him more than anything else, so, wisely, Marion had interposed no objection.

In a thousand disingenuous ways, backed by nimble sophistry, the whole ruling class, with its clouds of retainers, turned out either an increasing flood of praise of these conditions, or masses of misinforming matter which tended to reconcile or blind the victim to his pitiful drudgery.

While not so nimble in action, the great power of these guns of the main battery, and the elaboration and completeness of mechanism for operating them, for supplying them with ammunition, and for rotating the turrets, constitute a complete world in ordnance in itself.

Yet the permanent moral expression of each face it was impossible to discover, for as the nimble flames towered, nodded, and swooped through the surrounding air, the blots of shade and flakes of light upon the countenances of the group changed shape and position endlessly.

Whereat, fetching first a nimble flounce, the red moccasins, as if their wearer made a pivot of his head in the air, described a circular flourish aloft, and in a twinkle, there they were at the bear's flanks, each with a toe at one of our hero's naked heels.

The golden age of the American merchant marine was that of the square-rigged ship, intricate, capricious, and feminine in her beauty, with forty nimble seamen in the forecastle, not that of the metal trough with an engine in the middle and mechanics sweating in her depths.

If only those men who are continually preaching the larder could be forced, sick or well, to swallow every combination which the fertile feminine brain can devise, and the nimble feminine fingers accomplish, I should listen to their exhortations with the most lively satisfaction.

The third sort, is of those that may be accounted the left hands of courts; persons that are full of nimble and sinister tricks and shifts, whereby they pervert the plain and direct courses of courts, and bring justice into oblique lines and labyrinths.

He had bitterly resented in the past any or all interference with his management of his troop, yet had been an unsparing critic of everybody else's system, and, as we have seen, a nimble and active opponent of anything like control on the part of his commander.

For she was no quick and nimble worker for whom the briskness of town life seems somehow congenial and natural; it was rather in solitude, in quiet, solitary evenings, in rambles alone over that open and exhilarating down that her thought matured and ripened best.

Madge afterwards compared them to gigantic grasshoppers; and, indeed, as she panted hopelessly behind them, she would scarcely have felt surprised if one of her nimble pets had, with a higher leap than usual, suddenly perched on the bough of a tree or the roof of a house!

He was celebrated as a bon vivant, and in consequence of his too great indulgence in the pleasures of the table, had become very unwieldy and could not move quick enough to please his nimble captors, so he received many prods in the back from a sharp bayonet.

Beelzebub gave vent to one snort of mingled rage and terror, and then let drive, backing into that cluster of choice rascals like a very thunderbolt of wrath, cleaving his way by every lightning blow of those nimble legs, and tumbling men to right and left.

One old gentleman, whose excessive corpulence rendered retreat on his part impossible, made a virtue of necessity; and, seating himself in his doorway with his loaded king's arm, upbraided his more nimble neighbors, advising them to do as he did, and "stop and shoot the devils."

Not only was there no lack of articles essential to comfort, but tokens of taste were not entirely wanting, for Jennie's nimble fingers fashioned and arranged many little things, which, though costing but a trifle, beautified the home and rendered it more cheerful and attractive.

Though the poet has never yet touched upon politics, yet the careful reader will find that the hero of the sketch must have been a young Democrat, since he is made to appear very nimble, and has a fondness, partial to himself, of getting into rather thorny places.

The scholars were hurried through their lessons without stopping at trifles; those who were nimble skipped over half with impunity, and those who were tardy had a smart application now and then in the rear to quicken their speed or help them over a tall word.

Many dainty little accessories of the toilet gave scope to the delicate fancy and nimble fingers of the ladies who had found solace from the cessation of their labors for the priesthood in making dainty little handbags and other pretty articles, each a marvel of minute handicraft.

Many sprang from their horses and tried to get away on foot; but they slipped on the rocks, and the nimble mountaineers, whose nailed shoes gave them good foothold on their native slopes, and who were used to climbing over perilous heights, caught and destroyed them easily.

He waits to drink a cup of tea poured out by his love's nimble hands; and so, during a lucky moment, while the family are engaged in a light skirmish, he manages to slip unperceived a hoop of diamonds on her unwilling finger, and then he takes his leave.

The captain sate cross-legged upon the white deck with his scimitar lying beside him in its jewelled scabbard, and the sailors toiled to spread the nimble sails to bring the ship into the central stream of Yann, and all the while sang ancient soothing songs.

They would not require to be amused or even entertained after the manner of his own countrywomen; they would appear before him amply capable of yielding rather than exacting diversion, and often through the mediums of nimble wit, engaging humor, or an audacity at once daring and picturesque.

As a matter of fact, no objection ever seems to be raised to a competitor who transgresses this rule, and we remember to have seen a nimble player skipping about like an electrified eel outside the magic circle, until stopped by a barrier of chairs at the edge of the big arena.

Footsteps approached on the inside, and after some thumping and kicking on its panels it was burst open by a nimble old lady in immaculate gown, with carefully adjusted collar, and wavy hair combed back in a tidy knot and with still a dark shade in it.

Here the blind white creatures that inhabit its dark, slow-flowing waters are more plentiful, but are as unlike those nimble, glistening fellows which inhabit the streams of the outer world, as the cavern's atmosphere of darkness and death is different from our atmosphere of light and life.

Scrambling here and sliding there, at the imminent risk of breaking his neck, or at least spraining an ankle, Tom pelted along after his nimble guide, and arrived breathless at the water's edge, his clothes torn, and his hands scratched by the scrub and thorn.

Self-preservation is his grand object, and though as indefatigable, and more nimble than the wolf, he never trusts entirely to the swiftness of his course, but contrives himself an asylum, where he retires in cases of necessity, and in which he dwells and brings up his young.

The captain sat cross-legged upon the white deck with his scimitar lying beside him in its jeweled scabbard, and the sailors toiled to spread the nimble sails to bring the ship into the central stream of Yann, and all the while sang ancient soothing songs.

The dexterity of her nimble fingers was remarkable, and as she brought two thin edges accurately together by giving them a little bite, she would glance at the visitors out of the corners of her gray eyes with a look that out-sharpened all her other sharpness.

During the rainy season the tribe lived almost exclusively on the trees, and he speaks in very high terms of the dexterity with which they would leap from branch to branch, a mode of travelling in which he often found it too difficult to follow his nimble spouse.

And, bending on one knee to pick it up, they caught a glimpse of a slender young man in fashionable afternoon attire, who, as they entered with the crash of the shattered window in their ears, sprang to his nimble feet and stood confronting them, knife in hand.

Had the emergency called simply for physical powers or for manual dexterity, the chances were large that he could rise to the occasion; but in a pass where the demand was for mental adroitness and nimble wits, Jerry knew the captain to be infinitely his superior.

Not only are two pairs of strong hands needed, but it is necessary that the possessors of those hands should approach the fray from opposite sides, and be nimble and strong enough to get clear away, one from the other, when each pair has grabbed its dog.

Through their efforts to make a beautiful toy they may become more patient, more accurate, more observant, and more nimble with their fingers, but these virtues will come more naturally and readily if the teacher has but one object in view; singleness of purpose is the secret of success.

A family of them still inhabited the ancient boughs, and it amused him to remember how he once believed that the nimble brown creatures belonged to a tribe of dwarf Indians who might attempt to scalp him with their little knives if they caught him out after dusk.

If in one of these institutions for the petrifaction of the human mind there is a teacher who is either not nimble enough to escape the conclusions of a bright pupil or too honest to try, he is at once found to be "incompetent as an instructor," and is dropped from the faculty.

She extends a firm, white hand in cordial greeting, and as there is only one more doll to complete the set, you settle down beside her to watch the process, and notice the deft and nimble fingers, as they swiftly run up a flounce or adjust a tiny trimming.

Well, some think that one of the hemispheres of the brain hangs fire, and the small interval between the perceptions of the nimble and the sluggish half seems an indefinitely long period, and therefore the second perception appears to be the copy of another, ever so old.

She was nimble with her fingers in plying the needle, and took in hand the household linen, hemmed the sheets, attached buttons, darned holes, and put into condition all that was previously neglected, and through neglect had become ragged, and was falling to premature decomposition.

Gustavus Adolphus, that king of soldiers, was the first that I have ever observed found the advantage of mixing small bodies of musketeers among his horse; and, had he had such nimble strong fellows as these, he would have prized them above all the rest of his men.

In the corral the men were watering their teams; above them on the edge of a mesa, against the rosy sky, the other ponies, out all night on the range, were trooping, driven by a cowboy who darted here and there on his nimble pony, giving shrill cries.

In the midst of all this tilting and sparring of their nimble and fiery wits, we find them infinitely anxious for the good opinion of each other, and secretly impatient of each other's scorn: but Beatrice is the most truly indifferent of the two; the most assured of herself.

I passed among my comrades for a bold, resolute boy, and one that durst fight anything; but I had a different opinion of myself, and therefore shunned fighting as much as I could, though sometimes I ventured too, and came off well, being very strong made and nimble withal.

Nimble and far-flashing wit is more potent against error than the slow dull logic of the schools; and the great humorists and wits of the world have done far more to clear its head and sweeten its heart than all its sober philosophers from Aristotle to Kant.

All at once the nimble steed became so crowded on every side that his only escape from being gored to death was by a tremendous bound which he made over the back of a terrified steer who lowered his head for the purpose of driving his horns into his body.

Never before had he called to his servants without their scurrying on nimble feet to learn his desires, but this time he had struck repeatedly upon the arm of his chair, and had lifted his voice louder and louder, yet neither the Chief Imp nor any other came.

Nimble servants fetched chairs, tables, and golden utensils from the wagon; the cooks bustled about, and were so ready and eager to help each other that soon, as if by magic, a splendidly laid table where nothing was wanting, down to the very flowers, awaited the hungry travelers.

They did not let it want for food, but the child did not grow taller, but remained as it had been at the first, nevertheless it looked sensibly out of its eyes, and soon showed itself to be a wise and nimble creature, for everything it did turned out well.

With one of his nimble springs he lunged through the crowd, his big fat shoulders breasting the mob, wormed himself out into the air; slipped down a ladder to the deck below, interviewed the steward, borrowed a blanket and a pillow and proceeded to hunt up the ironclads.

Phil had hurried to the river's edge where he washed dishes and milk buckets in a shorter space of time than he would ordinarily have considered proper; but the car was chugging away in waiting, and he jumped up to the seat beside Dave in an exceedingly spry and nimble manner.

Then one would see going up, up, up, and then sinking down, down, down, Pollack, extinct pipe in mouth, humorously observant, bringing his mind slowly to the seventy-seventh decision that the captain was a Card, while the words flowed from the latter in a nimble incessant good.

As in football, ice hockey presents a fruitful field for diplomacy and clever tactics; and the wisest general usually manages to carry his team to victory over those who may be much more nimble skaters and even smarter with their sticks, but not so able in the line of strategy.

"I know not," he wrote in the Advertisement to the book, "if women be commonly engaged in printing, but their nimble and delicate fingers seem extremely well adapted to the office of compositor, and it will be readily granted that employment for females is amongst the greatest desiderata of society."

Paralyzed and still a prey to incurable torments, immovable in his armchair except for his nimble fingers, he drove his pen merrily to the making of comedies, tales, pamphlets, and the verse that, like him, was impishly awry with mockery, as if chattered by "a wilderness of monkeys."

That worthy personage is drawn entertaining his naval colleagues, admirals, commodores, and captains, in his state cabin, with the best of cheer; baskets of prime vintage from the Isles of the Madeira, are ready to the nimble steward's hand, and the goodly flasks are uncorked in a twinkling.

Weeding, and especially such thorough, radical weeding as alone would satisfy the rector's conscience, was my detestation; and, moreover, just at the time of being called upon to weed, there was sure to be something else of engrossing importance which my nimble little wits had set themselves upon doing.

Both the common house mouse and the white-bellied fence mouse are mushroom destroyers, but, so far, the nimble but timid field mouse (among garden, open air, and frame crops generally) has never yet troubled our mushrooms, but I can not believe that this immunity is voluntary on its part.

It seemed to me that we might have kept on along the trail and had a mighty good time, getting more and more nimble and stopping now and then to bake a pie and have a decent meal, and putting up our hair in crimps at night, without worrying about other folks' affairs.

The knight thought to chastise him, but the lad was too nimble for any there, and his heels carried him off, leaving Don Quixote highly incensed at his story, which moved the company to hold their laughter, lest they should raise his anger to a dangerous height.

Her way led under and around fragmentary masses of chalk crag belted with flints; and where the flints had fallen out, leaving the surface pockmarked, gulls and guillemots flew about chattering and screaming, and now and again a nimble tern, the swallow of the sea, glanced by.

Andrew Carnegie, the jubilee plunger of beneficence, that rosy, gray-haired, nimble little figure, going to and fro between two continents, scattering library buildings as if he sowed wild oats, buildings that may or may not have some educational value, if presently they are reorganized and properly stocked with books.

Beverley, sore, haggard, forlornly disheveled, had his arms bound again and was made to march apace with his nimble enemies, who set out swiftly eastward, their disappointment at having their sport cut short, although bitter enough, not in the least indicated by any facial expression or spiteful act.

The fortress had become the home of thieves and murderers, who would break into their neighbor's house and steal his goods, or knock a man on the head for the sake of an old grudge or a well-filled purse, sure that, if he were only nimble enough, no one could touch him.

The collection as a whole will afford innocent recreation for the fireside and social circle, and thus contribute to the happiness of those who enjoy the higher forms of pleasure that flow from the exercise of the mind upon those subjects that require quickness of thought and a nimble wit.

He was still several hundred yards from her, but owing to the feebleness of gravity on the planet he was so preternaturally light and nimble that he might have covered the distance in a minute or so, had he been more accustomed to control his limbs, and the ground been smoother.

Shag moved on nimble feet, and presently stood down on the shore, near the edge of the stream, while the colonel, on the bank above the eddy, played the fish that had taken his bait and sought to depart with it to some watery fastness to devour it at his leisure.

Timid animals, whose will it is to seek their safety in flight instead of contest, present themselves with light, nimble legs and sharp hearing in lieu of all weapons; a circumstance which has even necessitated a striking prolongation of the outer ear in the most timid of them all, the hare.

By pinning up here and there, tucking up one thing and letting out another, the lady wrought away rapidly with her neat and nimble little hands, working as only a Frenchwoman could have done, and in three minutes, her travel-stained and disordered attire was nicely and very passably arranged.

All of this, dazed by the misfortune, Marianne waited to see, but as the first of the pursuers darted out of sight she turned and ran to the box stall where she kept her favorite pony, a nimble bay, inimitable on a mountain trail and with plenty of foot on the flat.

The songs and cries of birds acquire a strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with such bizarre unreasonableness.

There is an instant of bustling, crunching of ice, stamping and pawing of feet, then the door bursts open suddenly, as if by a gust of wind, and a nimble little fellow bounces in, clad all in red and flecked with tufts of cotton on cap and shoulders to look like snow.

There was a compelling fascination for her in the nimble finger that traced a big outline so deftly in the sand, and since she was upside down to it, where she sat, it followed that she got up, and went round to see what manner of a caricature this was.

The Englishman's range of reading was wider than the Frenchman's, and his scholarship more accurate; but the Frenchman had a compact neatness of expression, a light and nimble grace, whether in the advancing or the retreat of his argument, which covered deficiencies, and often made them appear like merits.

He was transported from a world of failures and disappointments into a delectable land where a dinky little man, armed with nothing but a horsehair bow and his own nimble fingers, compelled a gut-strung box to sing songs of love and throb with pain and dark passions and splendid triumphs.

Little did these pompous invaders suspect how this slender capable girl with the hazel eyes was spicing the hours behind their backs, and drawing with nimble and irreverent pencil portraits of her captors, daring caricatures which she exhibited in secret to the terrified delight of her patients.

The yells of the audience, added to those of the attendants, sent the nimble little fellows scurrying up ropes, center and quarter poles, all the time keeping up their merry chatter, for freedom was a thing they had not enjoyed since they had been captured in their jungle homes.

As one approaches a feeding flock, he notes the eagerness with which the birds run forward, or rise and flit past their fellows, now diving at a nimble weevil, now leaping to catch a passing bug, but always pushing on until one perceives a curious rolling effect in the total movement.

On the broad and open plain he assembled his band of forty, and they came to a halt in a green meadow, dismounted from their nimble steeds, and sat down in a ring to tell of adventure and to take counsel as to the next journey to be made across the boundless steppe.