What is "refine"

Usage examples of "refine".

Even so dressed, James Ludlow managed to look slightly out of place, very like a man who was too refined for life aboard a ship.

As they moved, their adaptation became refined to areas as difficult as the arctic and the Kalahari.

They figured the Kurds, Afghanis, and Tuaregs already there would like a bit of smoke, and they could always refine opium into heroin if the Irish and Basques preferred needles to pipes.

Ganges to the Straits of Gibraltar, that they had no leisure for theological controversy: and though the Alcoran, the original monument of their faith, seems to contain some violent precepts, they were much less infected with the spirit of bigotry and persecution than the indolent and speculative Greeks, who were continually refining on the several articles of their religious system.

Bibles, a beautifully written manuscript that both refined and authenticated all subsequent versions, irrefutable proof of the distant origins of traditional Holy Scripture.

And above all the caravanners from Basilica, with their strange songs and seeds, images in glass and cunning tools, impossible fabrics that changed colors with the hours of the day, and their poems and stories that taught the Sotchitsiya how wise and refined men and women spoke and thought and dreamed and lived.

Refining plants are located near mine sites, if possible, since transportation is the major item in bauxite costs.

In a flutelike voice, he sang of the sacred writings, or Vedas, composed well before the first millennium bc, and of the catalogue of magical yajnas, sacrificial formulas, mantras, and rituals that the Vedic religion embodied, and of the many schools, sects, and religions that had developed through the centuries: Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta, Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shak-tas, all of which were preached and practised under the separate canopies of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, which in turn took their impetus from the original Vedic, changing and refining the basic precepts into a multiplicity of separate doctrines : Karma, avatar, samsara, dharma, trimurti, bhakti, maya.

By a dexterous application to his sensual appetites, they compared the tranquillity, the splendor, the refined pleasures of Rome, with the tumult of a Pannonian camp, which afforded neither leisure nor materials for luxury.

This young girl, whose mind had not been refined by study, aimed at being considered innocent and artless, and she did her best to succeed, but I had seen too good a specimen of her cleverness.

Her bracelets and the rings which covered her fingers did not prevent me from noticing that her hand was too large and too fleshy, and in spite of her carefully hiding her feet, I judged, by a telltale slipper lying close by her dress, that they were well proportioned to the height of her figure--a proportion which is unpleasant not only to the Chinese and Spaniards, but likewise to every man of refined taste.

Just as the difference between virile and effeminized, and in conventional terms that between homosexual and heterosexual, becomes more and more confused, so does the difference between simple and refined, aristocratic and barbarian.

From this perspective a classically ordered universe can be reimagined in which the European, the effeminized, the homosexual, the refined, and the aristocratic are systematically opposed to the American, the virile, the simplistic, and the barbarous.

But in any case, cold enfleurage was the most refined and effective method to capture delicate scents.

His weak stomach refused the exactitude of his refined perceptions, lest chance death or injury drag him into the entangling fabric of tragedy.