The quality of being difficult to detect or analyze

Usage examples of subtlety.

I began to see that the subtlety, complexity, and basic dissimilarity of waking experience to deeper and more archetypal dreams and experiences within dreams might in itself be cause of forgetting.

He had recurring flashes of a universal myth cycle explaining, in grand architectonic fashion, the growing informational subtlety that rose out of energy, through matter, through life, through mind, through worldmind and starmind and universal mind.

Beyond all automation and subtlety, L1-A would give the Podmaster back his absolute power.

Has a flair for factual reporting but fortunately an extrovert and without subtlety.

He used considerable subtlety in reaching his objective, which was information about Elmer Rait, an American of Columbus, Ohio, with whom I went to school, and with whom I was for several years in partnership until I decided it was not worth while to try to continue to get along with him.

The impersonal, reportorial quality of the third-person objective point of view works well to suggest ironies of situations and speech, those understated subtleties of discovery and reversal that make for psychological suspense.

He rehabilitated the love-business as he and his wife had newly imagined it, and, to disguise the originals the more effectively, he made the girl, whom he had provisionally called Salome, more like himself than Louise in certain superficial qualities, though in an essential nobleness and singleness, which consisted with a great deal of feminine sinuosity and subtlety, she remained a portrait of Louise.

The quantum subtleties that could, in principle, render the whole superposition visible were buried in the sheer number of details that would have had to be tracked in order to observe it.

The new territory which he made his own included contemporary politics, the growing role of mass communications, changing morals, the ways of the unconscious, all with a subtlety and intensity unmatched by anyone else.

She was happy enough, to put my poor results down to my inability to grasp the subtlety of the Afrikaans language as well as being the youngest in class, whereas I already spoke Zulu and Shangaan and, like most small kids, found learning a new language simple enough.

Then shadows moved up from the bruise-black depths, shading more and more of the writhing billows of cumulus and nimbus, finally climbing into the high cirrus and pond-rippled altocumulus, but at first the shadows brought not grayness or darkness, but an infinite palette of subtleties: gleaming gold dimming to bronze, pure white becoming cream and then dimming to sepia and shade, crimson with the boldness of spilled blood slowly darkening to the rust-red of dried blood, then fading to an autumnal tawny russet.

In ways devoid of his own vaunted subtlety, it was conveyed to Solon that Little Arcady expected him to do something.

As to the coyer subtleties of the score, their discovery provides fresh interest for repeated hearings, giving The Ring a Beethovenian inexhaustibility and toughness of wear.

What did he have in common with this Cain come to judgment, this bemedaled swaggering boor who rejoiced in having reduced all the subtleties of conscious thought to rigidly simple, unavoidable alternatives: kill or be killed!

To explain contradictory statements in the older and later parts of the Veda, Brahminical learning makes use of the subtleties of an harmonistical method of interpretation.