Literary notes about amount (AI summary)
The word “amount” is deployed in literature with a remarkable range of functions, from providing precise numerical values to conveying more abstract, even metaphorical, measures. In some texts it quantifies tangible entities, as seen in monetary sums and chemical variables—for instance, exact financial figures ([1], [2], [3], [4]) or measures in chemistry ([5], [6], [7])—while in other works it indicates proportions of abstract qualities like laughter, wealth, or truth ([8], [9], [10]). Authors also employ “amount” to compare, limit, or accentuate concepts; for example, characters debate whether certain efforts “amount to much” ([11], [12]), or the “amount” of obligation and sympathy in social settings is scrutinized ([13], [14]). This varied usage, found across genres from Dickens and Adam Smith to Thoreau and Nietzsche ([8], [15], [16], [17]), underscores the word’s flexibility as both a concrete measure and a tool for rhetorical nuance in literary expression.
- “You may have it,” I said, “with the sheath, if you will let me have the one thousand Roman crowns, the amount of the letter of exchange.”
— from The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt, 1725-1798. Complete by Giacomo Casanova - Of this amount, up to the beginning of the present year, the boys and the earnings of the house had contributed no less than $172,776.38.
— from How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob A. Riis - [117] On July 23, 1914, the amount was $339,000,000.
— from The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes - In 1855, the amount was 168,100,000 pounds of Java coffee, and 4,080,000 pounds of coffee from the other islands.
— from All About Coffee by William H. Ukers - It does not increase the absolute amount of nitrogen.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - The amount of nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, contained in different foods, has been accurately determined by many able and reliable chemists.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - Determination of the amount of percussion of the breech upon the elevating screw, and of that of the trunnions upon the trunnion holes.
— from The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America by Thomas Jefferson - This was done and said with a comical mixture of jest and earnest, and, leading to a great amount of laughter, made them very merry indeed.
— from Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens - What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what amount of justice springs from your tribunals?
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo - But this opposition of good and evil is really the opposition of a greater or lesser amount of pleasure.
— from Protagoras by Plato - And what did it amount to—it was a laughing-stock.
— from Project Gutenberg Compilation of Short Stories by Chekhov by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov - That's the whole amount of it," he said, suddenly.
— from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane - We are so used to it that we take it for granted that a considerable amount of it is necessary.
— from Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education by John Dewey - The first is that there should be a sufficient amount of mutual sympathy among the populations.
— from Considerations on Representative Government by John Stuart Mill - It would amount to more than £2,600,000 a year, which is more than the Brazils are supposed to afford.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith - The consensus gentium and especially hominum can probably amount only to an absurdity.
— from Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche - What does our Concord culture amount to?
— from Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
