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More "Contemplative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... become so serious a business from its labours and accompaniments, that the result often seems to fall short of what was expected, and the means seem to overpower the end. On the other hand, a visit to unpretending places in an unpretending way often produces unexpected entertainment for the contemplative man. Some such experiment was the following, where everything was a surprise because little was expected. The epicurean tourist will be facetious on the loss of sleep and comfort, money, etc.; but to a person in good health and spirits these are but ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... Calle Mayor, the only thoroughfare of the town that yet retains some vestige of traffic. It is a fine, long street bordered by stone arcades, within which are the shops, and without which in the pleasant afternoon are the rosy and contemplative shopkeepers. It would seem a pity to disturb their dreamy repose by offering to trade; and in justice to Castilian taste and feeling I must say that nobody does it. Halfway down the street a side alley runs to the right, called ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... little breast, so full of song, 70 Singing above me, on the mountain-ash. And thou too, desert stream! no pool of thine, Though clear as lake in latest summer-eve, Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe, The face, the form divine, the downcast look 75 Contemplative! Behold! her open palm Presses her cheek and brow! her elbow rests On the bare branch of half-uprooted tree, That leans towards its mirror! Who erewhile Had from her countenance turned, or looked by stealth, (For Fear is true-love's cruel nurse), he now 81 With steadfast gaze and unoffending ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... in the sun alone it doth not lie With light to take light from a mortal eye: For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see More than the sun steal mine own light from me. Contemplative desire! desire to be In contemplation that ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command of it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid are just as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, as by men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there a single fact stated in the following pages which ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... statues, and its yew-trees, clipped into fantastic shapes; while the ivy-covered walls that bound it, afford a shelter from the blasts that too often allay the sunshine of our northern climate, and render it a spot where 'tis sweet to saunter, in idle or quiet contemplative mood, at glowing sunset; or chaster beauty of summer evening, when the pure, cold moon mingles her passionless lustre with the gorgeous hues that still linger around the portals of the west—bright train of the departing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... devices to cheat the way, he has but his volume in his hand, his knapsack at his back. From such scenes he draws and hives all that various store which after years ripen to invention. Hence the florid mixture of the German muse,—the classic, the romantic, the contemplative, the philosophic, and the superstitious; each the result of actual meditation over different scenes; each the produce of separate but confused recollections. As the Rhine flows, so flows the national genius, by mountain and valley, the wildest ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the charm of the Italian spring, and he made a pretext for lingering. He had spent five days at Siena, where he had intended to spend but two, and still it was impossible to continue his journey. He was a young man of a contemplative and speculative turn, and this was his first visit to Italy, so that if he dallied by the way he should not be harshly judged. He had a fancy for sketching, and it was on his conscience to take a few pictorial notes. There were two old inns at Siena, both of them very shabby and very dirty. The ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... you recollect the only time that Wordsworth was really witty? He told the story himself at a dinner. "Gentlemen, I never was really witty but once in my life." Of course there was a general call for the bright but solitary instance. And the contemplative bard continued: "Well, gentlemen, I was standing at the door of my cottage on Rydal Mount, one fine summer morning, and a laborer said to me: 'Sir, have you seen my wife go by this way?' And I replied: 'My good man, I did not know until this moment ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... mistaken enthusiast. Jesus of Nazareth appears to have been a man of irreproachable purity, of great piety, and of great mildness of disposition. Though the world has never beheld a character exactly parallel with his, yet it has seen many, greatly similar. Contemplative, and melancholy, it is said of him by his followers, "he was often seen to weep, but never to laugh." He retired to solitary places, and there prayed: he went into the wilderness to sustain and to vanquish the assaults of the devil: ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... the wraith and foreboding phantom; the spectra of second sight; the various conceptions of avenging or tormented ghost, haunting the perpetrator of crime, or expiating its commission; and the half fictitious and contemplative, half visionary and believed images of the presence of death itself, doing its daily work in the chambers of sickness and sin, and waiting for its hour in the fortalices of strength and the high places of pleasure;—these, partly degrading us by the instinctive and paralyzing terror with which ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... stranger? Sir, to your very good health and our better acquaintance!—there is, in this city of Dunedin, a certain implication of streets which reflects the utmost credit on the designer and the publicans—at every hundred yards is seated the Judicious Tavern, so that persons of contemplative mind are secure, at moderate distances, of refreshment. I have been doing a trot in that favoured quarter, favoured by art and nature. A few chosen comrades—enemies of publicity and friends to wit and wine— obliged me with their ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... curb identified them by pointing with their grimy fingers. Each guest looked forward to the fulfilment of some cherished dream and Dr. Emma Harpe saw a picture, too, as she gazed at Symes with speculative, contemplative eyes. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... our author upon the validity of "the principle of the Unconditioned or the Infinite." "Supposing it were conceded that some faint glimmering of this great truth [the existence of a First Cause] might, by induction, have been discovered by contemplative minds, by what means could they have demonstrated to themselves that he is eternal, self-existent, immortal, and independent?"[365] "Between things visible and invisible, time and eternity, beings finite and beings infinite, objects of sense and objects of faith, the connection ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of a mild, contemplative, enthusiastic nature. When but eighteen years of age he was so delighted with reading Johnson's Rambler that he came to London chiefly with a view to obtain an introduction to the author. Boswell gives us an account of his first interview, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... had just crossed from the front of the new Houses of Legislature, and had nearly been run over by a great omnibus. Partly to recover my breath, and partly, being not used to large cities, to enjoy the really fine scene before me, I stood at the corner of the street in contemplative mood. I felt a hand on my shoulder, and looked ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... the argument. It held the octette, while men-servants in powder and gold-laced livery offered poires Zobraska, a subtle creation of the chef. Lord Bantry envied the contemplative calm which unexciting circumstances allowed the literary ancient. Mademoiselle de Cressy advanced the feminist view in favour of the modern world. The talk became the light and dancing interplay of opinion and paradox common to thousands ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... itself, as well as of the Nether-Saxon Circle;—till in the latter of these years he slightly rallied, and got a supportable Peace granted him (Peace of Lubeck, 1629); after which he sits quiet, contemplative, with an evil eye upon Sweden now and then. The beatings he got, in quite regular succession, from Tilly and Consorts, are not worth mentioning: the only thing one now remembers of him is his alarming accident on the ramparts of Hameln, just at the opening of these Campaigns. At Hameln, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... that angling is the contemplative man's recreation, and, having had in these later years much to con over in my mind, I know that he is right. But it is no occupation for a fuming man, and as I marched up and down I forgot all about my cork, till, with ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... of the Address. Amid the dreary space the stalwart figure of GEORGE HAWKESWORTH BOND, Member for the East Division of Dorset, stands forth like a monument. Curious to see how BOND avoids vicinity of Cross Benches. Was standing there in contemplative attitude last night, whilst GORST was demonstrating that HARCOURT's Motion on Breach of Privilege was, (1) too late, and (2) that it was too soon. It was at this moment that the Mouse appeared on the scene, leisurely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... religion far too personal, too private, and too intimate for it to be considered the religion of Jesus Christ. And this is illustrated by the supreme value which the Church places upon what is known as the Contemplative Life. ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... that day. "Keazletown road, six and twenty miles." "You seem to have no stragglers." "Never allow straggling." "You must teach my people; they straggle badly." A bow in reply. Just then my creoles started their band and a waltz. After a contemplative suck at a lemon, "Thoughtless fellows for serious work" came forth. I expressed a hope that the work would not be less well done because of the gayety. A return to the lemon gave me the opportunity to retire. Where Jackson got his ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... have become excellent mothers, might have been the light and joy of some hearth which now remains deserted, and who, lost and misled by a false education and a detestable system of morality, fall into wasting mysticism, hysterical ecstasies, a contemplative and useless existence, into degrading practices and shameful superstitions, and instead of being the fruitful animating springs of moral and social progress, become the passive instruments, the unfruitful things of the priest, that is to ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... or twenty, one dog; canoe Number Three—item, two little girls of ten and twelve, one dog. We tried desperately for three days to get away from this party. It did not seem to work hard at all. We did. Even the two little girls appeared to dip the contemplative paddle from time to time. Water boiled back of our own blades. We started early and quit late, and about as we congratulated ourselves over our evening fire that we had distanced our followers at last, those three canoes would steal silently and calmly about the lower ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... introspective habit of thought which the confessional is so much calculated to promote, which appears so prominently in the writings of the Catholic Saints, and which finds its special representation in the mystics and the religious contemplative orders. Improved conduct and improved circumstances are to an English mind the chief and almost ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... ecclesiastical personage in France.[636] His grandfather, wise prince that he was, would have been far from scorning the counsel of devout women in whom was the voice of God. About the year 1380 he had summoned to Paris Guillemette de la Rochelle, who led a solitary and contemplative life, and acquired such great power therefrom, so it was said, that during her transports she raised herself more than two feet from the ground. In many a church King Charles V had beautiful oratories ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... consonant to his wishes: and returned, without feeling mortified, to the cottage we have described, where he lived a secluded yet not unhappy life. His wants were few, and his half-pay more than adequate to supply them. A happy contemplative indolence, arising from a well-cultivated mind, feeding rather upon its previous acquirements than adding to its store—an equanimity of disposition, and a habit of rigid self-command—were the characteristics of Edward Forster; whom I shall now ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... the contemplative eye Discerns under mutable sand drifts Stable foundations of stone, Marble ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... lovable youths and has brought misery and despair to women and old people. But the war poet has left the mere arguments to others. For himself, he has seen and felt. Envisaging war from various angles, now romantically, now realistically, now as the celebrating chronicler, now as the contemplative interpreter, but always in a spirit of catholic curiosity, he has sung, the fall of Troy, the Roman adventures, the mediaeval battles and crusades, the fields of Agincourt and Waterloo, and the more modern revolutions. Since Homer, he has spoken with martial eloquence through, the voices of Drayton, ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... suggesting to Mr Broune that no one understood her so well as he did, to bedaub Mr Booker's very thoughtful book in a very thoughtless fashion,—and to be paid for her work. What had been said about his work in the 'Breakfast Table' had been very distasteful to poor Mr Booker. It grieved his inner contemplative intelligence that such rubbish should be thrown upon him; but in his outside experience of life he knew that even the rubbish was valuable, and that he must pay for it in the manner to which he had unfortunately become accustomed. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... operations, Mr. Lukisch sat down in a rickety chair and gazed at the clock, face to face, with contemplative satisfaction. Stepfather Time would have been interested in the contrast between those two physiognomies. The clock's face, benign and bland, would have deceived him. But, innocent though he was in the ways of evil, the man's ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... transmuted into emotional, and the harshness had disappeared; he would have been called a sad man but for his constant care not to divide himself from lively friends by piping notes out of harmony with theirs. Contemplative, he allowed his mind to be a quiet meeting-place for memories and hopes. So that, naturally enough, since succeeding to the agricultural calling, and up to his present age of thirty-two, he had neither advanced nor ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... really to have found it in the plays. But, in a certain sense, she did actually find it there. Shakspeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many faces of truth, each with scope enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of new readers will possess a whole library of new books, as we ourselves do, in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... saw the tinker stroking a white cat, and appealing to her, every now and then, as his missus, for an opinion or a confirmation; and he thought that a curious sight. Speed-the-Plough was stretched at full length, with his boots in the rain, and his head amidst the tinker's pots, smoking, profoundly contemplative. The minutes seemed to be taken up alternately by the grey puffs from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with a threatening look at me. At the same moment Miserrimus Dexter raised his head. My voice had reached him. He looked at me with a curious contemplative quietness in his eyes which I had never ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... my wish to save this manuscript all avoidable delay," Chester began, "I've kept it a week. I like it—much. I think that in quieter times, with the reading world in a more contemplative mood, any publisher would be glad to print it. At the same time it seems to me to have faults of construction that ought to come out of it before it goes to a possibly unsympathetic publisher. ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... uninitiated in the countless indications of nature, of which the eye of man becomes so keenly observant when thrown constantly into her fascinating society. Let a man of a vigorous health, active frame, and contemplative mind once enter, even for a short time, upon the enjoyments of sporting, wild and varied as are those of Le Morvan, it would be difficult to withdraw him from its delights, and persuade him that it is in any way desirable to return to the crowded haunts ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... a domestic animal, and naturally conservative in its tastes—averse therefore to uproar, and to all those given to change. Its propensities are to meditation and contemplative tranquillity, for which reason it has ever been held in reverence by nations of a similar staid and composed disposition, and has been the favourite companion and constant friend of grave philosophers and thoughtful students. By the ancient ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... with an impatient and powerful wave of the hand—as though brushing the man bodily out of the room. Remaining motionless until the door had closed, Mr. Flint turned abruptly and fixed his eyes on the contemplative figure of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... been a thriving writer of light prose and light verse. But the enchantress held him; he hated London, he had no literary friends, he could write gaily for pleasure, not for gain. So, like the Scholar Gypsy, he remained contemplative, ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... forest, her short, stiff, grey hair stood up in irregular tufts above her weather-beaten forehead. Her host, sitting sidewise on the edge of the table so that he could swing one leg freely and spit cleanly through the open window, bit off a contemplative quid of "blackjack" tobacco, and waited for her to unfold the problems that ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... is for solitary reverie, or sometimes for orgies. The main part of their original literature, like that of their brothers and cousins on the Continent, consists of triumphal songs and heartrending laments. It is contemplative ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the good, be it well understood, Was a man of very contemplative mood— He would pour by the hour, o'er a weed or a flower, Or the slugs, that came crawling out after a shower; Black beetles, bumble-bees, blue-bottle flies, And moths, were of no small account in his eyes; An "industrious flea," he'd by no means despise, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... such deeply contemplative life as this, in such "direct relationship" between man and the things of the outer world, that the German fairy tale could originate, the peculiarity of which consists in the fact that in it not only animals and plants, but also objects apparently inanimate, speak and act. To thoughtful harmless ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... glimpses of vivid velvet sward, even at times when the wild oats and "wire-grasses" of the plains are already yellowing. The placid river, unstained at this point by mining sluices or mill drift, runs clear under its contemplative shadows. Originally the camping-ground of a Digger Chief, it passed from his tenancy with the American rifle bullet that terminated his career. The pioneer who thus succeeded to its attractive calm gave way in turn to ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... to the monkish ideal of a contemplative life which had hitherto obtained, a new ideal, the ideal of the courtier's life, was upheld; ecclesiastical saintliness was contrasted with knightly honour. Beauty, which at the dawn of the Christian era had fallen into ill repute and had become associated ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... and warned me I was at my journey's end. I stepped out and stood on the narrow way, pausing to look and to enjoy all that I saw. I had been in other parts of the lower Himalayas before, and the first sensations I had experienced had given way to those of a contemplative admiration. No longer awed or overpowered or oppressed by the sense of physical insignificance in my own person, I could endure to look on the stupendous panorama before me, and could even analyse what I felt. But before long my pardonable reverie was ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... figure of a man. Also an inscription flanked by two shields with rampant lions, which are good. Opposite the Loggia, on the other side of the street, is a highly decorative lintel, which appears to have belonged to a palace of the Cippico, with two contemplative lions and half-length angels in roundels with scrolls. The caps have the same kind of foliage as is seen at Curzoia and Sebenico. The Austrian-Lloyd office is on the ground floor of a tower of the Venetian period, now a nunnery. It has a trefoiled ogee-window ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... Dr. Donne, and was much beloved by them; on the death of his second wife he went to Winchester and stayed with his friend Dr. Morley, the bishop; his principal work was the "Complete Angler; or, the Contemplative Man's Recreation," which was extended by his friend Charles Cotton, and is a classic to this day; he wrote in addition Lives of Hooker, Dr. Donne, Bishop Sanderson, Sir Henry Wotton, and George Herbert, all ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... like to retire for a year, in order to write the book I had so often contemplated, and never found time to begin. This, I reflected, was a place of peace, of freedom from all distraction, the place for calm, contemplative meditation. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... their owner on her farm—a fact that was perhaps due to Banneker's natural inclination to indulge his royal prerogatives. This Banneker is described as "a man of much intelligence and fine temper, with a very agreeable presence, dignified manner and contemplative habits."[151] ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... tardiness of locomotion; you mean that sluggishness of mind which comes upon a man in solitude." But the slowness of which novel-readers will complain is not mere commonplace, least of all is it dulness. It is the leisurely movement of a contemplative mind full of rich thought and stored with varied learning. Such a writer could not have any sympathy with the mercurial, vivacious, light-of-foot story-tellers of the French school. The author of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... principles of thine. How many things without studying nature dost thou imagine, and how many dost thou neglect? But it is thy duty so to look on and so to do everything, that at the same time the power of dealing with circumstances is perfected, and the contemplative faculty is exercised, and the confidence which comes from the knowledge of each several thing is maintained without showing it, but yet not concealed. For when wilt thou enjoy simplicity, when gravity, and when the knowledge of every several thing, both what it is in substance, and what place it ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... so kindly fond of me, would not suffer me to live with her; because she thought, that her contemplative temper might influence mine, and make me grave, at a time of life, when she is always saying, that cheerfulness is most becoming: she would therefore turn over her girl to the best of aunts. But now I fancy, she will allow ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... that loose belly of yours! Now pull, you swine, pull. Odso, flog the black horse. You, devil broil your bones, lay on to him. What now? Od rot you, Antony, you'll see no money this month, you—" She became unprintable. As she took breath again, she saw Harry Boyce calmly contemplative. "You dog, who bade you stand and gape? Go, give a hand there, ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... wonderful! Full of your prejudices," she said in a contemplative way. "Bulldog tenacity of purpose, whether you are right or wrong. Things are a custom, and they must be done, or it is not 'playing the game,'" and she imitated a set English voice, her beautiful mouth pursed up, until Paul had to use violent restraint with ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... near-by town where I was to get my supper, it went at a lazy winding pace. If a dog barked it was in sleepy fashion. He yelped merely to check his loneliness. There could be no venom on his drowsy tooth. The very cows that fed along its fences were of a slower breed and more contemplative whisk of tail than are found upon the thoroughfares. Sheep patched the fields with gray and followed their sleepy ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... read. As he scanned the copies of directives, reports, operations logs, and procedures the process became automatic, and part of his consciousness turned contemplative. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... turned out to have been serious studies. With the theory of English politics, as it shaped itself in 1852 when Lord Derby and Disraeli were trying to restore Protection, Vaughan showed himself thoroughly acquainted; and, as often happens when a contemplative and romantic nature is first brought into contact with eager humanity, he developed a faculty of public speaking which astonished his uncle as much as it astonished anyone, though that astute nobleman concealed his surprise. Meanwhile, ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... of the sea, notwithstanding its surface has been traversed and measured by thousands of voyagers for centuries, fills the contemplative mind with awe, as a wonderful creation of Almighty Power. One can hardly realize its vast extent from figures and calculations, without sailing over its surface and witnessing its immensity, as day after day passes away, the cry being still "onward, onward!" and the view bounded on ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... a start, seeing them at some little distance. His full, contemplative eyes rested upon them for a moment almost devoid of questioning. It was not the face of a man who finds himself confronted with the discovery of his duplicity and his hypocrisy. There was a strange doubt stirring in the blacksmith's heart As he approached he looked upon the storied cocks with ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of contemplative philosophers among the Hindus who practised an extreme asceticism ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... soul-subliming truth to man. And such a speeding grace shone over me, That from their impious worship I reclaim'd The dwellers round about, who with the world Were in delusion lost. These other flames, The spirits of men contemplative, were all Enliven'd by that warmth, whose kindly force Gives birth to flowers and fruits of holiness. Here is Macarius; Romoaldo here: And here my brethren, who their steps refrain'd Within the cloisters, and held ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... whose service he was specially devoted, while the other two climbed and explored. For even Armine had been invigorated with a sudden overflow of animal health and energy, which made him far more enterprising and less contemplative than ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,' as our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by summer visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few thousand acres in extent, scattered like raindrops over the map of our Northern sovereignties. The loneliness of contemplative old age finds its natural home in the near neighborhood of one of these ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... They are not to be regarded seriously as having a distinct meaning. They are parables, prophecies, myths, symbols, revelations, aspirations after an unknown world. They derive their origin from a deep religious and contemplative feeling, and also from an observation of curious mental phenomena. They gather up the elements of the previous philosophies, which they put together in a new form. Their great diversity shows the tentative character of early endeavours to think. They have not yet settled ...
— Meno • Plato
... up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... before the preaching of St. Patrick. Then the Christian religion was embraced and cultivated with an uncommon zeal, which displayed itself in the number and consequence of the persons who in all parts embraced the contemplative life. This mode of life, and the situation of Ireland, removed from the horror of those devastations which shook the rest of Europe, made it a refuge for learning, almost extinguished everywhere else. Science flourished in Ireland during the seventh and eighth centuries. The same ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... forenoon, from the moment that a noisy acclamation had greeted the rising of the sun, the images of the gods were exposed to the silent adoration of the initiates.[69] Egypt is the country whence contemplative devotion penetrated into Europe. Then, in the afternoon, a second service was ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... their room, the friends enjoyed a long and contemplative smoke upon the wide piazza in front of their windows, listlessly regarding the ever-varied marine view that lay before them in flashing breadth and beauty. Their next labor was to array themselves in wonderful morning-costumes of very shaggy ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 5 • Various
... very interesting," commented Fairchilds, his contemplative gaze moving from the face of Mrs. Wackernagel to Tillie. "But," he questioned, "Mrs. Wackernagel, why are your daughters allowed to do what you think wrong and would ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... Izaak Walton's joy as a contemplative man has been mine from youth; as witness these three fishing sonnets, just found in the faded ink of three or four decades ago, which may give a gleam of country sunshine on a page or two, and would have rejoiced my piscatorial friends Kingsley and Leech in old days, and ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... natural life, of plant and bird and beast, and unregenerate man. It is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built and work is done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, the mountains of purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplative life not yet made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes that thin white belt, where are the resting-places of angelic feet, the points whence purged souls take their flight towards infinity. Above all is heaven, the hierarchies ascending row on row to reach ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... observing too, that so far from the moral of this Bhagavat-Gita issuing in mere contemplative Quietism, its purpose is essentially practical. It arises out of Arjoun's doubt whether he shall join in the battle which he sees raging below him; it results in his being commanded to join in it, and fight like a man. We cannot see, as Mr. Vaughan does, an "unholy indifference" in the moral. ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... for their method as well as their matter. Burnet took Thuanus as his model. 'I have made him ', he says, 'my pattern in writing.'[5] The others are discussed by Clarendon in a long passage of his essay 'On an Active and on a Contemplative Life'.[6] He there develops the view, not without reference to his own history, that 'there was never yet a good History written but by men conversant in business, and of the best and most liberal education'; and he illustrates ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... of Montague sat Somers, lord keeper; older, of more steady demeanor, of fuller figure, of bold face and full light eye, a politician, not a ponderer. At the right of Montague, grave, silent, impassive, now and again turning a contemplative eye about him, sat that great man. Sir Isaac Newton, known then to every nobleman, and now to every schoolboy, of the world. A gem-like mind, keen, clear, hard and brilliant, exact in every facet, and forsooth held in the setting of an ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... being a busy time they were all occupied. The first one, immediately below us, was filled with a family of Kabyles, which consisted chiefly of a magnificent virago of a wife, tattooed, with a fine gold ring in her nostrils, who seemed to have a trying life with her mild and contemplative old husband. She had more children than one could count without giving the matter that close attention which might be misinterpreted. She cradled them in the manger every night. Loud as her voice was, though, I could almost hear the old man smile ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... an attitude of mind which is passive, contemplative. It may grow out of an active attitude or emotion, or it may lead to one, but in either case the state changes from one of appreciation to something else. In appreciation the individual is quiescent. Appreciation, therefore, has no end outside of itself. ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... readers will have seen by the preceding page, we have commenced engraving the above series of pictures. "The Age of Innocence," by Sir J. Reynolds, representing a young Hippopotamus seated under a shady tree, presents to the contemplative mind a charming union of youth ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... quite sure it does not agree With a quiet, peaceable man like me, Who am not of that nervous and meagre kind That are always distressed in body and mind! And at times it really does me good To come down among this brotherhood, Dwelling forever under ground, Silent, contemplative, round and sound; Each one old, and brown with mould, But filled to the lips with the ardor of youth, With the latent power and love of truth, And ...
— The Golden Legend • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... woman lighted another cigarette and blew a contemplative whiff toward the crystal: "No: at best the game is a crooked one, even for the few who have really ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... lies at the foundation of society and successively creates all forms of worship.—This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are. I ever bare a mind (in some middle place that I could discharge) to serve her Majesty, not as a man born under Sol, that loveth honour, nor under Jupiter, that loveth business (for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly), but as a man born under an excellent sovereign that deserveth the dedication of all men's abilities. Besides, I do not find in myself so much self-love, but that the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... court. He is fat and indolent and contemplative; but is business-like and capable when a fly comes about —reaches out a tongue like a teaspoon and takes him in. He gums his tongue first. He is always pious, in his looks. And pious and thankful ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Hawthorne "Mr. Noble Melancholy," in the next number of the paper. You know, what you read was the introduction only. It is singular how many people insist that Mr. Hawthorne is gloomy, since he is not. He is pensive, perhaps, as all contemplative persons must be; especially when, as in him, "a great heart is the household fire of a grand intellect" (to quote his own words), because he sees and sympathizes with all human suffering. He has ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... virtues which we must acquire. Sin makes man blind, meditation opens his eyes. Vocal prayer alone is not of itself a protection from sin, daily experience teaches this. There are many who say vocal prayers and yet fall into grievous sin and remain in that state. The reason is because they omit the contemplative prayer. Those who combine vocal prayer with meditation do not easily incur God's disfavor, or if they do they at once resolve to amend and they lose no time in returning to God. A combination of meditation and vocal ...
— The Excellence of the Rosary - Conferences for Devotions in Honor of the Blessed Virgin • M. J. Frings
... through layers of crust or skin. The man, having learned his lesson fully, casts off the physical life; having learned his lesson fully, casts off the psychic life; having learned his lesson fully, casts off the contemplative ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... intellectual prospects. For a companion I had found a book, not bemused with the cleverness of the day—a fine-weather book, simple and sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend. But looking at little Fyne seated in the room I understood that nothing would come of my contemplative aspirations; that in one way or another I should be let in for some form of severe exercise. Walking, it would be, I feared, since, for me, that idea was inseparably associated with the visual impression of Fyne. Where, why, how, a rapid striding rush could be brought in helpful relation to ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... no chance of ennui in the week in London before a voyage; you have packing, shopping, insuring, and buying tickets and general bustling round—what charming occupations for the contemplative mind! Then you throw in visits to friends, and acquaintances call on you, all in the concentrated week; you breakfast late, lunch heavily, rush off to a hurried dinner somewhere, then rush off to a play or some function or other, supper somewhere else and then home, too late ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... of conversation the meal was pleasantly despatched. The turn of Dick and Mick followed thereon. Dick, the property of Aunt Judith, was a canary of thoughtful temperament. The part he played in the domestic economy of the small household was a contemplative rather than an active one. Mick, Aunt Hester's bird, was of a more lively nature. He had, as a rule, something to say upon all subjects—and ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... are the delineations from Memory's tablet, upon this little map, but enough, perchance, to lead the contemplative mind to reflect upon the vicissitudes and changes of its little day, and teach us to prepare for a better ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... men of markedly contrasted types—the one all fire, restlessness, energy; the other calm, contemplative, intensely spiritual. Both were alike filled with a deep faith, a deep zeal; one the man of action, the other the man of meditation and devotion—yet deeply attached one to the other, as could be seen by the way they looked ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... elastic power. Yet, during all these multitudinous exertions, time would be found for the composition of a discourse on Natural Theology, that bears no marks of haste or excitement of mind, but presents as calm a face as though it had been the laborious production of a contemplative philosopher. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... object, and it is a perception or an idea; at another time it perceives a connection, and it is a judgment; at yet another, it perceives connections between connections, and it is an act of reason. But however subtle the object it contemplates may become, it does not depart from its contemplative attitude, and cognition ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... impatient of commanding as of being commanded Defer my revenge to another and better time Desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled Detest in others the defects which are more manifest in us Disdainful, contemplative, serious and grave as the ass Do not, nevertheless, always believe myself Events are a very poor testimony of our worth and parts. Every abridgment of a good book is a foolish abridgment Fault not to discern how far a man's ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Essays of Montaigne • David Widger
... his feet in our faces, scratching his fiddle? Now, the fiddle, Bonaventure—the fiddle would just suit you. Ah, if you could play!" But the boy's quick anger so flashed from his blue eyes that she checked herself and with contemplative serenity added: ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... pleasing; and would strike us, perhaps, as more impassioned and exalted, if it were not regulated and harmonized by the most beautiful taste. It is singularly sweet, elegant, and tender—touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished throughout with an exquisite delicacy, and even severity of execution, but infused with a purity and loftiness of feeling, and a certain sober and humble tone of indulgence and piety, which must satisfy all judgments, and allay ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... gaze was carried from base to summit. The sea was gilded with the same reflection, and upon the crest of every sparkling wave danced a point of light, like a diamond by lamplight. The mildness of the evening, the sea breezes, so dear to contemplative minds, setting in from the east and blowing in delicious gusts; then, in the distance, the black outline of the yacht with its rigging traced upon the empurpled background of the sky—while, dotting the horizon, might be ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... any new decision in Comus: the decision is already made when "vain deluding Joys" are banished in Il Penseroso, and "loathed Melancholy" in L'Allegro. The mask is an expansion and exaltation of the delights of the contemplative man, but there is still a place for the "unreproved pleasures" of the cheerful man. Unless it were so, Comus could not have been written; there would have been no "sunshine holiday" for the rustics and no "victorious dance" for the gentle lady and her brothers. But ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... does. And yet at this moment, whether it be the quiet of the place, or whether it be the sight of your philosophic countenance, I feel a kind of yearning for the contemplative life. I believe if I stayed here long you would lure me back to philosophy; and yet I thought I had finally escaped when I broke away from ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... you," replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative puff and settled himself in his chair,—"I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now hold were it known that ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... says Syrianus, do ideas subsist according to the contemplative lovers of truth? We reply, intelligibly and tetradically ([Greek: noeros kai tetradikos]), in animal itself ([Greek: en to antozoo]), or the extremity of the intelligible order; but intellectually and decadically ([Greek: noeros kai dekadikos]), in the intellect ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... be contemplative, or pragmatical abroad: but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged soul may leave off awhile ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... protectress,' who is known by truth 'among the most faithful of her followers.' In No. 150 he writes:—'Curiosity is in great and generous minds the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties.' In No. 5 he assert that 'he that enlarges his curiosity after the works of nature demonstrably multiplies the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life,—remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the impossibility of antedating ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... was the style of man fitted to command the admiration of Joanna Crawfurd. Contemplative girls love men of experience. Staid girls love men with a dash—a dash of bravery, self-reliance, or even of recklessness. Harry Jardine's gladness to be at home; his interest in everything and everybody; the pleasant tone in which he referred to his mother; ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... calm, quiet, almost enquiring face, the look half of melancholy, half of reproach, and, as the Milesian would say, the other half of sleek wisdom; the long nose, the prim mouth and joined lips, the elevated brow, and beneath it the quiet contemplative eye, contemplative not of heaven or hell, but of this world as it had seen it, in its most worldly point of view, yet twinkling with a flashing thought of incongruity made congruous, are the indices of the inner man. Most of our wits, it must have ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the hind leg of the rhinoceros, and then along its huge horny-hided body to the shoulder, where, lowering the rifle he carried, Dinny placed the stock upon the creature's neck, and rested his arm upon the barrel, regarding his fallen foe in quite a contemplative manner. ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... cared, he might, with his conversational gifts, have been a social success; certainly, I think, an artistic one. He had great powers, had any impulse been present to urge him to execution and achievement. But he was for none of these things. Contemplative, receptive, with a keen sense of certain sub-tones and side aspects of life unseen by most, he doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them in toiling for a harvest to be reaped ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... freshness and calm charmed thought away from all vain questionings; the fascination of outward things had for a while cooled the useless ardour of introspection. But it was inevitable that the bland ease of such a contemplative life should bring no enduring satisfaction to the mind; it was not an end in itself, but a mere means to serenity, a breathing-space useful to the recovery of a long-lost fortitude. The time was now come when the hunted deer, refreshed in the quiet of his inaccessible glen, was to ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... with a start from the sofa came Hobbes; with a cry from the sofa, There where he lay, the great Hobbes, contemplative, corpulent, witty; Author forgotten and silent of currentest phrase and fancy; Mute and exuberant by turns, a fountain at intervals playing, Mute and abstracted, or strong and abundant as rain in the tropics; Studious; careless of dress; ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... quiet walking would bring me to the village of St. Michel-Bonnefare—better known in the region as St. Michel-Montaigne (pronounced there Montagne, as the name was originally spelt), close to the castle or manor-house where the contemplative Prigourdin gentleman was born, and where he wrote his 'Essays' in a tower, of which he has left a detailed description. Then there was another lure: the battle-field of Castillon, a few miles farther south, where the heroic Talbot was slain, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... women—and especially of unmarried women—among our poetic leaders is, I think, to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that, according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American poets of both sexes, however, have ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... angles—so in writing, the attention of the reader naturally is called again and again to the same scenes. But this book is written not so much with an eye to its literary quality, as to afford the visitor to Lake Tahoe—whether contemplative, actual, or retrospective—a truthful and comprehensive account and description of ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Lord; [9] he must strive rather to strengthen his faith, and humble himself, because in this matter our Lord imparts perhaps a deeper knowledge to some old woman than to him, though he may be a very learned man. Being thus humble, he will profit souls and himself more than if he affected to be a contemplative without being so; for, I repeat it, if he have no experience, if he have not a most profound humility, whereby he may see that he does not understand, and that the thing is not for that reason impossible, he will do himself ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... rendering has been taken from the longer and more elaborate of the two MSS. containing the Treatise. The shorter form of his work On Grace and the Epistle have been added in the hope that they may meet the need of all, contemplative or active as they ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... this fascinating ruin, which has the best preserved stage of any Greek theatre now in existence. From the top of the hill is one of the most magnificent views in Sicily, and here our travellers sat in contemplative awe until Uncle John declared it was time to return to their ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... Summer Garden on a seat under a tree, and his mind dwelt on the matter. It was about seven o'clock, and the place was empty. The stifling atmosphere foretold a storm, and the prince felt a certain charm in the contemplative mood which possessed him. He found pleasure, too, in gazing at the exterior objects around him. All the time he was trying to forget some thing, to escape from some idea that haunted him; but melancholy ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... be found for the motions of the stars, the knowledge of the existence of those motions must always afford a new charm to the contemplative observer of the heavens, for they impart a sense of life to the starry system that would otherwise be lacking. A stagnant universe, with every star fixed immovably in its place, would not content the imagination or ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... work, not vision, is to be the ordinary method of our being here, against the position of those who shut themselves in to a contemplative and extatic piety. They would escape from the age, and its anxieties; they would recall past conditions; they would get into the shadow of cloisters, and build cathedrals for an exclusive sanctity. And, indeed, we would do well to consider those tendencies of our ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... reverently guarded the spot. They own and guard it to-day. The interesting reminiscences connected with the early history of the Nurse house have been alluded to. It has witnessed an extraordinary variety of the conditions of domestic vicissitude. Scenes rising before the mind in contemplative retrospection, while gazing upon it, present the extremest contrasts of human experience. On the evening of the 25th of October, 1678, Mary and Elizabeth Nurse were married. Such an occurrence was undoubtedly the occasion of the highest joy and gladness in a happy household. The old mansion ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... me?"—"No, but why do you choose this time to tell me that my coming for help to you was nothing but impudence in your sight? Well, I beg your pardon for intruding on your dignity."—"You misunderstood me," said Mrs. Travers, without relaxing for a moment her contemplative severity. "Such a flattering thing had never happened to me before and it will never happen to me again. But believe me, King Tom, you did me too much honour. Jorgenson is perfectly right in being angry with you for having taken a woman in tow."—"He didn't ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... Mr Toots, after some contemplative pulling at his pipe, during which his visage has expressed the most contented reflection, 'what an observant woman my wife is! What sagacity she possesses! What remarks she makes! It was only last night, when we were sitting in the enjoyment ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... board a little boat for a month at a time without more than three or four nights of usual repose, was to bring the mind and body into a curious condition of subdued life, a sort of contemplative oriental placid state in which both cares and pleasures ceased to be acute, and the flight of time seemed gliding and even, and not marked by the distinct epochs which define our civilised life. Although this passive enjoyment was really agreeable—and, in fine weather and good ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... cemented between Peter and John, both because they were the principal members of the quartet which stood first among the Apostles, and because they were so unlike each other, and therefore completed each other. Peter's practical force and eye for externals, and John's more contemplative nature and eye for the unseen, needed one another. So we find them together in the judgment hall, at the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... natural gifts, Leo the Thirteenth is essentially active rather than contemplative, and it is not surprising that the chief acts of his pontificate should have dealt rather with political matters than with questions of dogma and ecclesiastical authority. It has certainly been the object of the present ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... add with a justifiable touch of malice, "our jurisdiction may be revived, and they [the clergy] who have hitherto been enriched by our pauperisation may be reduced to the condition of the primitive Church, and living the contemplative life they may, as is seemly, show to us who spend an active life miracles which for a long time have disappeared from ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... have been transferred from the sacred canon of the Buddhists to the pages of the Greek writer. The driver who conducts Buddha when he flees by night from his palace where he leaves his wife, his only son, and all his treasures, in order to devote himself to a contemplative life, is called Chandaka, in Burmese, Sanna.[48] The friend and companion of Barlaam is called Zardan.[49] Reinaud in his "Mmoire sur l'Inde," p.91 (1849), was the first, it seems, to point out that Youdasf, mentioned by Massoudi as ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... been said to show that the visitor to Woodhall Spa, who has a taste for “the contemplative man’s recreation,” {81} may find some employment in its vicinity. Most of the ponds can be fished on asking the farmers’ permission. As to the Witham, although there are angling clubs at Boston and Lincoln, the river is practically open to every one, in the season. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... to signify the priests of the older ritual, in distinction from the Lamas. In China it has been used first as a synonym for {.} {.}, monks engaged in popular teaching (teachers of the Law), in distinction from {.} {.}, disciplinists, and {.} {.}, contemplative philosophers (meditationists); then it was used to designate the abbots of monasteries. But it is now popularly applied to all Buddhist monks. In the text there seems to be implied some distinction between the "teachers" ...
— Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms • Fa-Hien
... of the relative and provisional quality of truth. There might even be a plausible defence set up for it, if it sprang from that formulated distrust of the energetic rational judgment in comparison with the emotional, affective, contemplative parts of man, which underlies the various forms of religious mysticism. If you look closely into our present mood, it is seen to be the product mainly and above all of a shrinking deference to the status quo, not ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... November is no such gloomy, grim fellow as he is described. Over the brown glebes and changed woods in the country, his still face looks contemplative and mild; and he has soft smiles, too, at times,—lighting up his taxed vassals the groves; gleaming where the leaves still cling to the boughs, and reflected in dimples from the waves which still glide free from his chains. But as a conqueror ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... considered among them as a thing of separate nature, but that it should interweave itself with the ties of social life, and be employed in adding beauty to its nearest, dearest interests. Now, the English, he continues, are more disposed to an active than to a contemplative life. They possess, it must be owned, a character of much earnestness and energy; yet, from the earliest times, their attention has been more directed to the cultivation of the mechanical arts and the sciences appertaining ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... lie on the part you would invite me to. But if I could bring myself to fancy, what I think you do but fancy, that I have any talents for active life, I want health for it; and besides it is a real truth. I have, if possible, less inclination, than ability. Contemplative life is not only my scene, but is my habit too. I begun my life where most people end theirs, with all that the world calls ambition. I don't know why it is called so, for, to me, it always seemed to be stooping, or climbing. I'll tell you my politic and religious sentiments ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... no answer was forthcoming. The man turned from the woman, and his eyes sought the child's cot. There was no softness in his regard. It was deeply contemplative. That was all. It was the woman who displayed feeling as she followed his gaze, and the lighting of her beautiful eyes ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... would have failed to observe the slightest trace of cunning, or want of a balanced mind in their expression. During the progress of his story he had continually held his ring where he could see it, and several times had raised it to the light, in a contemplative sort of way, as if he drew some satisfaction from its appearance. He bowed his head in his hands as he ceased speaking, and some moments elapsed before he looked up, though when he did so he ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... lived on the earth. For myself, I would rather have seen Lamb himself once, than to have lived with Judas. Herbert, to my great delight, has not changed; I should know him anywhere,—the same serious, contemplative face, with lurking humor at the corners of the mouth,—the same cheery laugh and clear, distinct enunciation as of old. There is nothing so winning as a good voice. To see Herbert again, unchanged in all outward essentials, is not only ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... revolutions of the sky, and praise his Maker in lines which no reader shall lay aside. The subject of the disputation is not piety, but the motives to piety; that of the description is not God, but the works of God. Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Reedemer, is already in a higher ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... philosophy, which implies the love of wisdom, is now become the ornament of folly. In the times of its inventor, and for many succeeding ages, it was expressive of modesty and worth; in our days it is the badge of impudence and vain pretensions. It was formerly the symbol of the profound contemplative genius, it is now the mark of the superficial and unthinking practitioner. It was once reverenced by kings and clothed in the robes of nobility; it is now (according to its true acceptation) abandoned ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... under the old religions none obtained divine honours save those who were loaded with worldly glory, such as captains of armies and rulers of cities; whereas our religion glorifies men of a humble and contemplative, rather than of an active life. Accordingly, while the highest good of the old religions consisted in magnanimity, bodily strength, and all those other qualities which make men brave, our religion places it in humility, lowliness, and contempt for the things of this world; ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... might have been the light and joy of some hearth which now remains deserted, and who, lost and misled by a false education and a detestable system of morality, fall into wasting mysticism, hysterical ecstasies, a contemplative and useless existence, into degrading practices and shameful superstitions, and instead of being the fruitful animating springs of moral and social progress, become the passive instruments, the unfruitful things of the priest, that is to say the ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... object contemplated, independently of any faith, or hope that might be entertained as to their ulterior tendency. In this way, the true aesthetic culture would be realisable as a new form of the contemplative life, founding its claim on the intrinsic "blessedness" of "vision"—the vision of perfect men and things. One's human nature, indeed, would fain reckon on an assured and endless future, pleasing itself with the dream of a final home, to be ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... apart. Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their hearts, so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be matured on earth; for women worship such gentle dignity as his; and the proud, contemplative, yet kindly soul is oftenest captivated by simplicity like hers. But while they spoke softly, and he was watching the happy sadness, the lightsome shadows, the shy yearnings of a maiden's nature, the wind through the Notch took a deeper and drearier sound. It seemed, as the ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the current now and floating by his side. "It's Mamie—so far as I've had it from you—who'll be their great card." And then as his contemplative silence wasn't a denial she significantly added: "I think ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... man, because he's nearly always pleased with himself. If he fails at anything he can usually excuse himself on the grounds of somebody else's damnfoolishness. If he succeeds he complacently assumes that he did it out of his own greatness. Action—that's the thing. The contemplative, analytical mind is the mind that suffers. Man was a happy animal until he began to indulge in abstract thinking. And now that the burden of thought is laid on him, he frequently uses it to his ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... let us ask what conception of the universe will awaken active impulses capable of effecting this diversion. A definition of the world which will give back to the mind the free motion which has been blocked in the purely contemplative path may so far make ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... proportion as thought prevails over sense: but in the healthy processes of the mind, a balance is constantly maintained between the impressions from outward objects and the inward operations of the intellect;—for if there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man thereby becomes the creature of mere meditation, and loses his natural power of action. Now one of Shakespeare's modes of creating characters is, to conceive any one intellectual or moral faculty in ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... asked how many shares of the Communal land he will take, and replies in a slow, contemplative way, "I have two sons, and there is myself, so I'll take three shares, or somewhat less, if it ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... her contemplative attitude after the servant had withdrawn for the second time, and it is doubtful how long she would have remained sunk in apparent lethargy had not the unexpected sound of the hall-door bell caused her to start into ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... mutually exclusive types of religion. The Quaker, whom we may take as the type of anti-institutional mysticism, has a brotherhood to which he is proud to belong, and for which he feels loyalty and affection. And Catholicism has been rich in contemplative saints who have lived in the light of the Divine presence. The question raised in this essay is rather of the relative importance of these two elements in the religious life, than of choosing one and rejecting the other. I will conclude by saying that our preference of one of these types to the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... square, it is girdled round by a well-trimmed hedge of limes, from which, at intervals, pollarded trees shoot up; while the corners are thickly woven each into a shady arbour, where seats are arranged for the accommodation of the contemplative. It is, however, after you have passed beneath the arch, that the holy quiet of the spot strikes you most forcibly. Laid out with singular good taste into parallelograms, and having the paths which divide them one from another, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... friend, "with you, that the life of a husbandman of all others is the most delectable. It is honorable, it is amusing, and, with judicious management, it is profitable. To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Vieuxtemps both times he played after his return. I was very much delighted; he was so modest and composed and refined. His playing is as wonderful as Ole Bull's, but not so fascinating; his compositions more contemplative and regular, not so wild and throbbing with the irregular pulsations of unsatisfied genius, as are Ole Bull's. I felt no disposition to compare, feeling how different they were. I thanked God when I came away that no one man has sole power, but that many may serve in this boundless ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... of the altercation, the third Genius had advanced, and stood near us. I cannot tell you how I knew him, but I knew him to be the Genius of Death. Breathless as I was at beholding him, I soon became familiar with his features. First they seemed only calm; presently they grew contemplative; and lastly beautiful; those of the Graces themselves are less regular, less harmonious, ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... two-shilling piece, blessing him in her heart for refraining from putting her under a financial obligation to a stranger. He accepted the money quite simply, and turning away to speak to a porter, he tucked the two-shilling piece into his waistcoat pocket, while an odd, contemplative little ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... the finest pictures here is Domenichino's Cumean Sibyl, which, like all other masterpieces, defies the copyist and engraver. The Sibilla Persica of Guercino hangs a little to the left; and with her contemplative air, and the pen in her hand, she looks as if she were recording the effusions of her more inspired sister. The former is a chaste and beautiful picture, full of feeling and sweetly coloured; but the vicinity of Domenichino's magnificent creation throws it rather into shade. ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... course she was going out in a minute, put it into her ulster pocket. But, curiously enough, the sight of her face only intensified an impression that had been strong on him during the last part of their walk—the impression that she was a long way off. It wasn't the familiar contemplative brown study, either. There was an active eager excitement about it that made it more beautiful than ever he had seen it before. But it was as if she were looking at something he couldn't see—listening to ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Limoges; justice of the peace at Montegnac after 1809. He was in touch with Mme. Graslin when she moved there about 1830. An upright, phlegmatic man who finally led the contemplative life of one of the ancient hermits. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... (he delighted in carving and serving his family, and was old-fashioned enough to insist upon his right, to the distress of the girls, who preferred to have the roast carved in the kitchen and served by the Japanese butler), he kept a contemplative eye upon his son, and presently saw Donald ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the strokes of an autocratic tyranny, which the presentiment of its speedy end had driven into madness, the bewitching strains of the new Hebrew lyre resounded through Lithuania. They came from Micah Joseph Lebensohn, the son of "Adam" Lebensohn, author of high-flown Hebrew odes [1]—a contemplative Jewish youth, suffering from tuberculosis and Weltschmerz. He began his poetic career in 1840 by a Hebrew adaptation of the second book of Virgil's Aeneid [2] but soon turned to Jewish motifs. In the musical rhymes of the "Songs of the Daughter ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... circumstance that Irenaeus did not develop the mystic view in such a systematic way as the moralistic by no means justifies us in supposing that he merely adopted it superficially (from the Scriptures): for its nature admits of no systematic treatment, but only of a rhetorical and contemplative one. No further explanation can be given of the contradiction, because, strictly speaking, Irenaeus has only given ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... And yet at this moment, whether it be the quiet of the place, or whether it be the sight of your philosophic countenance, I feel a kind of yearning for the contemplative life. I believe if I stayed here long you would lure me back to philosophy; and yet I thought I had finally escaped when I broke ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... horses' backs. He had a smooth countenance, deeply tanned, and pale, clear blue eyes. At his side sat a priest in black, a man past middle age, with ashen, embittered lips, and a narrowed, chilling gaze. They were silent, contemplative; but, from the seat behind them, flowed a constant, buoyant, youthful chatter. A girl with a shining mass of chestnut hair gathered loosely on a virgin neck was recounting the thrilling incidents of "commencement week" for the benefit of a heavily-built young man with a handsome, masklike ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a little bit testy, and, on the whole, not without faults, was as good-natured an anchorite as ever said mass or brewed a contemplative bowl of punch. If he refused to go down to the Mills, he would not have been comfortable again that night, nor indeed for a week to come. So, with a sigh, he made up his mind, got quietly into his surtout and mufflers which hung on the peg behind the ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... thing that is done, the agents that do it, and the circumstances of time and place under which it is done; or, to say the matter in three words,—action, actors, and setting. Only when all three elements conspire can something happen. Life suggests to the mind of a contemplative observer many possible events which remain unrealized because only one or two of the necessary three elements are present,—events that are waiting, like unborn children on the other side of Lethe, until the necessary conditions shall call them into being. We observe a man who could ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... unfitted to be either a country squire or the father of a large family. Above all, was he singularly unable to bear with equanimity the strain upon his income such a large family entailed. He liked his comforts about him, he was by nature of a contemplative and aesthetically studious turn, and saw no good reason why his learned leisure should suffer interruption, or his delicate susceptibilities be ruffled by such incongruities as the loud voices and inharmonious movements of a ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... had first taken hold of the most active and important part, and if I may be allowed to call it, the heart of this body, from thence was on one side by a quick passage, and in its more refined parts, communicated through the blood to the contemplative, and reasoning, the head, which it inspired with noble thoughts and resolutions; and on the other, to the inferior extremities, which were thereby rendered more expedite and readier to obey the dictates of the head in a rougher method of opposition, from each of which ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... constitutes the of the delights of a French cit. Moireau seated himself in the pit, just opposite the box of the gentlemen in waiting. The performance was "Castor and Pollux." At the commencement of the second act a sudden noise and bustle drew Moireau from the contemplative admiration into which the splendor of the piece had thrown him. The disturbance arose from a general move, which was taking place in the box belonging to the gentlemen in waiting. Madame d'Egmont ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... and eyes,—a work of some patience. Forty eager fingers stretched out to assist him, but were waved aside, with a look of pained decorum as he gravely completed his task. Then falling back, he bade the others do the same, and they formed a contemplative semicircle before ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... untiring and patient observation of Nature is the secret of his power as a writer. He disdained nothing, for nothing seemed too small for him. Nature, in none of its phases, could appear insignificant to his fertile and mellow soul. When he could not soar in the high regions of contemplative philosophy, he stooped as low as the little child whose rosy cheek he patted, and who then became to him a teacher and a study. An insect crawling on a leaf,—a bit of grass bringing the joy of its short life around the stones of the pavement,—a cloud floating over the meadows,—a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... me, contemplative. She, too, was young. Ardor appealed to her. Life stood before her, beckoning, as to me. What could the girl ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... by examples of the most heroic virtue. The age of the martyrs ended, only to make room for that of the doctors and ascetics; so that each succeeding generation of the children of God presents to us the active and contemplative life equally fruitful in works of sanctification. An Athanasius, a Jerom, a Chrysostom, or an Augustin, are scarcely more precious as models in the house of God, than an Anthony, a Benedict, an Arseneus, or a Paul. Nor has the Almighty limited his gifts, or confined the mode of instruction ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... surely as I now stand before you; and till it comes the faithful can only weary heaven with their entreaties, if haply thereby they may mitigate the evil. I shall remain here," he continued, "while the Marquess needs me; but that task discharged, I intend to retire to one of the contemplative orders, and with my soul perpetually uplifted like the arms of Moses, wear out my life in prayer for those whom the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... rather than to the rude, fighting age which was about to pass away. Francis was no accident. We can see in him the two natures of his father and his mother—the commingling of the powerful, practical, sagacious politician and man of affairs, with the studious, contemplative, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... his sister. He was sure to hear of Augusta frequently, and to see some part, at least, of the letters which she was to write to her brother; he might also hope to be remembered in these letters as her "good friend and tutor;" and to these consolations his quiet, contemplative, and yet enthusiastic disposition, clung as to a secret source of pleasure, the only one which life seemed to open ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... we pass from the great facts of Roman history to the questions which it suggests to a contemplative mind in reference to the state of society among ourselves, on which history ought to shed light, what enigmas remain to be solved. Does moral worth necessarily keep pace with aesthetic culture, or intellectual triumphs, or material strength? ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... Lee sat still, his cigarette unlighted, his broad black hat far back upon his close-cropped hair, his eyes serenely contemplative upon the pink of the sky above the pines. Then he slipped from his place and, though each single movement gave an impression of great leisureliness, it was but a flash of time ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... inner life. It discourages, or at least neglects that minutely introspective habit of thought which the confessional is so much calculated to promote, which appears so prominently in the writings of the Catholic Saints, and which finds its special representation in the mystics and the religious contemplative orders. Improved conduct and improved circumstances are to an English mind the chief and almost the only ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... symbol, it is absurd to suppose that the "ten years' thirst" which the sight of her relieves, "the eyes whence Love once took his weapons," and such-like expressions were intended primarily as references to a neglected study of theology or a previous devotion to a contemplative life. The omission, therefore, of the commentators who interested themselves mainly in the allegory to tell us about the real Beatrice cannot be used ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... Sauti, thus questioned, gave in the midst of that big assemblage of contemplative Munis a full and proper answer in words consonant with their mode ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... acquaintance with Sarah had already taught him the expediency of keeping her in action. Sarah on the move might do some very startling things but a contemplative Sarah presented ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... once," Thorpe remarked. Some thought behind his words lent a musing effect to the tone in which they were uttered. The brother's contemplative smile seemed a comment upon ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... and flowers. The groves are filled with birds of beautiful plumage; the graceful blue bird, the enamelled hummer, and the cardinal, with his hood of the brightest scarlet, are for ever on the wing in pursuit of the shad-fly. The pert woodpecker climbs the trees, and along the shores sits the contemplative heron, watching the rapids flowing by, which are, during certain seasons, ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... actually find it there. Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet-line of every reader; his works present many phases of truth, each with scope large enough to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you seek in him you will surely discover, provided you seek truth. There is no exhausting the various interpretation of his symbols; and a thousand years hence, a world of new readers will possess a whole ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Theatre is Marguery's, which always seems to be full, and where the service is rather too hurried and too slap-dash to suit the contemplative gourmet; but Marguery's has its special claim to fame as the place where the Sole Marguery was invented, and though I have eaten the dish in half a hundred restaurants, there is no place where it is so perfectly cooked as in the ...
— The Gourmet's Guide to Europe • Algernon Bastard
... seat. In his hand he held a riding stick with which he drew shapeless pictures in the yellow gravel of the path. His brows were drawn over contemplative eyes, and the hint of a sour smile lifted the corners of his lips. Presently the brows relaxed, and his gaze traveled to the opposite side of the path, where the British minister sat in the ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... lads, the handsome one, was dreamy, contemplative, and a trifle elegaic; the other, ardent, impetuous, and always in action. They were two natures which completed each other; a priceless blessing to every friendship that is destined to last. Both had the same bar-sinister on them at their birth. The dreamer was the natural son of the unfortunate ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... manhood. His shining locks flowed in rich abundance upon his strong and graceful shoulders. His eye expressed more of flame than gaiety, more of enthusiasm than imagination. His brow, though manly, and, as it should seem, by nature erect, bore an appearance of solemn and contemplative. He had ever been distinguished by an attachment to solitude, and a love for those grand and tremendous objects of uncultivated nature with which his country abounded. His were the hanging precipice, and the foaming cataract. His ear drank in the voice of the ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... the part you would invite me to. But if I could bring myself to fancy, what I think you do but fancy, that I have any talents for active life, I want health for it; and besides it is a real truth. I have, if possible, less inclination, than ability. Contemplative life is not only my scene, but is my habit too. I begun my life where most people end theirs, with all that the world calls ambition. I don't know why it is called so, for, to me, it always seemed to be stooping, or climbing. I'll tell you my politic and religious ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... the wall, or admire the pictures or statuary, or it does not matter what, so long as they need not look straight into the fun they cannot share. What a glorious epoch of womanly dignity, independence and worthiness! It is a picture one likes to draw for the contemplative admirers of the age. ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... Latin was not subject, but sovereign, through virtue. Each thing has virtue in its nature, which does that to which it is ordained; and the better it does it so much the more virtue it has: hence we call that man virtuous who lives a life contemplative or active, doing that for which he is best fitted; we ascribe his virtue to the horse that runs swiftly and much, to which end he is ordained: we see virtue of a sword that cuts through hard things well, since it has been made to do so. Thus speech, which is ordained to express human ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... who baffled for a long time the rector's perspicacity and who might in a higher sphere have proved another l'Hopital, incapable of intrigue like all really profound persons, was by this time living in the contemplative state of an ancient hermit. Independent through privation, no personal consideration acted on his mind; he knew the laws and judged impartially. His life, reduced to the merest necessaries, was pure ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... extremity of his hunger. For a few moments the most profound silence reigned in the menagerie. The Prophet, with his hands behind his back, went from one cage to the other, observing the animals with a restless contemplative look, as if he hesitated to make between them an ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... said Tom. And a faint, contemplative grin showed itself on his countenance. He was thinking, as he often did, of the afternoon when he returned from Blair's Hollow and opened the door of the room behind the store to find the wooden cradle stranded like a small ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... imaginative vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command of it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid are just as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, as by men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there a single fact stated in the following pages which I have not verified ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... assemble about him: for this was one of his characteristics, that although the duke himself was not learned, yet he never wanted for knowledge; too early in life a practical man, he had not the leisure to become a contemplative one; he supplied this deficiency by perpetually "sifting and questioning well" the most eminent for their experience and knowledge; and Lord Bacon, and the Lord Keeper Williams, as well as such as Gerbier, were admitted into this sort of intimacy. We have a curious letter by Lord Bacon, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... more sedate, contemplative character. Philosophy becomes the rigid mistress of your life, enchanting enthusiasm the companion of mine. Suppose she lead me now and then in pursuit of a meteor; am not I happy in the chase? When one illusion vanishes, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... genius of the Scandinavian race was Tegner. His love of brave deeds and reckless adventure and his exaltation of the man of action above the man of thought are typical. His heroes, fair-haired and blue-eyed, stalwart and vigorous, relying on strength and longing for adventure, tender-hearted and contemplative when not aroused to violent action and bent on deeds of valor, personify the national ideal. His whole vision of life is Scandinavian, bright and vivid, with a tinge of melancholy. Tegner was, with Geijer and Ling, the first to adopt national ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... had no part in the lives of the men and women of the earth, but was torn away from them, left to stand by himself. From his place in the sky above the earth he saw the great river going majestically along. For a time it was quiet and contemplative as the sky had been when he was a boy down below lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass in boats and could hear their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and he looked abroad beyond the wide expanse of the ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... better than ever. He had given up walking; he was no longer a humorous stroller. He sat all day in a chair—almost any chair would serve, and was so dependent on what you would do for him that, had not his talk been highly contemplative, you might have thought he was blind. The reader already knows more about him than Isabel was ever to know, and the reader may therefore be given the key to the mystery. What kept Ralph alive was simply the fact that he had ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... case of Ann Penhallow was silent. The clergyman thinking too of his own bitter experience lapsed into contemplative cleaning of a much valued meerschaum pipe. The Squire not given to morbid or other psychological studies made brief reply. "I hope that Leila ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... began to crow like chanticleer, That fools should be so deep-contemplative; And I did laugh sans intermission An ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... contains drunken Christian's Exploits. Which were unfortunate, almost to the ruin of Denmark itself, as well as of the Nether-Saxon Circle;—till in the latter of these years he slightly rallied, and got a supportable Peace granted him (Peace of Lubeck, 1629); after which he sits quiet, contemplative, with an evil eye upon Sweden now and then. The beatings he got, in quite regular succession, from Tilly and Consorts, are not worth mentioning: the only thing one now remembers of him is his alarming ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... Minister'd to them; these their mantling cups With water slaked; with bibulous sponges those Made clean the tables, set the banquet on, And portioned out to each his plenteous share. 140 Long ere the rest Telemachus himself Mark'd her, for sad amid them all he sat, Pourtraying in deep thought contemplative His noble Sire, and questioning if yet Perchance the Hero might return to chase From all his palace that imperious herd, To his own honour lord of his own home. Amid them musing thus, sudden he saw The ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... eventually be found for the motions of the stars, the knowledge of the existence of those motions must always afford a new charm to the contemplative observer of the heavens, for they impart a sense of life to the starry system that would otherwise be lacking. A stagnant universe, with every star fixed immovably in its place, would not content the imagination or satisfy our longing for ceaseless activity. The majestic grandeur of the evolutions ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... of Colden. At first I was not much alarmed. Colden, it is true, was not a faultless or steadfast character. No gross or enormous vices were ascribed to him. His habits, as far as appearances enabled one to judge, were temperate and chaste. He was contemplative and bookish, and was vaguely described as being ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... with art for subject, in the Portfolio at a time when everybody had taken to writing about art, and I think his name was Davies. But it would be more in character to forget that he ever worked or had a name. When I was in Rome he had risen above activity and toil to the contemplative life and, I suppose, to the income that made it possible. One night he explained his philosophy to me. Men could not be happy without sunshine, he thought. The sun was house, food, clothes, furniture, identity, everything, and as most of the year in England sunshine was not to be had at any ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... business - life - this great city, Paris - Paris after dark - its lights, its gardens, its odd corners. Aha!' he cried, 'to be young again! The heart is young, but the heels are leaden. A poor, mean business, to grow old! Nothing remains but the COUP D'OEIL, the contemplative man's enjoyment, Mr. - ,' and ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed in its silence to say, "This is the abode of tranquility." All was still: not a sound was heard save soft murmuring tones which seemed to whisper in the ear of the weary traveller, "Come, and partake of nature's bounty," and to complain that such an offer should be made in vain. To a contemplative mind, such a scene might have suggested a thousand delightful reflections. But what charms could it have for the soul of Alexander, whose breast was filled with schemes of ambition and conquest; whose eye was familiarised with rapine and slaughter; and whose ears were accustomed to the clash of ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... lichen-clad pillar, with paws comfortably folded, a tuft of grass growing in each ear and rubus bushes along his back. And yonder is an old chief poised on a taller pillar, apparently gazing out over the landscape in contemplative mood, a tuft of bushes leaning back with a jaunty air from the top of his weatherbeaten hat, and downy mosses about his massive lips. But no rudeness or grotesqueness that may appear, however combined with the decorations that nature has added, may possibly ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... little respect as himself for the property of others. The associate perched on a branch a few steps away, while the first crow renewed his attempts by flying around the bone and the dog; but the latter remained impassive. Then the second personage, whose part had hitherto been to remain contemplative, flew off his branch, threw himself on the dog and gave him a formidable blow on the spine. Seized with indignation, the dog turned round to punish the author of this unjustifiable aggression; but the bird was already far away, and in the meanwhile ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... angel child, and the solitude of her quiet home accorded better with her sad and contemplative mood, than the foolish clatter of her simple neighbor's gossiping member, and right glad was she that her acquaintance extended no further than to her kind benefactor, and to the noble ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... to think of himself, Chichikov's mind had strayed elsewhere, for the reason that it had become taken up with grave meditation on the subject of the purchase just made. Suddenly finding himself no longer a fictitious proprietor, but the owner of a real, an actually existing, estate, he became contemplative, and his plans and ideas assumed such a serious vein as imparted to his features an unconsciously ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... opportunity to air his views upon the subject—to argue, in fact, that the barbed wire fence had been an important factor in building up the agricultural greatness of the West. "For what inducements," he exclaims, "does the top rail of such a fence offer to the contemplative farmer? None, sir! His traditional laziness has been broken up, and great material ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... nature. When a country arrives at a certain state of perfection, it looks as if it were made so; and curiosity is not excited. Besides, in social life too many objects occur for any to be distinctly observed by the generality of mankind; yet a contemplative man, or poet, in the country—I do not mean the country adjacent to cities—feels and sees what would escape vulgar eyes, and draws suitable inferences. This train of reflections might have led me further, ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the prospect ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... space the stalwart figure of GEORGE HAWKESWORTH BOND, Member for the East Division of Dorset, stands forth like a monument. Curious to see how BOND avoids vicinity of Cross Benches. Was standing there in contemplative attitude last night, whilst GORST was demonstrating that HARCOURT's Motion on Breach of Privilege was, (1) too late, and (2) that it was too soon. It was at this moment that the Mouse appeared on the scene, leisurely strolling down floor apparently going ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... Farthest of the three homes from the railroad, and where the hills begin, Philip and Ruth Van Doren chose their abode. And you may see them any day that you care to penetrate to their broad pastures, riding together, viewing with contemplative eyes the distant peaks or the cattle that are the Governor's delight, a link, he says, between the present and the olden times when the world was young. And often at night, when they are not with the Congdons or the Bennetts, they ride for hours in silence, ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... think) scorn to delight, so much they be content little to move, saving wrangling whether "virtus" be the chief or the only good; whether the contemplative or the active life do excel; which Plato and Boetius well knew; and therefore made mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of poesy. For even those hard-hearted evil men, who think virtue a school- ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... from a sort of gaiter of flesh, whose little boneless legs cannot carry the fat little paunch, the heavy big head. Note that its little skull is still soft, like an apple, under the thin floss hair. Its elder brother or sister is still vaguely contemplative of the world, with eyes that easily grow sleepy in their blueness. Those a little older have learned already that the world is full of solemn people on whom to practise tricks; their features have scarcely ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... left of Montague sat Somers, lord keeper; older, of more steady demeanor, of fuller figure, of bold face and full light eye, a politician, not a ponderer. At the right of Montague, grave, silent, impassive, now and again turning a contemplative eye about him, sat that great man. Sir Isaac Newton, known then to every nobleman, and now to every schoolboy, of the world. A gem-like mind, keen, clear, hard and brilliant, exact in every facet, and forsooth held ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... the firm produces these articles may be guessed at. They are probably easy to make, and require scarcely any skill. The contemplative man has a dim vision of a grimy shed in a back street, where a human being passes dismally through life the while he chips out an unending succession of these cheap urns and obelisks for his employers' retailing. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Union with God is its keynote, or rather is the dominant note which rings out clear again and again with its ever-repeated Sursum Corda! It is this that gives such special value to the treatises here presented on Prayer and the Contemplative Life. They flow from the pen of one who was literally steeped in God and Divine things, and who is speaking to us of things which he had himself tasted and seen. It is this that gives such simplicity and charm to the whole of his teaching. He is not experimenting; he is not speaking of theories; ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... while Catherine rose and stood contemplative before a long mirror that was in her room. Catherine de Vaucelles was now, at twenty-three, in the full flower of her comeliness. Blue eyes the mirror showed her,—luminous and tranquil eyes, set very far apart; honey-colored hair massed heavily ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... soon as they wipe off the heat of the day, they must simper an hour and catch cold in the princess's apartment; from thence to dinner with what appetite they may; and after that till midnight, work, walk, or think which way they please. No lone house in Wales, with a mountain and rookery, is more contemplative than this Court. Miss Lepell walked with me three or four hours by moonlight, and we met no creature of any quality but the king, who gave audience to the vice-chamberlain all ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... irregular reflex of those seen on the side they had left—here glimmering faintly at a picket station, and there at a larger encampment, glowing first in a circle of blaze, then of illumined smoke, that in its upward course gradually darkened into the blackness of night. To men of contemplative habits, and many such there were, though clad in blouses, the scene was strongly suggestive. Our states emblemed in the lights of the valleys and the mountain ridge as the much talked of "impassable barrier." But faith in the success of a cause ...
— Red-Tape and Pigeon-Hole Generals - As Seen From the Ranks During a Campaign in the Army of the Potomac • William H. Armstrong
... been the home. I dreamed a beautiful dream of hope to come here silently, to let every man, every house and every brick of the houses silently teach me, and, after having learned many fair and useful things, to return silently and thankfully home. Unfortunately I cannot now be a silent and contemplative pupil in this place, as I desired to be, but I must speak, forced by the time in which we are living and suffering. I will speak in order not to teach you, but to thank you. And I have to thank you much in the name of the Serbian nation and ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... of the incident he did not come to consider until later, but as he walked contemplative along Babylon Lane he detected sounds of distant gunfire, distinct from the more remote rumbling which was the voice of the battle front. He stood still—listening. An air raid on ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... honourable Frederick Fitzroy, addressing himself to Dashall, "You have now become a retired, steady, contemplative young man; a peripatetic philosopher; tired with the scenes of ton, and deriving pleasure only from the investigation of Real Life in London, accompanied in your wanderings, by your respectable relative of Belville-Hall; ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... listening to some divine melody that came in with the angelic visitors. The whole scene is bathed in light, and the longer we look the more we see the beauty of the lines which flow in the picture as if to some heavenly music. All is action save in the grave, contemplative figure of Joseph; and his serious, resting attitude by its contrast makes more evident the leaping child, the mother half stooping to lift him, John the Baptist pressing forward and Elizabeth gently restraining him, with the two flying, ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... To a quiet, contemplative character, averse to uproar, undue exercise of his bodily members, and all kind of useless confusion, nothing can be more distressing than a proceeding in all men-of-war called "general quarters." And well may it be so called, since it amounts to a general drawing and quartering ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... the airman with sudden alarm in his voice. "Hold tight!" And they began to shoot towards earth faster than they had risen. They came down, by what seemed a miracle to Mr. Lavender, who was still contemplative, precisely where they had gone up. A little group was collected there, and as they stepped out a voice said, "I beg your pardon," in a tone so dry that it pierced even the fogged condition in which Mr. Lavender alighted. The gentleman who spoke had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... pious, good, and clean, Sublime, contemplative, serene, Strong, constant, pleasant, wise! Bright effluence of exceeding grace; Best man! the swiftness and the race, The ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... says that angling is the contemplative man's recreation, and, having had in these later years much to con over in my mind, I know that he is right. But it is no occupation for a fuming man, and as I marched up and down I forgot all about my cork, till, with a short laugh that had the tail of a curse in ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... interest which the pranks of our mischievous relatives excite even in spectators not apt to appreciate the comic features of the spectacle. In the monkey-house of the Philadelphia Zoo I have seen saturnine burghers stand motionless for hours together, and contemplative children rapt in reveries that had little to do with the hope of witnessing a beast-fight. They seemed to feel the spell of a secret veiled in grotesque symbols, but disclosing occasional revelations of its significance, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... in itself a straggling procession of syllables that might be fifteen minutes passing a given point, and once more I confronted him—he so calm and sweet, I so hot and frenzied. He was standing in the contemplative attitude of the Colossus of Rhodes, with one foot on my infant tuberose, and the other among my pansies, his hands on his hips, his hat-brim tilted forward, one eye shut and the other gazing critically and admiringly in the direction of my principal chimney. He said now there was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... oneself a practical artist," answered the counsellor, "and so devoted a one as I am, so diligent in working at my art, and so ready to try every new experiment in it, one must leave such matters to people of an idler and more contemplative turn. If you aim at doing everything, you will never do ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... the border of a small lake, under the shadow of a mangrove tree which grew on its bank; then resting his elbows on his knees and his chin in the palms of his hands Youmaeale gazed into space, and motionless maintained for a long time the contemplative idleness so dear ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... of rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... no gay foliage, nor "shade above shade a woody theatre," such as is seen on a mountain declivity. It is a simple shadowy walk—shadowy to richness, cool, tranquil, redolent of freshness. There the soul feels "private, inactive, calm, contemplative," linked to things that were and are not. The mellow hue of time, not yet stricken by decay, clothes the buildings of this college, which, compared with other edifices more steeped in maturity of years, occupies, as it were, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... "Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me; for though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful; yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get: Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations and verbosities, the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... something to recreate nature, and soe goeth to the chapelle, hearinge the divine service and two lowe masses. From thence to dynner, during the tyme of whih she hath a lecture of holy matter (that is, reading from a religious book), either Hilton of Contemplative and Active Life, or some other spiritual and instructive work. After dynner she giveth audyence to all such as hath any matter to shrive unto her, by the space of one hower, and then sleepeth one quarter of an hower, and after she hath slept she contynueth in prayer until the ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Wulstan. She had lately been reading, in the Chronicles of Florence, the monk of Worcester, how "in his early life, when appointed to be chanter and treasurer of the Church, Wulstan embraced the opportunity of serving God with less restraint, giving himself up to a contemplative life, going into the church day and night to pray and read the Bible. So devoted was he to sacred vigils that not only would he keep himself awake during the night, but day and night also; and when the urgency of nature at last compelled him to sleep, he did not pamper his ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... style of man fitted to command the admiration of Joanna Crawfurd. Contemplative girls love men of experience. Staid girls love men with a dash—a dash of bravery, self-reliance, or even of recklessness. Harry Jardine's gladness to be at home; his interest in everything and everybody; the pleasant tone in which he referred to his mother; ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... with imperial magnificence. This suggested anything but doubts of the Sovereign's undisturbed rule. At Windsor, the current of affairs went merrily as a marriage-bell, the Royal party enjoying "the contemplative man's recreation" on the Virginia Water with a zeal that would have gratified, if it did not edify, Izaak Walton; and now the Coronation was boldly talked of—indeed, preparations were making for the performance of this ceremony with ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... experienced physiognomist in the world would have failed to observe the slightest trace of cunning, or want of a balanced mind in their expression. During the progress of his story he had continually held his ring where he could see it, and several times had raised it to the light, in a contemplative sort of way, as if he drew some satisfaction from its appearance. He bowed his head in his hands as he ceased speaking, and some moments elapsed before he looked up, though when he did so ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... the rapidly growing preponderance of women—and especially of unmarried women—among our poetic leaders is, I think, to be found in the fact that women, more often than men, command the means of living for a generous portion of the year that vital, unstrenuous, contemplative existence demanded by poetry as an antecedent condition of its creation. It is a significant fact that, according to Arnold Bennett, nearly all of the foremost English writers live far from the town. Most of the more promising American poets of both sexes, however, have of late had little ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Trinity, became the favorite philosophy of many of the Church fathers, and so introduced into Christian thought and life the Platonic dualism, that sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal which belittles the practical life and glorifies the contemplative. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to read. As he scanned the copies of directives, reports, operations logs, and procedures the process became automatic, and part of his consciousness turned contemplative. ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... same house with him, I learned that in other respects he did not deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St. James's Park,—where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts if he ever ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... Egypt, till the Murd'rous King Were dead, who sought his life, and missing fill'd With Infant blood the streets of Bethlehem; From Egypt home return'd, in Nazareth Hath been our dwelling many years, his life 80 Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, Little suspicious to any King; but now Full grown to Man, acknowledg'd, as I hear, By John the Baptist, and in publick shown, Son own'd from Heaven by his Father's voice; I look't for some great change; to Honour? no, But trouble, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... with that patient suffering the modern martyr has endured, he pursued, till he accomplished, the useful object of his labours. He, perhaps, was the first who exhibited to us other heroes than those of Rome and Greece; sages as contemplative, and a people more magnificent even than the iron masters of the world. Among other oriental productions, his most considerable is "The History of the Saracens." The first volume appeared in 1708, and the second ten years afterwards. In the preface ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... is so remarkable for its Doric simplicity, as well as being essential to mark the concluding period of the contemplative man's day) have not been admitted into any ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... said, giving the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen as much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn't want to ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... happiness; for of God alone is it true that His Being is His Happiness. Secondly, life means the operation of the living, by which operation the principle of life is made actual: thus we speak of active and contemplative life, or of a life of pleasure. And in this sense eternal life is said to be the last end, as is clear from John 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... solemn, mournful pages; and anon, when startled from sleep by these awful visions, she would soothe herself to rest by murmuring the metrical version of the Lord's Prayer contained in the "Purgatory." Most emphatically did Mrs. Hunt disapprove of the studious and contemplative habits of the ambitious child, who she averred was indulging dreams and aspirations far above her station in life, and well calculated to dissatisfy her with her humble, unpretending home and uninviting future. Education, she contended, was useless to poor people, who could not feed ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of the glorious mountain region in which he had established his household gods, the intercourse of society in which, during the later portion of his life, he took a conspicuous part, on account of the influx of visitors that besieged his retired, contemplative haunts, the manifestations of the contemporary literature of the day in its wonderful, pregnant phases, and the strong current of political excitements throughout a most eventful period of English history, never disturbed the deep, placid stream of the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... insufficient. At any rate, it is well to found another house: Carthusians of course, for they are holy, popular, and inexpensive. Henry, who was generous enough for lepers, hospitals, and active workers, did not usually care very much for contemplative orders, though his mother, the Empress Matilda, affected the Cistercians and founded the De Voto Monastery near Calais, and he inherited something from her. These considerations may have first prompted and then fortified Henry's very slow and reluctant steps in the work of founding Witham, in ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... ark. Cellini himself would have wiped out the insult with blood. Still Cellini knew that personal violence was not in the line of Michelangelo's character; for Michelangelo, according to his friend and best biographer, Condivi, was by nature, "as is usual with men of sedentary and contemplative habits, rather timorous than otherwise, except when he is roused by righteous anger to resent unjust injuries or wrongs done to himself or others, in which case he plucks up more spirit than those who are esteemed brave; but, for ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... the hay and the song of the birds and the life of the fields were her ceaseless satisfaction and refreshment. Perhaps, as she wandered about those winding lanes and lonely bridle-paths, she became too contemplative, too introspective, too much addicted to the analysis of frames and feelings. Perhaps, dwelling so exclusively on the abstract and the ideal, her fresh young spirit became unfitted for its rude impact with the actual and the real. Perhaps, too, she was unfortunate ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... gooseherd. Sometimes it is a little boy or girl, sometimes an old woman, and early in the morning whoever has the post collects the whole flock, drives it to a chosen feeding ground, spends the day there, and brings it back at night. It must be a contemplative life, and in dry weather pleasant. I think it would suit a philosopher if he could choose his days. In our Franconian village the gooseherd was a little boy, vastly proud of his job. Every morning, ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... by Mrs. Byron, of a resemblance between her son and Rousseau was founded chiefly, we may suppose, on those habits of solitariness, in which he had even already shown a disposition to follow that self-contemplative philosopher, and which, manifesting themselves thus early, gained strength as he advanced in life. In one of his Journals, to which I frequently have occasion to refer,[94] he thus, in questioning the justice of this comparison between himself and Rousseau, gives,—as usual, vividly,—some ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... contented man, because he's nearly always pleased with himself. If he fails at anything he can usually excuse himself on the grounds of somebody else's damnfoolishness. If he succeeds he complacently assumes that he did it out of his own greatness. Action—that's the thing. The contemplative, analytical mind is the mind that suffers. Man was a happy animal until he began to indulge in abstract thinking. And now that the burden of thought is laid on him, he frequently uses it to ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... and miscellaneous reading, both at Harvard, and at the magnificent Boston Library. During his first two years at college, his bent seemed to lie rather towards the studious and contemplative than towards the active life. His brother, at this time, appeared to him to be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition; and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting, with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... dazzled than convinced the world at first; nay, though it must be acknowledged that one, and perhaps more of Spinoza's fundamental conceptions have increasingly repelled rather than attracted religious people, yet it can hardly be disputed that he gave an impulse to contemplative religion, of which the effect is only now beginning to be ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... of a contrast, and as a testimonial to the planetary growth of man's emotional nature, gained from the ages of progress; let us question modern man as he leans confidingly, in a contemplative mood, against the broad trunk of some giant of the forest. With uncovered head, he muses in silence; he senses a vague feeling of awe for this magnificent specimen of matured life in the vegetable world. With every sense attuned to the overtones and undertones, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... its purpose so perverted, that its ideas are mere fantasy to common men. Whether the artist becomes poet or philosopher, moralist or founder of a religion, his sexual doctrine is nothing but a barren special pleading for pleasure, excitement, and knowledge when he is young, and for contemplative tranquillity when he is old and satiated. Romance and Asceticism, Amorism and Puritanism are equally unreal in the great Philistine world. The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... church or something? Until he feels that the world is being conducted for him, that things are tolerably not at rest, where shall one find in civilisation, in this present moment, a man who is ready to stop and look about him—to take a spell at last at being a reasonable, contemplative, or even marriageable being? ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... outside the walls. And all around, among the beautiful vegetation and lovely forests on the banks of the broad Irrawaddy, rose the pagodas, graceful with the peculiar beauty of the far East, with gilded lacquer-work, umbrella-shaped roofs spiring upwards; huge idols with solemn contemplative faces within, and all around swarms of yellow-robed, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... additions and changes in the list of dramatis personae. Nine characters are added outright—Dennis, Le Beau, Amiens, the First Lord, Sir Oliver Martext, William, Audrey, Touchstone, and Jaques. The latter is most noteworthy. Hazlitt calls him the only purely contemplative character Shakespeare ever drew. From the beginning to the end of the play he does absolutely nothing except to think and moralize. Another critic has said, "Shakespeare designed Jaques to be a maker of fine sentiments, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... in her eyes burned more steadily now. It was the fire which is unquenchable—the fire of a lasting hate, vengeful, terrible. Then her tone dropped to a contemplative soliloquy. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... its chief power of pleasing; and would strike us, perhaps, as more impassioned and exalted, if it were not regulated and harmonized by the most beautiful taste. It is singularly sweet, elegant, and tender—touching, perhaps, and contemplative, rather than vehement and overpowering; and not only finished throughout with an exquisite delicacy, and even severity of execution, but infused with a purity and loftiness of feeling, and a certain ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... work we tend the sick and visit the dying; we also are employed in other good undertakings, and we hope before long to establish fresh ones. So you see, my dear, that we work out our own salvation, though those who have a vocation to a purely religious life can enter our contemplative order, and devote themselves entirely to prayer and meditation. You will be able to judge by-and-by to which you would wish to belong, though you will, of course, be guided by the ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... death, "here I am, living at the age of seventy-five."[243] The one supernatural idea which seems to have deepened with old age and remained undisturbed to the end was his belief in his attendant genius. In what he wrote during his last years his mood was almost entirely introspective, contemplative, and didactic, yet here and there he introduces a sentence which lets in a little light from his way of life and personal affairs, and helps to show how he occupied himself, and what his humour was. He tells how one day, in 1576, he was writing ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... occupation, "the words which you have just spoken might, without injustice, be applied to the two persons who are now conversing together. For after suffering misfortunes and wrongs beyond an appropriate portion, they have now reached that period of existence when a tranquil and contemplative future is assured to them. In this manner is the sage and matured utterance of the inspired philosopher Nien-tsu again proved: that the life of every person is largely composed of two varieties of circumstances which together build up his existence—the Good ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... outside work must go on, and somebody must do it. But of course we have the hardest time, since while in the world we must not be of it. I have come, of late, to think that both classes are needed, the contemplative and the active, and God does certainly take the latter aside now and then as you suggest, by sickness and in other ways, to set them thinking. Holiness is not a mere abstraction; it is praying and loving and being consecrate, but it is also the doing kind deeds, speaking friendly ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... a passionate whisper, as if overpowered by the intensity of his contemplative rapture, his anger with the ravening wolves, and his desire to be with those other men, whose souls aspired toward the salvation of the world. Sergei was taken aback. He remained quiet for some time, ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... London at twenty-two, and enrolled himself as a student of the Mining College in Jermyn Street. There he had spent four years, sharing the chambers of a young barrister in the Temple Gardens. His London career was uneventful. Taciturn in manner, he made few friends. His mind had a tendency toward contemplative inactivity. Of physical energy he had very little, and this may have been partly due to his infirmity. Late at night he would walk alone in the Strand: the teeming life of the city, and the mystery of its silence after ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... he had thought, so still sat the contemplative mountaineer, so alluring were the details of the landscape. The enthusiasm of the amateur is always a more urgent motive power than the restrained and ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... the shining ones, lie on the part you would invite me to. But if I could bring myself to fancy, what I think you do but fancy, that I have any talents for active life, I want health for it; and besides it is a real truth. I have, if possible, less inclination, than ability. Contemplative life is not only my scene, but is my habit too. I begun my life where most people end theirs, with all that the world calls ambition. I don't know why it is called so, for, to me, it always seemed to be stooping, or climbing. I'll tell you my politic and religious sentiments in a few ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... out on deck in contemplative silence enjoying his after-dinner smoke. Farther down were Grace and Veath. Suddenly turning in their direction, Hugh perceived that they were not there; nor were they anywhere in sight. He was pondering over their whereabouts, his eyes still on the vacant chairs, ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... of a winding rivulet; that I am invigorating myself in the sunshine, or delighting my imagination with being hidden from the invasion of human evils and human passions in the darkness of a thicket; that I am busy in gathering shells and pebbles on the shore, or contemplative on a rock, from which I look upon the water, and consider how many waves are rolling ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... and women of the earth, but was torn away from them, left to stand by himself. From his place in the sky above the earth he saw the great river going majestically along. For a time it was quiet and contemplative as the sky had been when he was a boy down below lying on his belly in the wood. He saw men pass in boats and could hear their voices dimly. A great quiet prevailed and he looked abroad beyond the wide expanse of the river and saw fields and towns. They were ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... things more readily than Agatha did, for her spirits were lighter. Not that Agatha was unhappy, or inattentive to her father; but she was quieter than Marie and of a more contemplative mood. She also had dark hair, but it was a dark brown, and she wore it braided close to her forehead. Her complexion was clear and bright, her forehead was white, and the colour in her cheeks, when she had ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... you pass to a higher and much larger mountain, which seems formed by nature for a lonely contemplative life; for on one side it looks upon the sea, and on the other is covered with old trees, always green, which at once make a fruitful and a pleasing object. Hither St Thomas retired to pray with his disciples; and here it was also that he was slain by a Brachman with ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... Britannic Majesty, reduced to that frightful pinch, has at last given way. Treaty of Neutrality for Hanover; engagement again to stick one's puissant Pragmatic sword into its scabbard, to be perfectly quiescent and contemplative in these French-Bavarian Anti-Austrian undertakings, and digest one's indignation as one can. For our Paladin of the Pragmatic what a posture! This is the first of Three Attempts by our puissant little Paladin to draw sword;—not till the third could he get his sword out, or ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... in new editions, was contented now with attending his patients; and, when Izaak Walton was not in his house in Clerkenwell (to which neighbourhood he seems to have removed after giving up his shop in Chancery Lane), he was away on some fishing ramble. His Complete Angler, or The Contemplative Man's Recreation had appeared in May 1653, and a second edition of it ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... have found itself in an England absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and brilliant picture, and whence his impartial brain—one lobe of which seems to have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious—could draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its lessons ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... temples and altars. The Roman priests were warriors and magistrates; those of Athens were philosophers and poets. The same observations apply to Mahometanism. In India it has always shown itself more contemplative, more tolerant, than in Arabia, Turkey, or on the northern coast of Africa, and when it propagated itself in the southern regions of Europe, its stern inflexibility was not able to resist even the influence of clime; the perfumed breezes of the Betis and the Xenil despoiled it, in part, of ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... was English, and she wondered, with a faint uneasiness, what his business was. In the meanwhile the big, slowly-moving beasts had stopped and stood still, blowing through their nostrils and regarding the stranger with mild, contemplative eyes. One of them turned its head towards the girl inquiringly, and ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss
... said his daughter, letting her fine eyes dwell on Schmidt with the contemplative scrutiny she might bestow on an exhibit in a ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the meal Rod described their discovery of the chasm and revealed some of his thoughts concerning it, but Wabi betrayed only passing flashes of interest. At times he seemed strangely preoccupied and would stand in an idle, contemplative mood, his hands buried deep in his pockets, while Rod or Mukoki proceeded with the little duties about the table or the stove. Finally, after arousing himself from one of these momentary spells, he pulled a brass shell ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... bird and beast, and unregenerate man. It is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built and work is done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, the mountains of purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplative life not yet made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes that thin white belt, where are the resting-places of angelic feet, the points whence purged souls take their flight towards infinity. Above all is heaven, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... herself in that atmosphere of contemplative eternity, and so strangely did it affect me that I should not have been surprised to have awaked a century or so later and found her just beginning to ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... eye. The claims of the psychoanalyst are there fulfilled to the uttermost.] Instead of many examples I gladly quote a single one, but an instructive exposition by Walter Hitton, a great master of the contemplative life, from his "Scala Perfectionis" as Beaumont (Tract. v. Gust. pub. 1721, pp. 188 ff.) renders it. Thus he writes: "From what I said we can to some extent perceive that visions and revelations, or any kind of spirit in bodily appearance, or in the imagination in sleep or waking, or any other ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... of men by its own moderation. Hence was it that the ancients pronounced Athens to be the seat of sages, because, enriched with an air of the greatest purity, it prepared with glad liberality the lucid intellects of its sons for the contemplative part of life. Assuredly for the body to imbibe muddy waters is a different thing from sucking in the transparency of a sweet fountain. Even so the vigour of the mind is repressed when it is clogged by a heavy atmosphere. Nature herself hath ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... had come round to the marble fireplace. The mantel-piece was a handsome work by a Princhester artist in the Gill style—with contemplative ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... of a more sedate, contemplative character. Philosophy becomes the rigid mistress of your life, enchanting enthusiasm the companion of mine. Suppose she lead me now and then in pursuit of a meteor; am not I happy in the chase? When one illusion ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... the outsides of the marble may be seen on the top of the head and in the base. He has left the same roughnesses in other of his works, as that statue for the tomb of Pope Julius II., which represents Contemplative Life. This is the custom of great masters, lords of their art. But in the Giant it is more wonderful than ever, because, besides not adding any pieces, he amended the faults of the roughing out, an impossible or, at least, a most difficult ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... great circular Spanish cloaks of brown or bottle-green, defective in the matter of footgear, and with shapeless greasy hats in their ungloved hands. Their deportment was as dignified as if they had been the chapter of a religious order, and every face was turned with an air of contemplative solemnity toward the countess. With nervous haste she wrote a few lines at the foot of the document, read it over three or four times and altered a word here and there; she then folded the paper, returned it to the envelope, and handed it back ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Magazine, and in the Southern Literary Messenger, where they originally appeared, is one of the most remarkable and delightful books of the present season. Under the artistic disguise of the reveries of a solitary bachelor, yielding to the sweet and pensive fancies that cluster around his contemplative moments, inspired to strange, aerial, and solemn musings by the quiet murmur of his old-fashioned wood-fire, or gathering a swarm of quaint moralities from the fragrant embers of his cigar, the author stamps his heart on these living pages, and informs them with the most beautiful revelations ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... to question its correctness. For among the precepts and rules of all those in the East who teach men how to withdraw the mind from the body, and to unite it with God, or inculcate what the Latins call a contemplative and mystic life, whether they are Christians, or Mohammedans, or Pagans, there is this precept, viz., that the eyes must be fixed every day for some hours upon some particular object, and that whoever does this will ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Man," and still less a Prophet, the kind of truth he divined was, in fact, on the scale of the prophets. It seemed to me that over the last decade of his life he found himself more and more in the dilemma that in the life of his mind he was living with ideas, the fruit of a contemplative preoccupation with the Incarnation and the Sacraments, which he shrank from talking about, from a natural humility and a clear and grateful understanding of the Catholic tradition of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... occupy it since several of his professional acquaintances were seated in the neighborhood who would be glad to greet him. "Annie Louise Cary is right back of me," I said, "and Clara Louise Kellogg near by." But he did not care to accept my offer, and I fancied I saw a rather more serious and contemplative look come over his grizzled face. Naturally, I asked him what he thought of the new house and the new enterprise, adding that I regretted that he was not the manager. He ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... padded shoulders. This he then proceeded to fasten with hooks and eyes,—a work of some patience. Forty eager fingers stretched out to assist him, but were waved aside, with a look of pained decorum as he gravely completed his task. Then falling back, he bade the others do the same, and they formed a contemplative semicircle before ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... sedate, contemplative girls, never out of temper but with reason; when that reason is given them, hardly ever pardon, or afford you ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... household, homely passion, which belongs to the early ballad poetry. Their passion is of a quality more venerable, it is true, and deeper than that of the opera, because more permanent and coextensive with human life; but it is not much wider in its sphere, nor more apt to coalesce with contemplative or philosophic thinking. Pass from these narrow fields of the intellect, where the relations of the objects are so few and simple, and the whole prospect so bounded, to the immeasurable and sea-like arena upon which Shakspeare careers—co- ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... said the honourable Frederick Fitzroy, addressing himself to Dashall, "You have now become a retired, steady, contemplative young man; a peripatetic philosopher; tired with the scenes of ton, and deriving pleasure only from the investigation of Real Life in London, accompanied in your wanderings, by your respectable relative of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Church fathers, and so introduced into Christian thought and life the Platonic dualism, that sharp distinction between the temporal and the eternal which belittles the practical life and glorifies the contemplative. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... evening in the summer time. A soft air stirred the leaves of the fresh green trees, and passed like a smooth shadow over the river, and like a smoother shadow over the yielding grass. The voice of the falling water, like the voices of the sea and the wind, were as an outer memory to a contemplative listener; but not particularly so to Mr Riderhood, who sat on one of the blunt wooden levers of his lock-gates, dozing. Wine must be got into a butt by some agency before it can be drawn out; and the wine of sentiment never having been ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... another cigarette and blew a contemplative whiff toward the crystal: "No: at best the game is a crooked one, even for the few who have really ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... quite sure it does not agree With a quiet, peaceable man like me, Who am not of that nervous and meagre kind, That are always distressed in body and mind! And at times it really does me good To come down among this brotherhood, Dwelling forever underground, Silent, contemplative, round and sound; Each one old, and brown with mould, But filled to the lips with the ardor of youth, With the latent power and love of truth, And with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... gleam throws softened lights or tricksy reflections on every object, and favors a dreamy mood which vaguely weds itself to the play of light and shade. The silence which generally prevails at that time makes it particularly dear to artists, who grow contemplative, stand a few paces back from the pictures on which they can no longer work, and pass judgement on them, rapt by the subject whose most recondite meaning then flashes on the inner eye of genius. He who has never stood pensive by a friend's ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... Dorothy, her head turned to one side in a half-contemplative attitude. "Experience? Of course that is the only way we ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... Belle Isle, and carried open water most across t' Straits. Well, sir, t' wind veered round all of a sudden, just as us was abeam of t' Devil's Table, and t' Gulf ice came out of t' Straits fair roaring"—and Uncle Rube took another contemplative ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... 'Keezleton road, six-and-twenty miles.' 'You seem to have no stragglers.' 'Never allow straggling.' 'You must teach my people; they straggle badly.' A bow in reply. Just then my Creoles started their band for a waltz. After a contemplative suck at a lemon, 'Thoughtless fellows for serious work' came forth. I expressed a hope that the work would not be less well done because of the gaiety. A return to the lemon gave me the opportunity to retire. Where Jackson got his lemons 'No fellow could find out,' ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... this interview meant important things to him. Somehow on his commonplace countenance was to be found the expression of a dreamer, a fashioner of great and absurd projects, a fine, tender fool. He cast hopeful and reverent glances at the man who was deeply contemplative of the grey note. He evidently believed himself on the threshold of a triumph of some kind, and he awaited his fruition with a joy that was only made sharper by the usual ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... and contrast between contemplative life and actual existence was quite in the Rasmus Nielsen spirit; the use that was made of it here was strange. One would suppose that the example adduced established that similar natural qualifications, similar family and other conditions, in other words, the actual ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... large brick building, covering, with its grounds, 13/4 acres, and which was built for the convent purposes in 1859, having been founded by Cardinal (then Father) Manning. The nuns, numbering about thirty, are vowed to the contemplative life of prayer and manual labour in the service of God, but do no teaching or nursing, and there are no lay sisters. The next opening on the south side of Cornwall Road is Kensington Park Road, ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... life; for of God alone can it be said that His own being is His happiness. In another way life is taken to mean the activity on the part of the living thing by which activity the principle of life is reduced to act. Thus we speak of an active or contemplative life, or of a life of pleasure; and in this way the last end is called life everlasting, as is clear from the text: "This is life everlasting, that they know Thee, the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... this brotherhood Dwelling for ever underground, Silent, contemplative, round and sound, Each one old and brown with mould, But filled to the lips with the ardour of youth, With the latent power and love of truth, And with ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... contrary to the Divine commands; so that she does not compel the philosophers, who become Christians, to change their habit or their means of life, which are no hindrance to religion, but only their false opinions. As for these three kinds of life, the contemplative, the active, and that which partakes of both qualities, although a man living in faith may adopt any of them, and therein reach eternal reward, yet the love of truth and the duties of charity alike must have their place. One may not so give himself to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... of view are different in different countries. We may find ourselves looking, not only at political questions, but at incidents in natural history from a different point of view when we are on different sides of an ocean. The other day I was in a contemplative mood not far from Washington. I was thinking what a great country I was in, how much larger the rivers were and how vast the distances, and generally working up in my own mind an impression of the great size of the country. ...
— Recreation • Edward Grey
... severe," returned Juliet. "We are apt to forget during the excitement of the moment the cruelty we inflict. I read old Izaak Walton when a child. He made me mistress of the whole art of angling. It is such a quiet contemplative amusement. The clear stream, the balmy air, the warbling of happy birds, the fragrant hedge-rows and flowery banks, by which you are surrounded, make you alive to the most pleasing impressions: and amidst sights and sounds of beauty, you never reflect that you are acting the part of the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... driving man has been condemned socially. Submission, absolute and perpetual, to parents, to lord, to ancestors, to Fate, has been the ruling idea of each man's life. Controlled by such ideas, the easy-going, time-ignoring, dreaming, contemplative life—if you so choose to call it—of the Orient ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... plain, and folk cannot say but that the horse are hearty and in spirits." Animated by the natural impetuosity and fire of his temper, young Bucklaw rushed on with the careless speed of a whirlwind. Ravenswood was scarce more moderate in his pace, for his was a mind unwillingly roused from contemplative inactivity, but which, when once put into motion, acquired a spirit of forcible and violent progression. Neither was his eagerness proportioned in all cases to the motive of impulse, but might be compared to the sped of ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... but whether this was the cause of his restlessness he could not say. He felt anxious and melancholy, and was worried by a sense of coming ill, though what such ill might be, or from what quarter it would come, he knew not. While thus gloomily contemplative, the great bell of the cathedral boomed out nine deep strokes, and the hollow sound breaking in on his reflections made him wake up, shake off his dismal thoughts, and sent him inside to attend to his work. Yet the memory of those forebodings occurred to him often in after days, and read by the ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... to the military men; no body of doctrine which, while strengthening him for the fight, could bring to him peace of mind. The Zen-shu ultimately satisfied that want. Zen is the Japanese equivalent of the Indian term dhyana, which signifies "meditation." In fact, the Zen is a contemplative sect. Its disciples believe that, "knowledge can be transmitted from heart to heart without the intervention of words." But though purely a contemplative rite at the time of its introduction into Japan, 1168, it was subsequently ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... it. In that prayer, the soul, which would willingly neither stir nor move, is delighting in the holy repose of Mary; but in this prayer it can be like Martha also. [3] Accordingly, the soul is, as it were, living the active and contemplative life at once, and is able to apply itself to works of charity and the affairs of its state, and to spiritual reading. Still, those who arrive at this state, are not wholly masters of themselves, and are ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... at first recognise their colour. But when you had perceived that they were blue, and had brought the fact home to your knowledge, their blueness remained with you as a thing fixed for ever. And you would feel, if you yourself were thoughtful and contemplative, and much given to study a lady's eyes, that, such as they were, every lady would possess the like if only it were given to ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... Augusta frequently, and to see some part, at least, of the letters which she was to write to her brother; he might also hope to be remembered in these letters as her "good friend and tutor;" and to these consolations his quiet, contemplative, and yet enthusiastic disposition, clung as to a secret source of pleasure, the only one which life seemed to ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... opinions what they may, who but some fantastic individual, or ultra-contemplative scholar, ever thinks of subjecting to them his practical notions of bettering his condition! And how soon is it likely that men will leave off endeavouring to secure themselves against the uneasier chances of vicissitude, even if Providence ordains them to do so for no other end than the preservation ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... method as well as their matter. Burnet took Thuanus as his model. 'I have made him ', he says, 'my pattern in writing.'[5] The others are discussed by Clarendon in a long passage of his essay 'On an Active and on a Contemplative Life'.[6] He there develops the view, not without reference to his own history, that 'there was never yet a good History written but by men conversant in business, and of the best and most liberal education'; and he illustrates it by comparing ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... undisciplined fancies in the ordered chamber of his brain. The worst of it was she saw and knew just what she was doing. She was aware before he was, and she made him aware, her face turned to look at him, on her lips a mocking, contemplative smile that was almost a superior sneer. It was this that shocked him into consciousness of the orgy his imagination had been playing him. From the wall above her, the stiff portraits of Isaac and Eliza Travers ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... mischievous wisdom. He told me once that when he lived in some peasant's house, he tried to make those about him forget that he was there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room. It is possible that low vitality helped him to be observant and contemplative, and made him dislike, even in solitude, those thoughts which unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... not that," answered the other, still moodily contemplative of his boots. "I really like the lady well enough—love her, I daresay. I have not had much experience of the tender passion since I was jilted by an Oxford barmaid—whom I would have married, by Jove. But the truth is, the lady in question isn't free to marry ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... experienced, and with that patient suffering the modern martyr has endured, he pursued, till he accomplished, the useful object of his labours. He, perhaps, was the first who exhibited to us other heroes than those of Rome and Greece; sages as contemplative, and a people more magnificent even than the iron masters of the world. Among other oriental productions, his most considerable is "The History of the Saracens." The first volume appeared in 1708, and the second ten years afterwards. In the preface to the last volume, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... very well described this impulse in his Genio y Figura. Rafaela, the heroine of this novel, says that, after her bath: "I fall into a puerility which may be innocent or vicious, I cannot decide. I only know that it is a purely contemplative act, a disinterested admiration of beauty. It is not coarse sensuality, but aesthetic platonism. I imitate Narcissus; and I apply my lips to the cold surface of the mirror and kiss my image. It is the love of beauty, the expression of tenderness and affection for ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the oligarchs, would rip off the leather or vellum, and throw them into the fire or out of the window, saying that 'now he could read with unwashed hands at his ease.' Such a person, then, is the man indifferent to books, and he sins by way of defect, being deficient in the contemplative virtue of book-loving. As to the man who is exactly in the right mean, we call him the book-lover. His happiness consists not in reading, which is an active virtue, but in the contemplation of bindings, and illustrations, and title-pages. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... Adams' fireplace leans against her. It falls on to her with a tremendous crash.... Lord Gumthorpe comes forward and gazes at the jumbled debris. He is conscious of a sense of despairing conflict—the conflict between contemplative amazement and some natural but well-controlled demand for concrete action. An appalling conviction comes to him that he ought to do something. Under the fallen mess of brick, marble, and wood there are feeble undulations. A phrase keeps running through his mind—"Expressing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... the great beech about eleven o'clock on spring mornings there was always a wood-pigeon. The wood-pigeon is a contemplative sort of bird, and pauses now and then during the day to consider over his labours in filling his crop. He came again about half-past four, but it was at eleven that his visit to the beech was usually ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... you, when you were walking alone and in contemplative mood, to lie flat on your face in the grassy underbrush of a forest, amid the peculiar vegetation, of many and varying species, that grows between the fallen autumn leaves, and to let your eyes stray along ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... can hope to describe my sensations of that night, in such a manner as to impart them to the contemplative spirit that may read this sketch, and to afford pleasure at all comparable with that which I enjoyed; but I have thought that I might by the recital awaken some gratifying recollections of still higher flittings of the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... old; but not only because she was so exceedingly slender, small, and dainty, did she seem like a girl of eighteen—her nature, too, was permeated by a rare spirit of youth; and when her eye rested, absorbed and contemplative, upon an object, it had the clearness and dreamy sweetness of the gaze of a child. She was a product of the border: southern vivacity and northern gravity had resulted in a restless mixture; she was fond of musing, and, playful as a young animal, was capable ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... the dramatic monologues, "A Death in the Desert," detaches itself from this double group. It is contemplative in tone, but inspired by a formed conviction, and, dramatically at least, by an instructive purpose; and thus becomes the centre of another small division of Mr. Browning's poems, which for want of a less ugly and hackneyed ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... was not often my fortune to encounter an imposing military array. In London there are a great many red-coats, but they rarely march about the streets in large masses. The most impressive military body that engages the attention of the contemplative pedestrian is the troop of Life Guards or of Blues which every morning, about eleven o'clock, makes its way down to Whitehall from the Regent's Park barracks. (Shortly afterward another troop passes up from Whitehall, where, at the Horse Guards, the guard has been changed.) The Life Guards ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... by some French Sisters who had come to London in 1865, and settled at Fulham in 1867 in a house near the site of the present convent. There are eleven nuns, of whom three are lay Sisters. They are devoted to the contemplative life. Just opposite is a large brewery, established 1867. At the east end of Eustace Road is a small brick Wesleyan chapel, hidden away in a corner, which deserves a word of mention, as it is a German chapel and the services ...
— Hammersmith, Fulham and Putney - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... the apt and deserved soubriquet of 'the picturesque explorer of America.' To the pleasure which Mr. Lanman derived from these pursuits he added a sportsman's love for the field and took genuine delight in the 'contemplative art' of angling. He was the first American to cast the artificial fly in the Saguenay region and to describe for the angler the charms of that since famous locality. He has followed this sport in nearly every State ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6 • Various
... Mr. Lukisch sat down in a rickety chair and gazed at the clock, face to face, with contemplative satisfaction. Stepfather Time would have been interested in the contrast between those two physiognomies. The clock's face, benign and bland, would have deceived him. But, innocent though he was in the ways of evil, the man's ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to the practical life is also dependent on Plato's. In the Tenth Book of the Ethics he puts the claims of the Contemplative Life even higher than Plato ever did, so that the practical life appears to be only ancillary to it. He does not feel in the same degree as Plato the call for the philosopher to descend once more into the Cave for the sake of the prisoners there, and altogether he seems far more ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of later ages. Light, as the indispensable condition of life, is no dream, but a fact; sight is the highest sentient faculty; and the luminous rays are real intellectual stimulants.[186-1] But such reflections will not escape the contemplative reader. ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... took his time about the letter, but when it was finished he dismissed the stenographer with an impatient and powerful wave of the hand—as though brushing the man bodily out of the room. Remaining motionless until the door had closed, Mr. Flint turned abruptly and fixed his eyes on the contemplative figure ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the cautious contemplative brother as one that was fraught with no ordinary danger, and he would have most willingly declined the prominent character allotted to him in the performance but for the importunate entreaty of his friends, who implored him, as he valued their blessing, not to slight ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... intense effect of the lyric is due. Like the essay the lyric is a subjective composition; it is confessedly the expression of the poet's personal emotion and his own experiences. His mind, his soul, speak to us; he does not interpret the thoughts and feelings of another. The lyric is usually contemplative and full of the choicest results of the poet's meditations. It influences action indirectly through direct appeals ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... him health so vigorous and settled that those who had known him in the days of his infirmity declared him to be absolutely rejuvenated, and truly he did feel in his soul a renewal of strength like that of the eagle. This he attributed to exercises of the contemplative life to which he now ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... after dark - its lights, its gardens, its odd corners. Aha!' he cried, 'to be young again! The heart is young, but the heels are leaden. A poor, mean business, to grow old! Nothing remains but the COUP D'OEIL, the contemplative man's enjoyment, Mr. - ,' and he paused for ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have received without incongruity additions and accommodations adapted to the needs of each successive occupant, who, being for the most part proprietor, was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these humble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator of a production of Nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown than to have been erected—to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock—so little is there in them of formality, such ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... was a perfectly good American citizen in shirt-sleeves and overalls, pipe in mouth, toleration in his mien, calmly steering a wheelbarrow down the drive. Sally caught the glint of his cool eyes and experienced a flash of intuition into a soul steeped in contemplative indulgence of the city crowd and its silly antics. And forthwith, for some reason she found no time to analyse, she felt more at home, ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... lungs that have once inhaled it, or thought to the mind in which it has once been conceived. I defied Heaven itself to rob me of this divine embodying of my desires. I had seen her, and that was enough. For the contemplative, to see is to enjoy. It scarcely mattered to me whether she loved me, or whether she passed me by without perceiving me. I had been touched by her splendor, and was still enveloped in her rays; she could no more ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... open, and a long silence dropped down. Ope-Kwan borrowed Koogah's pipe for a couple of contemplative sucks. One of the younger women giggled nervously and ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... magnificent passage of the Journal the feelings of the moment: "He said," writes his secretary, "that at Rome one saw nothing but the sky under which she had been built, and the outline of her site: that the knowledge we had of her was abstract, contemplative, not palpable to the actual senses: that those who said they beheld at least the ruins of Rome, went too far, for the ruins of so gigantic a structure must have commanded greater reverence-it was nothing but her sepulchre. The world, jealous of her, prolonged ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... feet long, reposing on top of his lichen-clad pillar, with paws comfortably folded, a tuft of grass growing in each ear and rubus bushes along his back. And yonder is an old chief poised on a taller pillar, apparently gazing out over the landscape in contemplative mood, a tuft of bushes leaning back with a jaunty air from the top of his weatherbeaten hat, and downy mosses about his massive lips. But no rudeness or grotesqueness that may appear, however combined with the decorations that nature has added, may possibly ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... The captain then arose, for a moment critically examined the sleeping man, holding his head a little on one side, whistling softly, and stepping backwards to get a good perspective, but always with contemplative good humor, as if Catron were a work of art, which he (the captain) had created, yet one that he was not yet entirely satisfied with. Then he put a large pea-jacket over his flannel blouse, dragged a Mexican serape from the corner, and putting ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... so remarkable for its Doric simplicity, as well as being essential to mark the concluding period of the contemplative man's day) have not been admitted into any edition ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 24. Saturday, April 13. 1850 • Various
... and we were soon out of sight. Our way still lay through desert-hills, but with vegetation frequently. There was talk of the small oasis of Janet to our left; and we indulged in some pastoral reflections on the life of contemplative ease and primitive simplicity which would be indulged in in such ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... the presence of a creation, we recognize perfect harmony (which goes beyond perfect proportion); if the work call forth in us that contemplative ecstasy which gives us the impression and, as it were, the vision of pure beauty, shall ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... shelf of rock by the side of the spring, cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... shadow of deepest gravity falling like a cloud over the animation which had brightened his features but a moment before. He sat in contemplative silence a little while, his ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... pompous Palladian front, the brick campaniles beyond, the milder, yellower light, the range of colour, the suggestion of sound. Later, beneath the arcades, I found many an old acquaintance: beautiful officers, resplendent, slow-strolling, contemplative of female beauty; civil and peaceful dandies, hardly less gorgeous, with that religious faith in moustache and shirt-front which distinguishes the belle jeunesse of Italy; ladies with heads artfully shawled in Spanish-looking lace, but with too little art—or too ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... people of London have left behind; and this paper-sticking is really the best sport to be enjoyed now on Hampstead Heath, unless one counts fishing for dace in the ponds, which I take to be the most contemplative recreation, except coal-mining, in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... sincerity of impulse, yet with a passionate fulness and ardour not elsewhere to be paralleled. It is steeped in an atmosphere which is felt in no other of his works, is the issue of an inspiration more profoundly contemplative than any to which he ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... a large piece of artificial water in the grounds, in which were three green islands covered with trees and shrubs. Beth was standing on the bank one morning in a contemplative mood, admiring the water, and yearning for a boat to get to the islands, when round one of them, unexpectedly, a white wonder of a swan came gliding towards ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... a fine nature—a contemplative mind imbued with a true love of literature, and a kindness of heart that melts and makes those of others melt, for the evils to ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... waiting for Joanna outside the Law Courts. In the stillness of the August evening and the yellow dusty sunshine, he looked almost contemplative, standing there with bowed head, looking down at his hands which were folded on his stick, while one or two pigeons strutted about at his feet. Joanna's heart melted at the sight of him. She went up to him, ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... saddle, and, unstrapping the bag of gold which was attached to the holsters, he placed it by his side on the rock, while he splashed his hands and face in the cool water. By-and-by he drew up the girths, mounted his horse dreamily, for he was a man of contemplative moods, and rode away from the way-side well, forgetful of his treasure, which lay temptingly on the flat rock, ready to the hand of the first comer. Not so his faithful dog, who, having in vain tried to lift ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... Socrates. It is all very well to have a contemplative disposition; but it need not be accompanied by a ...
— The Comic Latin Grammar - A new and facetious introduction to the Latin tongue • Percival Leigh
... superciliary ridge, corresponds to the Perceptive, the middle region to the Recollective, and the upper to the Reflective faculties. (See also Fig. 65, b.) If we divide the forehead by vertical lines, as shown in Fig. 71, the divisions thus formed represent respectively, the Active, Deliberative, and Contemplative departments of the intellect, all the processes of which are sustained by vital changes, the transformation of organized materials. No mental effort can be made without waste of nervous matter. The gardener's hoe wears by use, and so does every part of the animal organism. Otherwise, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... stand the notion of any cruelty. He would have stuck that officer like a pig if he had seen him then. It's true, too! Some people don't deserve much mercy." Mrs Verloc's voice ceased, and the expression of her motionless eyes became more and more contemplative and veiled during the long pause. "Comfortable, dear?" she asked in a faint, far-away voice. "Shall I put out the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... picking flies with his whip from the horses' backs. He had a smooth countenance, deeply tanned, and pale, clear blue eyes. At his side sat a priest in black, a man past middle age, with ashen, embittered lips, and a narrowed, chilling gaze. They were silent, contemplative; but, from the seat behind them, flowed a constant, buoyant, youthful chatter. A girl with a shining mass of chestnut hair gathered loosely on a virgin neck was recounting the thrilling incidents of "commencement week" for the benefit of a heavily-built young man with a handsome, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... friend" strangely distasteful to him. That cynical manner of looking at life, which not long ago had seemed to him the only manner compatible with wisdom and experience, now grated harshly upon those finer senses which had been awakened in the quiet contemplative existence he had of late been leading. He had been wont to enjoy Captain Paget's savage bitterness against a world which had not provided him with a house in Carlton-gardens, and a seat in the Cabinet; but to-night he was revolted by the noble Horatio's ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... he was sad and oppressed, for he had gained an insight into futurity, and had become aware of the transitory nature of all things, and even of the fate of the gods, who were doomed to pass away. This knowledge so affected his spirits that he ever after wore a melancholy and contemplative expression. ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Damages, gentlemen—heavy damages—is the only punishment with which you can visit him; the only recompense you can award to my client. And for those damages she now appeals to an enlightened, a high-minded, a right-feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a contemplative jury of ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... The consequences of this contemplative habit on the part of the Executive—a habit to be looked for in a hermit, but not in a Police System—are familiar to us all. The Ruffian becomes one of the established orders of the body politic. Under the playful ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... thrown on the indolence and luxury of religious orders, it was surely good that, in an age of ignorance and violence, there should be quiet cloisters and gardens, in which the arts of peace could be safely cultivated, in which gentle and contemplative natures could find an asylum, in which one brother could employ himself in transcribing the AEneid of Virgil, and another in meditating the Analytics of Aristotle, in which he who had a genius for art might illuminate a martyrology or carve a crucifix, and in which he who had a turn for natural ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wore on, for the shade of the tall trees became short and shorter; and when our little stout Northern guest went from under the cottage roof, to give some orders to a labourer, I observed that the huge flaps of his felt hat sheltered his round projecting van and bulbous flank, and, that, to the contemplative man with downcast eye, his whole frame, fat though it were, would appear quashed into a circular shadow moving along ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... her, every now and then, as his missus, for an opinion or a confirmation; and he thought that a curious sight. Speed-the-Plough was stretched at full length, with his boots in the rain, and his head amidst the tinker's pots, smoking, profoundly contemplative. The minutes seemed to be taken up alternately by the grey puffs ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... another look at the old place," I said, one day in August as I was passing the lodge, and rode at a quiet contemplative walk down the avenue. I hung my rein over one of the rails of the porch steps, and passed round into the garden. Not a flower to be seen; but the place of them famously supplied with potatoes and other useful articles—and the same evidence of absenteeism in the shape of tottering ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... smokes for dinner as you go along; the banks of the canal slowly unroll their scenery to contemplative eyes; the barge floats by great forests and through great cities with their public buildings and their lamps at night; and for the bargee, in his floating home, 'travelling abed,' it is merely as if he were listening to another man's story ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said,—to exercise your ingenuity in a rational and contemplative manner.—No, I do not proscribe certain forms of philosophical speculation which involve an approach to the absurd or the ludicrous, such as you may find, for example, in the folio of the Reverend ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... But others are practical, that make a further reference of all things they cognosce upon, to some practice and operation. Now, perhaps some may think that the scripture, or divinity, is much of it merely contemplative, in regard of many mysteries infolded in it, that seem nothing to concern our practice. I confess much of that, that is raised out of the scriptures, is such, and therefore it seems a deviation and departure from the great scope and plain intent of the simplicity and ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... Napoleon, like Moliere—the moment that it sees it, or it waits to be sought when it has patiently revealed itself. Young Granson belonged to that class of men of talent who distrust themselves and are easily discouraged. His soul was contemplative. He lived more by thought than by action. Perhaps he might have seemed deficient or incomplete to those who cannot conceive of genius without the sparkle of French passion; but he was powerful in the world of mind, and he was liable to reach, through a series of emotions imperceptible ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... that there has been a great deal too much made of the supposed divergencies of types of doctrine in the New Testament. There are such types, within certain limits. Nobody would mistake a word of John's calm, mystical, contemplative spirit for a word of Paul's fiery, dialectic spirit. And nobody would mistake either the one or the other for Peter's impulsive, warm-hearted exhortations. But whilst there are diversities in the way of apprehending, there are no diversities ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and accompaniments, that the result often seems to fall short of what was expected, and the means seem to overpower the end. On the other hand, a visit to unpretending places in an unpretending way often produces unexpected entertainment for the contemplative man. Some such experiment was the following, where everything was a surprise because little was expected. The epicurean tourist will be facetious on the loss of sleep and comfort, money, etc.; but to a person in good health and spirits these are but ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up.—Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... so much wing, leg, neck, and bill, counterpoised by so little body, incline the spectator to look upon them as ornithological caricatures. After balancing himself upon one foot for an hour, with the other drawn up close to his scanty robe of feathers, and his head poised in a most contemplative attitude, one of these queer birds will suddenly turn a somersault, and, returning to his previous posture, continue his cogitations as though nothing had interrupted his reflections. With wings spread, they slowly winnow the air, rising or hopping from the ground a few feet at a time, ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... the museful sage:—abroad he walks Contemplative, if haply he may find What cause controls the tempest's rage, or whence, Amidst the savage ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... the road and distance marched that day. "Keazletown road, six and twenty miles." "You seem to have no stragglers." "Never allow straggling." "You must teach my people; they straggle badly." A bow in reply. Just then my creoles started their band and a waltz. After a contemplative suck at a lemon, "Thoughtless fellows for serious work" came forth. I expressed a hope that the work would not be less well done because of the gayety. A return to the lemon gave me the opportunity to retire. Where Jackson got his lemons "no fellow could find out," but he was rarely ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... posts of that gateway there rested the elbow of a contemplative man, middleaged or a little worse. Of all persons having pleasure or business within the bright inclosure, he was, that evening, the least important; being merely the background parent who paid the bills. However, even this unconsidered elder shared ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... religion. The Quaker, whom we may take as the type of anti-institutional mysticism, has a brotherhood to which he is proud to belong, and for which he feels loyalty and affection. And Catholicism has been rich in contemplative saints who have lived in the light of the Divine presence. The question raised in this essay is rather of the relative importance of these two elements in the religious life, than of choosing one and rejecting the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... mentioned by Hillebrand with implication that it is the extreme example of the absurd sentimental tendency, probably judging merely from the title,[56] for the book is doubtless merely thoughtful, contemplative, with ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... dead, who sought his life, and missing fill'd With Infant blood the streets of Bethlehem; From Egypt home return'd, in Nazareth Hath been our dwelling many years, his life 80 Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, Little suspicious to any King; but now Full grown to Man, acknowledg'd, as I hear, By John the Baptist, and in publick shown, Son own'd from Heaven by his Father's voice; I look't for some great change; to Honour? ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... equal benefactors. The essential truths are instinctive and universal. As for the philosophers, they have, with few exceptions, been occupied as much about mere frivolities as any Palmyrene lady at her toilet. Still, I do not deny that the contemplative race is a useful one in its way. What I say is, that a religion which enjoined a solitary life as a duty, would be a very mischievous religion. And what is more, any such precept, fairly proved upon it, would annihilate all its claims ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... sentiment lies at the foundation of society and successively creates all forms of worship.—This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to Oriental genius its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true. And the unique impression of Jesus upon mankind, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... conversation of the larger annoying because it prevented him from hearing that of the smaller. It was carried on for the greater part by his mother and Mr. Trumble; Laura sat silent between these two; and Lindley's mood was obviously contemplative. Mr. Wade Trumble, twenty-six, small, earnest, and already beginning to lose his hair, was ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... character, and even the position he assumed. A certain nonchalance announced that he easily laid aside these faculties from the conviction of his ability to recover all his forces at the moment when he should require them. His brow was contemplative, his look composed, his mouth serious and somewhat sad; the deep inspiration of antiquity was mingled in his physiognomy with the smiles and the carelessness of youth. At the foot of the tribune he was loved with familiarity; as he ascended it each man ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... is occupied, and the person attempting to think is occupied, with what I call "the difficult work of art" of concentrating its various energies and fusing them into one balanced point of rhythmic harmony. This effort of contemplative tension is a "creative effort" similar to that which all artists are compelled to make. In addition to this aspect of what I call "creation," there also remains the fact that the individual soul modifies and changes that ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Herbert, this philosophy of your Oxford contemplative Radicals is only another name for a kind of social selfishness, I fancy,' said the old man solemnly. 'It seems to me your head is with us, but your heart, your heart ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank herbage; and there is voluptuousness pampered by the still sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it ripens ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... beautifully he plays the disinterested to curtain the designs of his ambition! John, nevertheless, did wake from his years of stupor to find himself in an uncertain position;—this was manifest by the manner in which he assumed a contemplative mood. A few shakes at the hands of his rougher politicians aroused his apprehension of being swamped in the political perplexity. Mr. Smooth paused, and took a careful view of the venerable old man, that he might learn something more of him. 'Stranger.' said I, 'what ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... to a large dining room. The table furnished with bowls, bottles, glasses, and cards.——The Group appear sitting round in a restless attitude. In one corner of the room is discovered a small cabinet of books, for the use of the studious and contemplative; containing, Hobbs's Leviathan, Sipthorp's Sermons, Hutchinson's History, Fable of the Bees, Philalethes on Philanthropy, with an appendix by Massachusettensis, Hoyl on Whist, Lives of the Stuarts, Statutes of Henry the Eighth, and William ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... enthusiasm in the Vedas, where, be it only in reference to the splendour of dawn or the 'golden-handed sun,' Nature is always assumed to be closely connected with man's inner and outer life. Later on, as Brahminism appeared, deepening the contemplative side of Hindoo character, and the drama and historical plays came in, generalities gave way to definite localizing, and in the Epics ornate descriptions of actual landscape took independent place. Nature's sympathy with human joys and griefs was taken for granted, and ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... manner only to quarrel with me?"—"No, but why do you choose this time to tell me that my coming for help to you was nothing but impudence in your sight? Well, I beg your pardon for intruding on your dignity."—"You misunderstood me," said Mrs. Travers, without relaxing for a moment her contemplative severity. "Such a flattering thing had never happened to me before and it will never happen to me again. But believe me, King Tom, you did me too much honour. Jorgenson is perfectly right in being angry with you ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... the dome. The shadowy forms of saints and angels are around him. He has raised his eyes from his cartoon to study one of these. In his right hand is the opera-glass with which he scrutinises the details of distant groups. The upturned face, with its expression of contemplative intelligence, is like that of an astronomer accustomed to commerce with things above the sphere of common life, and ready to give account of all that he has gathered from his observation of a world not ours. In truth the world ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... works of another character. Her secluded life favored habits of study, and, at an age when girls are generally just beginning to traverse the fields of literature, she had progressed so far as to explore some of the footpaths which entice contemplative minds from the beaten track. With earlier cultivation and superiority of years, Eugene had essayed to direct her reading; but now, in point of advancement, she felt that she was in the van. Dr. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... which varies little with a thousand people in the same circumstances. But he had a naive fresh sense, everything interested him, and he said what he thought with taste and tact, sometimes with wit, and always in that cheerful contemplative mood which influences women. Some of his sayings were so startling and heretical that they had gone the rounds, and certain crisp words out of the argot of the North were used by women who wished to be ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of eternal and unconscious repose, equivalent to soul absorption, to which they gave the name of Nirvana, into which they taught that, by the awards of the gods, the souls of the righteous, or those who had lived what they called "the contemplative life," would be permitted to enter immediately after death. But, for the souls of sinners, they invented a system of expiatory punishments which, known as the Metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, taught that they would be compelled to ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... them to almost their highest level. When he said that the Saleve seemed close behind the house, he was saying in other words that the sun beat back from, and the air was intercepted by it. We see, nevertheless, in his description of the surrounding scenery, a promise of the contemplative delight in natural beauty to be henceforth so conspicuous in his experience, and which seemed a new feature in it. He had hitherto approached every living thing with curious and sympathetic observation—this hardly requires ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... effects, he sat, musing and contemplative, when suddenly his spirit was imperiously aroused by the orchestra. The 'celli had opened the Andante from the C Minor Symphony. For ten minutes, the music held his every sense.... It unfolded as of old, but ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... the Abbey meads was a small fish-pond where the monks used to spend many a contemplative hour with rod and line. One day, when they had had very bad luck and only caught twelve fishes amongst them, Brother Jonathan suddenly declared that as there was no sport that day he would put forth a riddle for their entertainment. He thereupon took twelve fish ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... had been furnished with imperial magnificence. This suggested anything but doubts of the Sovereign's undisturbed rule. At Windsor, the current of affairs went merrily as a marriage-bell, the Royal party enjoying "the contemplative man's recreation" on the Virginia Water with a zeal that would have gratified, if it did not edify, Izaak Walton; and now the Coronation was boldly talked of—indeed, preparations were making for the performance of this ceremony with the ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... perhaps sufficient to discompose a landman's stomach, would not affect that of a sailor, who would probably testify under oath, that the water was "just as smooth as a mill-pond." The pelican, that grave and contemplative bird, sat on the rocks near the water's edge, with his neck coiled up and stowed away in some recess in his capacious crop, the fish forgetting, or sailed on lazy wings across the bay, to seek some sequestered spot to ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... very triumphant I should be;—but it does not.' For this atrocious wish, I must add, he apologises amply in a later letter. It is merely a passing velleity. In truth it represents his version of Carlyle's doctrine about the superiority of silence to speech, or rather of the active to the contemplative life. The career of a great conqueror, a great legislator, a man who in any capacity has moulded the doctrines of the race, had a charm for his imagination which he could not find in the pleasant idlers, who beguile our leisure by ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... fragment of a small figure of a man. Also an inscription flanked by two shields with rampant lions, which are good. Opposite the Loggia, on the other side of the street, is a highly decorative lintel, which appears to have belonged to a palace of the Cippico, with two contemplative lions and half-length angels in roundels with scrolls. The caps have the same kind of foliage as is seen at Curzoia and Sebenico. The Austrian-Lloyd office is on the ground floor of a tower of the Venetian period, now a nunnery. It has a trefoiled ogee-window ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... have, are at least as curious and delightful as sea-shells or birds' nests. The purpose of improvements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purpose of castles was military; but both may incidentally please the contemplative mind by their huge forms ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... at the trot—by a kind of pitching movement to and fro across the axle, which well entitles it to the style of a Noddy. The hood describes a considerable arc against the landscape, with a solemnly absurd effect on the contemplative pedestrian. To ride in such a carriage cannot be numbered among the things that appertain to glory; but I have no doubt it may be useful in liver complaint. Thence, perhaps, its wide popularity ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this cloystered place of ours Is but newe reared; the founder, hee still lyves, A souldier once and eminent in the feild, And after many battayles nowe retyrd In peace to lyve a lyff contemplative. Mongst many other charitable deedes, Unto religion hee hathe vowed this howse, Next to his owne fayre mantion that adjoynes And parted only by a slender wall. Who knwes but that hee neighboring us so neare And havinge doone this unto pious ends, May carry ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... man the chief actor, and the source from which the dramatist must cull his choicest beauties, painting up to nature the varied scenes which mark the changeful courses of her motley groups. Here she opes her volume to the view of contemplative minds, and spreads her treasures forth, decked in all the variegated tints that Flora, goddess of the flowery mead and silvery dell, with many coloured ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Lake—though, of course, at slightly or widely differing angles—so in writing, the attention of the reader naturally is called again and again to the same scenes. But this book is written not so much with an eye to its literary quality, as to afford the visitor to Lake Tahoe—whether contemplative, actual, or retrospective—a truthful and comprehensive account and description of the Lake ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... cruel fixity of a beast of prey, and betrayed the cold maliciousness of the courtesan. The eyes were gray, fringed with black lashes,—a charming contrast, which made their expression of calm and contemplative voluptuousness the more observable; the circle round the eyes showed marks of fatigue, but the artistic manner in which she could turn her eyeballs, right and left, or up and down, to observe, or seem ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... commissions he has to execute for Mrs. Brown. How many he remembered or forgot we know not; but that day he purchased a fair blank Diary—the stationer who sold it not only wishing him "a Happy New Year," but that he might "live to fill fifty such:"—a wish that made Mr. Brown very contemplative—thinking 18,250 entries no joke;—of many bright, bright days of pleasure; two score and ten of birthdays; half a century of weddings, anniversaries, and deaths—let us hope of peaceful, happy deaths,—for clouds will sometimes gather, ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... unexpected aid had come to him. From the lofty ceilings fell the voices of guardian angels. There was not a flagstone in the halls, not an ashlar of the walls, not a bough of the plane-trees, but it spoke to him of the delights of his contemplative life, his lispings of tenderness, his gradual initiation, the favours vouchsafed him in return for self-bestowal, all that happiness of ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... you will think, have we disposed of this one definition: but recollect, and take me for a son of leisure, an amateur tourist of Parnassus, an idling gatherer of way-side flowers in the vale of Thessaly, a careless, unbusied, "contemplative man," recreating himself by gentle craft on the banks of much-poached Helicon; and if you, my casual friend, be neither like-minded in fancy nor like-fitted in leisure, courteously consider that we may not travel well together: at this ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... fire or out of the window, saying that 'now he could read with unwashed hands at his ease.' Such a person, then, is the man indifferent to books, and he sins by way of defect, being deficient in the contemplative virtue of book-loving. As to the man who is exactly in the right mean, we call him the book-lover. His happiness consists not in reading, which is an active virtue, but in the contemplation of bindings, and illustrations, and title-pages. Thus his felicity partakes of the nature ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... recollect the only time that Wordsworth was really witty? He told the story himself at a dinner. "Gentlemen, I never was really witty but once in my life." Of course there was a general call for the bright but solitary instance. And the contemplative bard continued: "Well, gentlemen, I was standing at the door of my cottage on Rydal Mount, one fine summer morning, and a laborer said to me: 'Sir, have you seen my wife go by this way?' And I replied: 'My good man, I did not know until this moment ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... till the Murd'rous King Were dead, who sought his life, and missing fill'd With Infant blood the streets of Bethlehem; From Egypt home return'd, in Nazareth Hath been our dwelling many years, his life 80 Private, unactive, calm, contemplative, Little suspicious to any King; but now Full grown to Man, acknowledg'd, as I hear, By John the Baptist, and in publick shown, Son own'd from Heaven by his Father's voice; I look't for some great change; to Honour? no, But trouble, as old ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... action or forbearance: And if the analogy, imperfect as it is, can be carried no further than to the human intelligence, and cannot be transferred, with any appearance of probability, to the other qualities of the mind; if this really be the case, what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs, and believe that the arguments on which it is established exceed the objections which lie against it? Some astonishment ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... fail to trace in these simple words the shadow of all religious exaltation that is based on faith alone? Madame Guyon is strung to a higher key than most of this dull and relaxed world; but she has struck the eternal note of contemplative worship. Such is the sense of union with the divine Spirit. Such are the thoughts and even the words of Dante, Eckhart, St. Teresa, the countless mystics of the Middle Age, and of the followers of Buddhism in its ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... deviate in his prosperity from the philosophic tenor of his former life. He abated nothing of his peripatetic exercises; and repaired duly in the morning, as he had done in former years, to St. James's Park,—where he sate in contemplative ease amongst the cows, inhaling their balmy breath and pursuing his philosophic reveries. He had also purchased an organ, or more than one, with which he solaced his solitude and beguiled himself of uneasy thoughts if he ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... most delectable. It is honorable, it is amusing, and, with judicious management, it is profitable. To see plants rise from the earth and flourish by the superior skill and bounty of the laborer fills a contemplative mind with ideas which are more easy to be conceived than expressed." "Agriculture has ever been the most favorite amusement of my life," he wrote after the Revolution, and he informed another correspondent that "the ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... now come to the celebrated Fall Portage. It is short but deterrent. The height and ruggedness of the rocks over which cargo and boats have to be dragged are unusually forbidding. The only consolation to the contemplative soul, who does not have to portage, is that "The stream is turbulent and unfriendly in the extreme, but in romantic variety, and in natural beauty nothing can exceed this picture." High rocks are seen, beetling over the rapids like towers, and are rent into the most diversified ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... reading, and she was especially fond of fiction, not because she cared for sensational interests, but because she was naturally contemplative, and it interested her to read about the human nature of the present, rather than to learn what any individual historian thought of the human nature of ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... her chamber. After mass she taketh something to recreate nature, and soe goeth to the chapelle, hearinge the divine service and two lowe masses. From thence to dynner, during the tyme of whih she hath a lecture of holy matter (that is, reading from a religious book), either Hilton of Contemplative and Active Life, or some other spiritual and instructive work. After dynner she giveth audyence to all such as hath any matter to shrive unto her, by the space of one hower, and then sleepeth one quarter of an hower, and after she hath slept she contynueth in prayer ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the fellows going," said Mr. Batch, standing at the window, looking out over roofs, dilly-dallying up and down on his heels and breaking into a low, contemplative whistle. She was at his shoulder, peering over it. "You wouldn't be afraid, ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... bloomin' war?" Then back came a smile to his face and he shook his head, indicating, perhaps, that he had answered the question to his complete satisfaction. The joyousness at the thought of some of those unrecorded slices of military history caused my friend to drop again into a contemplative mood, and he started humming a ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... reason that she was not to participate in the result of the old Judge's or young hero's happy championship of the cause of her sex, she conceived her separateness high aloof, and actually supposed she was a contemplative, simply speculative political spirit, impersonal albeit a woman. This, as Emma, smiling at the lines, had not to learn, was always her secret pride of fancy—the belief in her possession of a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the country orator, brightens with its apt allusions the more refined periods of the lecturer, flits charmingly in and out of the sympathetic essays of Holmes, keeps us in a perpetual chuckle over the mirthful pages of Irving, and embodies itself in the quaint good-nature of an indolent, contemplative Sam Lawson. ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... of his thoughtful and contemplative mind it is not strange that, suddenly transferred from the quiet of home life to the turmoil of college scenes, he should have found much that was distasteful; and the following extract from a letter to him from the late Mr. Justice Story, at that ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... why are we so content to censure others? Let us be fair and pass judgment on ourselves. But the contemplative life we lead is merely the result of indolence, which we gloss over by reflections on the vanity of all things. We are content with our rags. Why? Because we are too lazy to earn better. We reproach ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... impressive in childhood, and so hardly forgotten in succeeding years. In the venerable solitudes of Charnwood, among thick shades of the oak and beech, (this last his favorite tree,) the young Listen cultivated those contemplative habits which have never entirely deserted him in after-years. Here he was commonly in the summer months to be met with, with a book in his hand,—not a play-book,—meditating. Boyle's 'Reflections' was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... farewell, Where my days in the wilderness Of languor and of love did tell And contemplative dreaminess; And thou, youth's early inspiration, Invigorate imagination And spur my spirit's torpid mood! Fly frequent to my solitude, Let not the poet's spirit freeze, Grow harsh and cruel, dead and dry, Eventually petrify In the world's mortal revelries, Amid ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... "for the common good."[69] It is a profoundly mystical book, characterized by interior depth and insight. Its central aim is the exposition of a stage of spiritual life which transcends both "the active life" and "the contemplative life," a stage which the writer calls "the Life Supereminent." In this highest stage "the essential will of God is practiced," without strain or effort, because God Himself has now become the inner Life and Being of the person, the spring ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... forked beard with his fingers, and looked at the young peasant with a contemplative eye. John surmised that Pappenheim stood well with him, and ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... fatalistically, aware of what to think of this? I at any rate watch the small boy dawdle and gape again. I smell the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative nose, and, feeling him foredoomed, withhold from him no grain of my sympathy. He is a convenient little image or warning of all that was to be for him, and he might well have been even happier than he was. For there was ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... it was a regal day, leisurely, immense, and majestic. The wind was steady and generous. The warm sunlight danced. I should not have been surprised to have seen Zeus throned on the splendid summit of the greatest of those rounded clouds, contemplative of us, finger on cheek, smiling with approval of the scene below—melancholy approval, for we would remind him of those halcyon days whose refulgence turned pale and sickly when Paul, that argumentative zealot, came to provide a world, already thinking more of industry and State politics ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... under no tree, under nothing indeed but the blue of heaven, I looked about for the object that had struck me. As I did so, I perceived my husband in his window, but his eyes, while upon me, did not see me, for no change passed over him as I groped about in the grass. "In one of his contemplative moods," thought I, continuing my search. In another instant I started up. I had found a little thing like a bullet wrapped up in paper; but it was no bullet; it was a bead, a large gold bead, and on the paper which surrounded it were written words so fine I could ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... is oneself a practical artist," answered the counsellor, "and so devoted a one as I am, so diligent in working at my art, and so ready to try every new experiment in it, one must leave such matters to people of an idler and more contemplative turn. If you aim at doing everything, you will never do anything ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... Cromwell's policy of reformation, just as Burke viewed Mirabeau's policy of revolution. Burke too, we may be very sure, would as willingly have sent Mirabeau and Bailly to prison or the block as More sent Phillips to the Tower and Bainham to the stake. For neither More nor Burke was of the gentle contemplative spirit, which the first disorder of a new society just bursting into life merely overshadows with saddening regrets and poetic gloom. The old harmony was to them so bound up with the purpose and meaning of life, that to wage active battle for the gods of their ...
— Burke • John Morley
... poems of the amatory and contemplative class, was somewhat chary of putting forth his strength in the ballad. We have already selected almost every specimen of this most popular and fascinating description of poetry which is at all worthy of his genius;—at least all of them which we thought ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... clearly proves how foreign to children, is the fear or even the idea of danger; and, at the same time, it presents to the contemplative mind a striking instance of the wisdom which the Almighty has displayed in the works of the creation! In what a wonderful manner has he endowed all his creatures with sensibility, regulated their habits, and provided for their wants; and so ingeniously are the animal and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... think of himself, Chichikov's mind had strayed elsewhere, for the reason that it had become taken up with grave meditation on the subject of the purchase just made. Suddenly finding himself no longer a fictitious proprietor, but the owner of a real, an actually existing, estate, he became contemplative, and his plans and ideas assumed such a serious vein as imparted to his features an unconsciously ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... he himself took sides, with a mischievous wisdom. He told me once that when he lived in some peasant's house, he tried to make those about him forget that he was there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room. It is possible that low vitality helped him to be observant and contemplative, and made him dislike, even in solitude, those thoughts which unite us to others, much as we all dislike, when fatigue or illness has sharpened the nerves, hoardings covered with advertisements, the fronts of big theatres, big London hotels, and all architecture ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... of a taciturn and contemplative turn. Only thus can we drink in the sense of such solitude and immensity; realizing to the full what indeed these words may mean, he may wander for hours without encountering a soul, very few birds are heard by the way, but the hum of the ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... was not subject, but sovereign, through virtue. Each thing has virtue in its nature, which does that to which it is ordained; and the better it does it so much the more virtue it has: hence we call that man virtuous who lives a life contemplative or active, doing that for which he is best fitted; we ascribe his virtue to the horse that runs swiftly and much, to which end he is ordained: we see virtue of a sword that cuts through hard things well, since it has ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... progress after hatching, until it becomes a bird, or winged animal, in the form of its parent stock. A farther attention to the nature and quality of the form cannot fail to cause astonishment in the contemplative mind; to observe in the least as well as in the largest kinds, yea, in the invisible as in the visible, that is, in small insects, as in fowls or great beasts, how they are all endowed with organs of sense, such as ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... back into the dining-room, and thence to the hall, where she stood peering up the stairway at the skylight. "Yes," she continued presently, in a judicial, contemplative tone, "I think it will do very well on the whole. I am not perfectly sure that the laundress will be satisfied with the arrangement of the laundry, and I don't see exactly, Fred, what you are to do for a dressing-room, when we have more than one visitor. I am out of conceit with the tinting of ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... himself up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the prospect of ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... that," answered the other, still moodily contemplative of his boots. "I really like the lady well enough—love her, I daresay. I have not had much experience of the tender passion since I was jilted by an Oxford barmaid—whom I would have married, by Jove. But the truth is, the lady in ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... was a teamster, but likewise a thoroughly independent and capable citizen. He was of the lank, hewn, lean-faced, hawk-nosed type, deliberate in movement and speech, with a twinkling, contemplative, appraising eye, and an unhurried drawl. He told Nan he ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... has not a position in the same series of time and space, or, if it has or had such a position, is taken apart from much that belonged to it there; and therefore it makes no direct appeal to those feelings, desires, and purposes, but speaks only to contemplative imagination—imagination the reverse of empty or emotionless, imagination saturated with the results of 'real' experience, but still contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why poetry has poetic value for us is that it presents to us in its own way something ...
— Poetry for Poetry's Sake - An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on June 5, 1901 • A. C. Bradley
... myself. The Reverend Mother wanted me to leave the community and enter a contemplative order. She did not think I should be able to ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... yet too dark to mark his face as he lounged past, slowly turning his head about as he progressed until his chin was on his shoulder, staring back. His look the while remained riveted on Weir—a steady, contemplative, evil regard. In Chihuahua the engineer had once seen a notorious local "killer" ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... simple joys to the contemplative mind. A slow procession of white ducks, walking delicately, with heads lifted high and timid eyes, in a long line, has the air of an ecclesiastical procession. The singers go before, the minstrels follow after. There ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... had erected a hut for him nigh to the tent in the door of which he squatted, usually with Marufa beside him, throughout the day, with ever a contemplative eye upon his victim, an eye which Birnier was sure was eagerly seeking some excuse to plead that he had inadvertently rendered the magic impotent, and must accordingly have ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... between the housemaster's house and Mr. Outwood's at that moment saw what, if they had but known it, was a most unusual sight, the spectacle of Psmith running. Psmith's usual mode of progression was a dignified walk. He believed in the contemplative ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... reward, ill-deserving if it seems to merit resentment and punishment. Nature has inscribed on the heart, apart from all reflection on the utility of punishment, an independent, immediate, and instinctive approbation of the sacred law of retribution. This is the point at which a hitherto purely contemplative sympathy passes over into an active impulse, which prepares us to support the victim of attack and insult in ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... days—for many days and many nights, for, what with his whiteness and the transparency of these Egyptian nights, I have seen him often outlined in the distance under the dim light of the stars—a great phantom in his contemplative pose. And I feel myself obsessed now by the continuance of his attitude at this entrance of the ruins—I who shall pass without a morrow from Thebes and even from the earth—even as we all pass. Before conscious life was vouchsafed to me he was there, had been ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... or something? Until he feels that the world is being conducted for him, that things are tolerably not at rest, where shall one find in civilisation, in this present moment, a man who is ready to stop and look about him—to take a spell at last at being a reasonable, contemplative, or even marriageable being? ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... ran indoors, the man stood contemplative in the cold, shrugging his uncovered shoulders slightly. The open inner door showed a bright linoleum on the floor, and the end of a brown side-board on ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up.—Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... have seen by the preceding page, we have commenced engraving the above series of pictures. "The Age of Innocence," by Sir J. Reynolds, representing a young Hippopotamus seated under a shady tree, presents to the contemplative mind a charming union of youth ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... prospects. For a companion I had found a book, not bemused with the cleverness of the day—a fine-weather book, simple and sincere like the talk of an unselfish friend. But looking at little Fyne seated in the room I understood that nothing would come of my contemplative aspirations; that in one way or another I should be let in for some form of severe exercise. Walking, it would be, I feared, since, for me, that idea was inseparably associated with the visual impression of Fyne. Where, why, how, a rapid striding rush could be ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... haste to reach its turbid outlet, but go reluctantly from town to town with whole days before them, yes, perhaps, it was an age in making its first journey. It loses its way often, but cares not so there be a pleasant meadow to meander through or a contemplative fisherman to companion its course. The Charles has never gained force, as man is said to do, by having obstacles to overcome. It treats all the dams which intercept its current with a lenient benevolence, never having been known to carry one away. Meeting a dam, it turns the other cheek; ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... piece is suffused with a mood that is Schumann-like in its intense sincerity of impulse, yet with a passionate fulness and ardour not elsewhere to be paralleled. It is steeped in an atmosphere which is felt in no other of his works, is the issue of an inspiration more profoundly contemplative than any to which ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... to honour their respective board and bed. There was the shirt-sleeved figure of Jim Ludlow, ticket agent and tenor of the Presbyterian choir. And leaning cross-legged beneath the station eaves, giving the effect of supporting the low roof, were half a dozen slowly masticating, soberly contemplative gentlemen—loose-jointed caryatides, whose lank sculpture forms the sole and invariable ornamentation of the facades of all Western stations. But nowhere did the young woman's expectant eyes alight upon the ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... choosing various spots outside, that he became talkative again for a while. We lay in the blank—we had spread on some soft, dry sand in preference to the stable, where Taylor and Tommy had gone. Under the contemplative influence of the stars, Lin ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... Nature-Mythology, which flourishes mainly in Germany, maintains that primitive man is highly interested in natural phenomena, and that this interest is essentially of a theoretic, contemplative and poetical character. To writers of this school every myth has as its kernel or essence some natural phenomenon or other, even though such idea is not apparent upon the surface of the story; a deeper meaning, a symbolic reference, being insisted ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett
... mountains, and on the interior plains; the fish principle in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or less numbers. The natural historian is not a fisherman, who prays for cloudy days and good luck merely, but as fishing has been styled "a contemplative man's recreation," introducing him profitably to woods and water, so the fruit of the naturalist's observations is not in new genera or species, but in new contemplations still, and science is only a more contemplative man's recreation. ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... portrait. She moved very quietly, and her voice was low, and a little dragging. The young vicar of a neighbouring hamlet in the fells, who admired her greatly, thought of her as playing "melancholy"—in the contemplative Miltonic sense—to Lydia's "mirth." She was a mystery to him; a mystery he would have liked to unravel. But she was also a mystery to her family. She shut herself up a good deal with her books; she had written two tragedies in blank verse; and she held feminist views, ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... lozenge-box, said "Good morning," and went on up the pier. I watched him go—English-Americano- Germano-Franco-Prussian-Russian-Chinese-New Zealander that he was. But he was not a man of genius; you could choke him off by talking. Still he had effectually jogged me and spoiled my contemplative enjoyment of the bathers' courage; upon the whole I thought I would go down on the beach now and see them a little closer. The truth is, I suppose, that it is people like myself who are in the wrong, or are in the way. What business had I to make a note in the Tower yard, or study in the ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... gentlemen—heavy damages—is the only punishment with which you can visit him; the only recompense you can award to my client. And for those damages she now appeals to an enlightened, a high-minded, a right-feeling, a conscientious, a dispassionate, a sympathising, a contemplative jury of ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... it may seem, you cannot always be sitting at the Master's feet in that contemplative, ecstatic mood sometimes attributed to Mary. Like Martha, we have to do a good deal of serving. Whether we are encumbered by 'much serving' is a separate question; but if we are to fulfil the Divine tasks we have to do a great deal of serving as well as praying and trusting. I ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... most difficult to obtain in such a forlorn country; and now the few rich merchants and bankers of Antwerp that were left looked very black at these crushing news from America. "They are drawing their purse-strings very tight," said Alexander, "and will make no accommodation. The most contemplative of them ponder much over this success of Drake, and think that your Majesty will forget our matters here altogether." For this reason he informed the King that it would be advisable to drop all further negotiation with England for the time, as ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... Latin, warning mortal man that time flows as swiftly as water and exhorting him to make the most of his hours; after which piece of Jacobean moralising it set itself shamelessly to beguile all who might pass that way into an abandonment of contemplative repose. On all sides of it a stretch of smooth turf spread away, broken up here and there by groups of dwarfish chestnut and mulberry trees, whose leaves and branches cast a laced pattern of shade beneath them. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... in the doorway. At the sound of his curtly-spoken question she glanced at him with a certain contemplative curiosity in her eyes. They might have held surprise as well as curiosity had she not lately stood beside that huge, canopied bed upstairs, listening pitifully to a woman's secret fears and longings, unveiled in the ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... unregenerate man. It is the place of faun and nymph and satyr, the plain where wars are fought and cities built and work is done. Thence we climb to purified humanity, the mountains of purgation, the solitude and simplicity of contemplative life not yet made perfect by freedom from the flesh. Higher comes that thin white belt, where are the resting-places of angelic feet, the points whence purged souls take their flight towards infinity. Above all is heaven, the hierarchies ascending row on row to ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... special and sacred office whereby the nun became the mystic bride of the Church, and it was no uncommon thing for the sisters, when racked and tortured by the temptations of the world, to fall into these ecstatic contemplative moods wherein they became possessed with powers beyond those of earth. In that age of quite universal ignorance, it is not to be wondered at that the emotional spirit was too strongly developed in all religious observances, and, as we have ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... that we were now quite near Hartington and Dovedale. Hartington was a famous resort of fishermen and well known to Isaak Walton, the "Father of Fishermen," and author of that famous book The Compleat Angler or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, so full of such cheerful piety and contentment, such sweet freshness and simplicity, as to give the book a perennial charm. He was a great friend of Charles Cotton of Beresford Hall, who built a fine fishing-house near ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... resolution of the foe to give him no rest, to give him no time to sit down and think. Yesterday he had fought and had fled rapidly. There had been many adventures. For to-day he felt that he had earned opportunities for contemplative repose. He could have enjoyed portraying to uninitiated listeners various scenes at which he had been a witness or ably discussing the processes of war with other proved men. Too it was important that he should have time for physical recuperation. He was sore and stiff from ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... of herself the image of Francisco was still uppermost in her thoughts; and, in the contemplative vein thus encouraged, her eyes lingered, unwittingly—and through no base motive of curiosity—upon the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... Elk, a quarter of a mile distant. Leaning loosely against the long handle of his sweep, he was watching the lane of bright water that ran between the black shadows cast by the trees on either bank. He was in shirt and trousers, barefoot and bareheaded, and his face, mild and contemplative, wore an expression ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... This in a contemplative mood forcibly reminds us of that sublime passage of holy writ, wherein that thrilling command is embodied, to "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, when he shall rise up at the voice ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... most subtle purification of this judicial inner eye. The claims of the psychoanalyst are there fulfilled to the uttermost.] Instead of many examples I gladly quote a single one, but an instructive exposition by Walter Hitton, a great master of the contemplative life, from his "Scala Perfectionis" as Beaumont (Tract. v. Gust. pub. 1721, pp. 188 ff.) renders it. Thus he writes: "From what I said we can to some extent perceive that visions and revelations, or any kind of spirit in bodily appearance, or in the imagination in sleep or waking, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... anon from their lairs with lances couched to spear up the pieces of paper which the people of London have left behind; and this paper-sticking is really the best sport to be enjoyed now on Hampstead Heath, unless one counts fishing for dace in the ponds, which I take to be the most contemplative recreation, except ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 26, 1920 • Various
... that instead. If he shows his face near it, mine assumes an imploring and submissive expression. If he looks out through the glass, the boldest boy (Steerforth excepted) stops in the middle of a shout or yell, and becomes contemplative. One day, Traddles (the most unfortunate boy in the world) breaks that window accidentally, with a ball. I shudder at this moment with the tremendous sensation of seeing it done, and feeling that the ball has bounded on ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... had He never been in my thoughts as a present and powerful aid. But this is what I am as yet totally incompetent to effect—to realise, in speaking, anything, however small, which at all satisfies my mind. Debating seems to me less difficult, though unattained. But to hold in serene contemplative action the mental faculties in the turbid excitement of debate, so as to see truth clearly and set it forth such as it is, this ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... a contemplative mind," replied the gentleman, resolving that the young lady should not ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... transferred from the sacred canon of the Buddhists to the pages of the Greek writer. The driver who conducts Buddha when he flees by night from his palace where he leaves his wife, his only son, and all his treasures, in order to devote himself to a contemplative life, is called Chandaka, in Burmese, Sanna.[48] The friend and companion of Barlaam is called Zardan.[49] Reinaud in his "Mmoire sur l'Inde," p.91 (1849), was the first, it seems, to point out that Youdasf, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... John, briskly, shaking off his contemplative mood, "for I believe we've now got the key to the sitiwation. Thou remembers," he went on eagerly, "how, soon after their little lad's death, the maister ordered that all his toys and clothing should be taken away from the house, as he couldn't bear to see ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... its special good is to live on when all else seems to be dying. That is why Providence delivers it from passions too personal or too general, and has given to its organization patience and persistence, an enduring sensibility, and that contemplative sense upon which ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... and steady moral decision of character. He is so animated, too, by all these subjects; quite enthusiastic, in his way, about the interests of the people, and the new field of exertion which his present prospects open to him. It is plain that he has a genius more fitted for active than for contemplative life,—and so much the better for him; for a man, this is the happiest of dispositions: and he will be happy; for there is nothing in his character incompatible with quiet enjoyment; no violent passions and feelings; no morbid sensibility; ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... giving the fire a contemplative poke, "if you'd seen as much sorrow in the world as I have, you wouldn't want to write ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... Schopenhauer's passive and contemplative receptivity here! Rather a mingling of being in a sweep ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... described their discovery of the chasm and revealed some of his thoughts concerning it, but Wabi betrayed only passing flashes of interest. At times he seemed strangely preoccupied and would stand in an idle, contemplative mood, his hands buried deep in his pockets, while Rod or Mukoki proceeded with the little duties about the table or the stove. Finally, after arousing himself from one of these momentary spells, he pulled a brass shell from his pocket ...
— The Wolf Hunters - A Tale of Adventure in the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... fashion. Among these is Virgil's Tomb, which is, indeed, holy ground. The temples, aqueducts, and arches of olden time are likewise stupendous records of the sumptuousness of the ancient people of this interesting district; and, apart from these attractions, the contemplative philosopher may read in the volcanic remains, and other phenomena on its shores, many inspiring lessons in the broad volume of Nature; as well as amid the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... he was under the charm of the Italian spring, and he made a pretext for lingering. He had spent five days at Siena, where he had intended to spend but two, and still it was impossible to continue his journey. He was a young man of a contemplative and speculative turn, and this was his first visit to Italy, so that if he dallied by the way he should not be harshly judged. He had a fancy for sketching, and it was on his conscience to take a few pictorial notes. There were ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... began putting the flowers into a vase that stood between the reproduction of a Giotto Madonna and a Japanese devil-hunt, both results of the study of art taken up during the past winter by her mother's favorite woman's club. Mrs. Emery watched the process in the contemplative relief which follows an emotional outbreak, and her eyes wandered to the objects on either side the vase. The sight stirred her to speech. "Oh, Marietta, how do you suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... specially to the military men; no body of doctrine which, while strengthening him for the fight, could bring to him peace of mind. The Zen-shu ultimately satisfied that want. Zen is the Japanese equivalent of the Indian term dhyana, which signifies "meditation." In fact, the Zen is a contemplative sect. Its disciples believe that, "knowledge can be transmitted from heart to heart without the intervention of words." But though purely a contemplative rite at the time of its introduction into Japan, 1168, it was subsequently modified—from ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... island. In the fourth century it fell down before the preaching of St. Patrick. Then the Christian religion was embraced and cultivated with an uncommon zeal, which displayed itself in the number and consequence of the persons who in all parts embraced the contemplative life. This mode of life, and the situation of Ireland, removed from the horror of those devastations which shook the rest of Europe, made it a refuge for learning, almost extinguished everywhere else. Science flourished in Ireland during the seventh and eighth ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... footsteps of any other lay that way or not. Not that I want a due respect to other men's opinions; but, after all, the greatest reverence is due to truth: and I hope it will not be thought arrogance to say, that perhaps we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge, if we sought it in the fountain, IN THE CONSIDERATION OF THINGS THEMSELVES; and made use rather of our own thoughts than other men's to find it. For I think we may as rationally hope to see with other men's eyes, as to know by other men's understandings. So much as we ourselves consider ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... of Lady Caroom's stare, the contemplative incredulity which found militant expression in her beautiful eyes and shapely curving lips, and for a moment half closed ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... silence of discretion was unbroken between us. The lady was old, bulky, and the victim of a prolonged bilious attack all the way. The son was a red-haired gentleman with very new gold-rimmed spectacles and a scented silk handkerchief. We travelled by rail to Prescott, keeping our peace in contemplative sullenness all the while. The day was hot and dusty, and the car as uncomfortable ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... representing the different trades vary in structure and spirit. There is an immense difference between the temper of the tumultuous structural iron workers and the contemplative cigar-makers, who often hire one of their number to read to them while engaged in their work, the favorite authors being in many instances Ruskin and Carlyle. Some unions are more successful than others in collective bargaining. ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth
... the oldest of the great Hindu creeds, that of the Sikhs is the newest. Its founder, Nanuk, in the fifteenth century, was a contemplative enthusiast; his successor, Govind, a zealous man of action; himself succeeded by similar gurus, or priests, who eventually, by means of fanaticism, organization, and union with the state raised the power ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... said madame, summing up. "Thass ver' wicked man, M'sieur Morin. Everybody shall be cert' he steal those money I plaze in his hand for keep safe. Yes. He's boun' spend that money, somehow." Madame turned a broad and contemplative smile upon Dumars. "I ond'stand you, M'sieur Dumars, those day you come ask fo' tell ev'ything I know 'bout M'sieur Morin. Ah! yes, I know most time when those men lose money you say 'Cherchez la femme'—there is somewhere ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... Mrs. Assingham, still darkly contemplative, denied this with a headshake. "She won't 'put' it anywhere. She won't do with it anything anyone else would. She'll ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... had established his household gods, the intercourse of society in which, during the later portion of his life, he took a conspicuous part, on account of the influx of visitors that besieged his retired, contemplative haunts, the manifestations of the contemporary literature of the day in its wonderful, pregnant phases, and the strong current of political excitements throughout a most eventful period of English history, never disturbed the deep, placid stream of the poet's ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... mean it? He spoke of me to you?" And the good Nabob, quite proud, would look around him with movements of the head that were supremely laughable, or perhaps assume the contemplative air of a devotee who should hear the name of Our ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... mine; it was to me what light is to the eye that has once seen it, air to the lungs that have once inhaled it, or thought to the mind in which it has once been conceived. I defied Heaven itself to rob me of this divine embodying of my desires. I had seen her, and that was enough. For the contemplative, to see is to enjoy. It scarcely mattered to me whether she loved me, or whether she passed me by without perceiving me. I had been touched by her splendor, and was still enveloped in her rays; she could no more withdraw them ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine
... the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately presented itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his arm-chair amid his improvisations and ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... that mysterious principle, Life, which we think we understand because we see its effects and feel it in ourselves, but the sources of which will never be reached, as the problem of it will never be solved, either by the prying of experimental science or the musings of contemplative speculation; life eternal, also,—for the workings of nature are eternal,—and the tree that is black and lifeless to-day, we know from long experience is not dead, but will revive in the fulness of time, and bud, and grow and bear again. All these things we ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... Gideon's ranks were thinn'd, As he to Midian march'd adown the hills." Thus near one border coasting, still we heard The sins of gluttony, with woe erewhile Reguerdon'd. Then along the lonely path, Once more at large, full thousand paces on We travel'd, each contemplative and mute. "Why pensive journey thus ye three alone?" Thus suddenly a voice exclaim'd: whereat I shook, as doth a scar'd and paltry beast; Then rais'd my head to look from whence it came. Was ne'er, in furnace, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... his breathing, albeit hurried and irregular, announced that he slept. The captain then arose, for a moment critically examined the sleeping man, holding his head a little on one side, whistling softly, and stepping backwards to get a good perspective, but always with contemplative good humor, as if Catron were a work of art, which he (the captain) had created, yet one that he was not yet entirely satisfied with. Then he put a large pea-jacket over his flannel blouse, dragged a Mexican serape from the corner, and putting it over ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... respect as himself for the property of others. The associate perched on a branch a few steps away, while the first crow renewed his attempts by flying around the bone and the dog; but the latter remained impassive. Then the second personage, whose part had hitherto been to remain contemplative, flew off his branch, threw himself on the dog and gave him a formidable blow on the spine. Seized with indignation, the dog turned round to punish the author of this unjustifiable aggression; but the bird was already far away, and in the meanwhile from ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... have danced, contrary to my system, as I have done many other things since I have been here, from a motive that you will easily guess. (Mr Jenkison smiled.) I have great objections to dancing. The wild and original man is a calm and contemplative animal. The stings of natural appetite alone rouse him to action. He satisfies his hunger with roots and fruits, unvitiated by the malignant adhibition of fire, and all its diabolical processes of elixion and assation; he slakes his ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... an Indian, who during the storm had been sitting beside the mast, gazing at the boiling water with a grave, contemplative aspect, sprang quickly forward, drew his knife, and with two blows (so rapidly delivered that they seemed but one) cut asunder first the sheet and then the halyards, which let the sail blow out and fall flat upon the boat. He was just ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the excitement of the scene, totally different from the contemplative philosophy with which it would formerly have been regarded. Every incident of motion and of energy is seized upon with indescribable delight, and every line of the composition animated with a force and fury which are now no longer the mere expression of a ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... form, the application, would naturally spring up. Besides, would it not be safer, wiser, to modify ideas by experience, to look abroad for patterns, to seek for an equilibrium, a juste milieu? Thus there was a diversity of systems, but all contemplative of change. No one was in favor of standing still, for there was nothing to stand upon. In a word, the agitation was not so much one of measures, of principles, or of prejudices, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... forward from his seat. In his hand he held a riding stick with which he drew shapeless pictures in the yellow gravel of the path. His brows were drawn over contemplative eyes, and the hint of a sour smile lifted the corners of his lips. Presently the brows relaxed, and his gaze traveled to the opposite side of the path, where the British minister sat in the full glare of ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... that I had lived two days and nights without meat or drink, some began to believe that I was a holy madman, while others supposed me to be stark mad; wherefore they consulted to send for certain men who dwell in the mountain, who lead a contemplative life, and are esteemed holy as we do hermits. When they came to give their judgment concerning me, and were debating among themselves for upwards of an hour on my case, I pissed in my hands, and threw the water in their faces, on which they agreed ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... seen him there, lolling upon the swaying bough of the jungle-forest giant, his brown skin mottled by the brilliant equatorial sunlight which percolated through the leafy canopy of green above him, his clean-limbed body relaxed in graceful ease, his shapely head partly turned in contemplative absorption and his intelligent, gray eyes dreamily devouring the object of their devotion, you would have thought him the reincarnation of some demigod ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was moody, contemplative, and desirous of solitude. Nothing that the Duke had said had shaken him. He was still sure of his pearl, and quite determined that he would wear it. Various thoughts were running through his brain. What if he were to abdicate the title and become a republican? ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... the fire. The funeral had evidently taken place that day, for attached to his hat, which he still retained on his head, was a hatband measuring about a yard and a half in length, which hung over the top rail of the chair and streamed negligently down. Mr. Weller was in a very abstracted and contemplative mood. Notwithstanding that Sam called him by name several times, he still continued to smoke with the same fixed and quiet countenance, and was only roused ultimately by his son's placing the palm of his hand ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... in stress of dire necessity, in the Odyssey, and Homer's own Diomede and Odysseus would never stoop to assassinate a companion when engaged in the contemplative man's recreation. We here see the heroes in late degraded form as on the Attic stage. (4) The Cyclics introduce Helen as daughter of Nemesis, and describe the flight of Nemesis from Zeus in various animal forms, a Marchen of a sort ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... always better to bury treasure," said he once more; but his tone was altered; it was more contemplative; and many smoke-rings came from the shrunk lips before another word; but through them all, his dark eyes, dull with ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... themselves lolling in a rubber-tired vehicle while the vulgar populace on the curb identified them by pointing with their grimy fingers. Each guest looked forward to the fulfilment of some cherished dream and Dr. Emma Harpe saw a picture, too, as she gazed at Symes with speculative, contemplative eyes. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... one of those in which opposing tendencies co-exist in almost equal strength: the passionate sensibility which, impatient of definite thought, floods every idea with emotion and tends towards contemplative ecstasy, alternated in him with a keen perception of outward facts and a vigorous practical judgment of men and things. And in this case of the Trial by Fire, the latter characteristics were stimulated into unusual activity by an acute physical sensitiveness ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the slightest trace of cunning, or want of a balanced mind in their expression. During the progress of his story he had continually held his ring where he could see it, and several times had raised it to the light, in a contemplative sort of way, as if he drew some satisfaction from its appearance. He bowed his head in his hands as he ceased speaking, and some moments elapsed before he looked up, though when he did ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... Simon's family, that I had a more honourable view than at first was apprehended. I said, We fellows of fortune, Mr. Williams, take sometimes a little more liberty with the world than we ought to do; wantoning, very probably, as you contemplative folks would say, in the sunbeams of a dangerous affluence; and cannot think of confining ourselves to the common paths, though the safest and most eligible, after all. And you may believe I could not very well like to be supplanted in a view that ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... the Address. Amid the dreary space the stalwart figure of GEORGE HAWKESWORTH BOND, Member for the East Division of Dorset, stands forth like a monument. Curious to see how BOND avoids vicinity of Cross Benches. Was standing there in contemplative attitude last night, whilst GORST was demonstrating that HARCOURT's Motion on Breach of Privilege was, (1) too late, and (2) that it was too soon. It was at this moment that the Mouse appeared on the scene, leisurely strolling down floor apparently going to join the majority. A view-halloa started ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 22nd, 1890 • Various
... fortunately for himself, was not learned enough or contemplative enough to be troubled with presages of evil afar off, and, having no mental spectacles to assist his vision in this respect, saw nothing but the dull house, which jarred uncomfortably upon his previous thoughts. So, almost wishing that ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... this hour?" Mrs. Walker asked. The afternoon was drawing to a close—it was the hour for the throng of carriages and of contemplative pedestrians. "I don't think it's safe, ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... make itself felt. Yet once as Rose passed her, Robert saw her stretch out her hand and touch her sister caressingly, with a bright upward look and smile as though she would say, 'Is all well? have you had a good time this afternoon, Roeschen?' Clearly the strong contemplative nature was not strong enough to dispense with any of the little wants and cravings of human affection. Compared to the main impression she was making on him, her suppliant attitude at her mother's feet and her caress of her sister were like flowers breaking ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... was plain that this interview meant important things to him. Somehow on his commonplace countenance was to be found the expression of a dreamer, a fashioner of great and absurd projects, a fine, tender fool. He cast hopeful and reverent glances at the man who was deeply contemplative of the grey note. He evidently believed himself on the threshold of a triumph of some kind, and he awaited his fruition with a joy that was only made sharper by the usual human suspicion of ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... of thing from patriotism as a principle of action, to be prosecuted as a duty, at every peril, instantly and always, to the death, if need be. Our patriots at Bogota were but too frequently of the contemplative, the philosophical order. Patriotism with them was rather a subject for eloquence than use. They could recall those Utopian histories of Greece and Rome which furnish us with ideals rather than facts, and sigh for names like those of Cato, and Brutus, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... make choice of his own death.[126] Antoninus called Papinianus, who had been long a gallant courtier, to be cut in pieces with his soldiers' swords.[127] Yet they would both have renounced their power, yea Seneca endeavoured to deliver up his riches also to Nero, and to give himself to a contemplative life. But their very greatness drawing them to their destruction, neither of them could compass that which they desired. Wherefore what power is this that the possessors fear, which when thou wilt ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
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