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More "Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books



... to couple the word "terrible" with any action of mere inanimate matter, from which, after all, we stood in no very evident peril. Yet "terrible" is the only word for it. Grand it was not, because in all its action and voice it seemed infernal. Though its movement is slow and deliberate, it would scarcely occur to you to call either the constant impulse from ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... and straight-forward Neoptolemus will not be able to maintain to the end the character which, so much against his will, he has assumed. Not without reason after this deception does Philoctetes turn away from mankind to those inanimate companions to which the instinctive craving for society had attached him. He calls on the island and its volcanoes to witness this fresh wrong; he believes that his beloved bow feels pain in being taken from him; and at length he takes ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... adrersus Math. lib. viii.], though absurdly, that the origin of all religious worship was derived from the utility of inanimate objects, as the sun and moon, to the support and well-being of mankind. This is also the common reason assigned by historians, for the deification of eminent heroes and legislators ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume

... him, and his curiously mean mind set him groping in the remotest and more subtle directions. Nor had it taken him long to locate the most vulnerable point in Buck's armor. He had realized something of the possibilities at the first coming of Joan. He had seen then the effect of the beautiful inanimate body upon the man's susceptibilities. It had been instantaneous. Then had come that scene at the farm, and Buck's further insult over the gold which he had hated to see pass into the girl's possession. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... silence. The unfortunate man looked round at the great cliffs, the moon above, the stolid faces of the soldiers, and even at the poor, prostate, inanimate woman close by, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... grand tour of the saloons, greeting with kind and gracious words the assembled nobles. He motioned, however, to his followers to leave him, he wished to remain a few moments alone, and look thoughtfully upon this sea of upturned faces. Frederick gazed eagerly below. That was no inanimate and pulseless creation moved to and fro by the wind, which he now looked upon, but a living, thinking, immortal people; with hearts to hate or love, with lips to bless or curse, their verdict would ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... Lord, to suggest on this branch of my subject, that it requires the utmost delicacy to personify inanimate objects so justly, as to render them adapted in every circumstance to the occasion on which they are introduced. Your Lordship however will permit me to observe, that as the happiest effect is produced upon the ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... intent on sending his precious message, he shot him through the head, but not until the warning had been given to Fort Scott. Denny's faithful horse was standing near, as if keeping watch over the inanimate ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady

... a tall, thin, grave man, with a sunburned complexion, who at a single glance took in everything in the room, animate and inanimate. The chevalier recognized the ambassador of their Catholic majesties, ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... chemist. The three immediately behind, Mr. Bosengate did not thoroughly master; but the three at the end of the second row he learned in their order of an oldish man in a grey suit, given to winking; an inanimate person with the mouth of a moustachioed codfish, over whose long bald crown three wisps of damp hair were carefully arranged; and a dried, dapperish, clean-shorn man, whose mouth seemed terrified lest it should be surprised without a smile. Their first and second verdicts ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words, "You are not very ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... contradiction, the most beautiful creation of the hands of God, in the order of inanimate objects. This precious stone, as durable as the sun, and far more accessible than that, shines with the same fire, unites all its rays and colours in a single facet, and lavishes its charms, by night and day, in every clime, at all seasons; whilst the sun appears only ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... I must rest and recuperate. He told me I must interest myself again in daily life, in people and inanimate things. So I went away. For the next few years I traveled. I tore myself away from everything scientific and plunged into the business of living. Almost overnight I became an adventurer, tasting sensations with the same ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker

... clouds and winds and sewing machines, kings and brigands, hats and heads, flower-pots, jam and public-houses—surely one could find a little to chat about at any moment if one were not ambitiously particular. With inanimate objects one could speak of shape and colour and usefulness. Animate objects had, beside these, movements and aptitudes for eating and drinking, playing and quarrelling. Artistic things were well or ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... worked hard for nearly two years for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. But now that I had finished, breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... sign of feeling that responded to this announcement was a deadly paleness and a slight, nervous crushing of the paper in her hands. Moveless as a thing inanimate, she sat with fixed, dreamy eyes for a long, ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur

... beautiful engraving from an excellent drawing by Clennell{1}—-another contemplating the brilliance of Goodall in his beautiful print of the Fountains of Neptune in the Gardens of Versailles. Dash all, who generally took care to see all before him, animate and inanimate, was occasionally ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... it made me more and more its own property. Whenever the warnings showed themselves I fled to the refuge of Miss Masters's house. She bought and kept there things on which, when the mania was at its height, it satisfied me to expend my lust. But those inanimate things, though sufficient for that purpose, had no power in themselves to produce an attack of the madness. The capability to do that was reserved to a woman's beauty—the effect of which, so far, I had had no opportunity to experience. That opportunity came to me for the first time at ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming

... which is called magnetic effluvia a something, a stuff or a substance, invisible and imponderable though it be?... The mesmeric or magnetic fluid which emanates from man to man, or even from man to what is termed an inanimate object, is far greater. Indeed, it is 'life atoms' that a man in a blind passion throws off unconsciously. Let any man give way to any intense feeling such as anger, grief, &c., under or near a tree, or in direct contact with a stone, and many thousands of years after that any ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... begins to stir, A whisper runs along the hall, A lady draws the hostess near, Behind her a grave general. Her manners were deliberate, Reserved, but not inanimate, Her eyes no saucy glance address, There was no angling for success. Her features no grimaces bleared; Of affectation innocent, Calm and without embarrassment, A faithful model she appeared Of "comme il faut." Shishkoff, forgive! I ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin

... what my father would call 'the aggravation of inanimate things'! Those grapes knew that you wanted them, that I wanted to get them for you, and see how they act? But I'll have them yet. Don't fear. That old fellow I camped-out with this last summer told me ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond

... and, giving a few orders in German, helped Lord Northmoor to carry the inanimate form into the hotel, a low building of stone, with a high-pitched shingle roof. Constance followed in a bewilderment of fright, together with Lenchen, the Swiss maid, who, as well as could be made out, was declaring that a Swiss bearer ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge

... ten thousand loads of brick and stone dumped down higgledy piggledy will not build a house, neither will ten thousand millions of materials poured into a chaos make a world like this earth, arranged in order and beauty. It is grossly absurd to imagine that the inanimate materials of the earth arranged themselves in their present ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... marched on, until it put on a fatal expression of duty. All that day she revolved it. Mrs. Brigg attacked her again. Food was lacking. Cuckoo's case became desperate. She turned over carefully all her few remaining possessions to see if there was any inanimate thing that she had omitted to turn into money. Jessie, poor innocent, assisted with animation at the forlorn inventory, nestling among the tumbled garments, leaping on and off the bed. Her ingenuous nature supposed ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... at the swamper as coolly as if he were an inanimate object, and he glared at her in return, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... in a few moments Leopold landed her on the narrow beach beneath the lofty rock. The maiden left the boat, climbed the high rock, and wandered about among the wild cliffs and chasms, all alone, for Leopold could not leave the inanimate Rosabel—which the rude sea might injure—to follow the animate and beautiful Rosabel in her ramble ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic

... to the lips, nor make use of any of those tests which, under the circumstances, would be absolutely necessary before life could be pronounced to be extinct; they would see that the body was lifeless, inanimate, to all outward appearance like the few other dead bodies which they had probably observed closely; with this ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler

... boiled overhead looked almost as far aloft as a frigate's lower yard; and by the same ghastly phosphorescent light I could distinguish vaguely a number of swirling objects, some of which appeared to be merely inanimate wreckage, while others looked like struggling human beings. Then, suddenly conscious of the fact that I was within the influence of the downward draught of the sinking schooner, and was being dragged ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... parents, children, and friends, and contains the living and the dead; the past and the present generations of our race. By a very natural process, the scene of our affections soon becomes identified with them, and a portion of our regard is transferred from animate to inanimate objects. The streams on which we sported, the mountains on which we clambered, the fields in which we wandered, the school where we were instructed, the church where we worshipped, the very bell whose pensive melancholy ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... should properly be called heat; for heat, strictly speaking, is the sensation produced by caloric, on animated bodies; this word, therefore, in the accurate language of science, should be confined to express the sensation. But custom has adapted it likewise to inanimate matter, and we say the heat of an oven, the heat of the sun, without any reference to the sensation which ...
— Conversations on Chemistry, V. 1-2 • Jane Marcet

... seeming absurdity of their interference with the subject of the drama: being deemed so indispensable a part of the performance, that the scene itself was hardly more so: consequently, there was no secret supposed to be more violated by speaking before them, than before the inanimate scene itself. But what was at least excusable, on this footing, in the antients, would be an ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... With an empty and a hungry heart he kneeled before it. 'O Lord Jesus,' he cried, 'shed Thy light upon the darkness of my mind!' And then an extraordinary thing happened. The Saviour to whom he prayed was no longer an inanimate image; but a living Person! 'An answer seemed to come from the tender eyes that looked down on him from the Cross,' says Canon Adderley. 'Jesus heard his cry, and Francis accepted the dear Lord as his Saviour and Master. A real spiritual union took place ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham

... it is this that he means when he tells us that "To glance with an eye confounds the learning of all times." But he is not unready. He is never weary of descanting on the undebatable conviction that is forced upon our minds by the presence of other men, of animals, or of inanimate things. To glance with an eye, were it only at a chair or a park railing, is by far a more persuasive process, and brings us to a far more exact conclusion, than to read the works of all the logicians extant. If both, by a large allowance, ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson

... which held for him the dearest memories and associations of his life. No change of expression crossed his grim and stern-set features as he strode across the room and stood beside the little couch and the inanimate form which lay face downward upon it; the still, silent thing that had pulsed with life and youth ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... that a combination of disastrous circumstances wrought havoc with my temper. I lost my train; my head hummed like a bumblebee with weary pain, and the elastic that held my hat to its moorings broke, so that that capering compromise between inanimate matter and demoniac possession blew half a block up street on its own account, and was brought back to me by a youthful son of Belial, who took my very last quarter as reward ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden

... when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a work of ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... reply that I am simply observing and reporting facts, and that I need not enter into the whys and wherefores. Nevertheless it seems clear that if, in an ordinary dining-room, any heavy inanimate body is to be lifted from the floor, it cannot very well be anything except a table or a chair. I have numerous proofs that this property does not appertain alone to articles of furniture; but in this, as in other experimental demonstrations, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... gladly be lowering down thy bridge to the bottom, If from stupor inanimate peradventure he wake him, Leaving muddy behind him his sluggish heart's hesitation, 25 As some mule in a glutinous ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus

... from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood within arm's length of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken, and I saw opening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting, disappointments and an ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... can be replaced almost entirely by machinery. What we will never be able to replace by machinery is a Man, because man belongs to the level of a dimension above machinery. Engine-power, sun man-power, and capital—mainly the work of the dead—are inanimate; they become productive only when quickened by the time-binding energies of living men and women. Then only are the results proportional to the ever growing magnitude of exponential power. In nature's economy ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... different kinds of irritabilities and sensibilities, or of animal appetencies; which exist in every gland, and in every moving organ of the body, and are as essential to living organization as chemical affinities are to certain combinations of inanimate matter. ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... lowing. The strident cocks crowed to each other from farm to farm. There came up the irregular beat of the flails in the barns. The fevered life of myriads of creatures swelled and flowed through the peace of inanimate Nature. Uneasily Olivier would watch the ever hurrying columns of the ants, and the bees big with their booty, buzzing like organ-pipes, and the superb and stupid wasps who know not what they want—the whole world of busy little creatures, all seemingly devoured ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland

... Transportation and animals and himself. Do not these pretty well cover the field of his interests? If conceived of as motor and personal do they not hold all the material a four-or five-year-old needs for stories? If we bring in inanimate unmoving things, we must do with them what he does. We must endow them with life and motion. We need not be afraid of personification. This is the age when anthropomorphism flourishes. The five-year-old is still motor; his conception of cause ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell

... motion, that he at all rose above the level of ordinary men. No two individuals indeed could be much more unlike to each other than was the same youth to himself before rising to speak and after; the brow that had appeared inanimate and almost drooping, at once elevating itself to all the consciousness of power, and the whole countenance and figure of the speaker assuming a change ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various

... fetish, any material object, such as an animal or inanimate thing, regarded as representative of godship, to which worship is paid and from which ...
— Quatre contes de Prosper Mrime • F. C. L. Van Steenderen

... next few seconds I had the seemingly inanimate maiden safely deposited in the inside of the barouche and myself sitting by her side. The driver cracked his whip, and whilst I, happy but exhausted, was mopping my streaming forehead the chaise rattled gaily along the uneven pavements of the great ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... mimicry hypothesis must have revealed itself very clearly to him in the course of his investigations regarding the coloring of butterflies. Mimicry, as our readers are well aware, consists in this, that living beings imitate other organisms or even inanimate objects; Darwinism maintains that this is done for the sake of protection against enemies. This phenomenon is said to have been produced by selection. Those animals that possessed, for instance, some ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... of them in description, but neither of them inclined to let mere description (in Pope's phrase) take the place of sense—i.e. of the life which it is the business of the novelist to interpret. There is danger, no doubt, of overdoing it, but description in Balzac, however full and long, is never inanimate. He has explained his theory in a notice of Scott, or rather in a comparison of Scott and Fenimore Cooper (Revue Parisienne, 1840), where the emptiness of Cooper's novels is compared with the variety of Scott's, the solitude of the American lakes and forests with the crowd of life commanded ...
— Sir Walter Scott - A Lecture at the Sorbonne • William Paton Ker

... was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions. Does Humanity weep at these painful separations from every thing, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it. It is rather a source of joy that our country affords scope where our young population may range unconstrained in body or in mind, developing the power and faculties of man ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson

... falling of rain, the roar of thunder. This was succeeded by low, plaintive strains, as of people weeping, and a party of elves in the garb of monks headed a procession bearing lighted tapers and carrying biers, upon which they placed the inanimate forms of the warriors. Slowly they paced about, chanting in low tones, and constantly accompanied by the ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays

... goodness, which we see in the frame of the world. Now He that can do the greater can undoubtedly do the less; He that made all things of nothing, can much more raise a body out of dust; He who at first gave life to so many inanimate beings, can easily restore that which is dead to life again. It is an excellent saying of one of the Jewish rabbis: He who made that which was not, to be, can certainly make that which was once, to be again. This hath the force of a demonstration; ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser

... grades of organisms in their ascending order, we find them more and more distinguished from their inanimate media in structure, in form, in chemical composition, in specific gravity, in temperature, in self-mobility. It is true that this generalization does not hold with regularity. Organisms which are in some ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... the dressing-bell dispersed the party. It was not till after dinner that I saw him again: he then seemed quite at his ease. But I liked his physiognomy even less than before: it struck me as being at the same time unsettled and inanimate. His eye wandered, and had no meaning in its wandering: this gave him an odd look, such as I never remembered to have seen. For a handsome and not an unamiable-looking man, he repelled me exceedingly: there was no power in that smooth-skinned face of a full oval shape: no firmness in that ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... you ask of the world, according to the common signification—that is, in so far as it signifies what is called the universe—I say that, being infinite, it has no dimension or measure, is immobile, inanimate, and without form, notwithstanding it is the place of infinite moving worlds and is infinite space, in which are so many large animals that are called stars. If you ask according to the signification held by the true ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... Plutarch, in his treatise where he examines professedly the pretensions of Isis and Osiris, the two most famous deities of the Egyptians, says as follows:(357) "Philosophers honour the image of God wherever they find it, even in inanimate beings, and consequently more in those which have life. We are therefore to approve, not the worshippers of these animals, but those who, by their means, ascend to the Deity; they are to be considered as ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... words, exhausted by the excess of her emotion, her strength deserted her. She uttered a cry, closed her eyes, and sank down. Gilbert, however, had already sprang towards her; he raised her in his arms and laid her inanimate form in an armchair; then placing himself before her, made a rampart of his body. When he turned his eyes upon the Count again, he could not repress a shudder, for he fancied he saw the somnambulist. The features ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... carefully drugged) was sent up to the unwelcome visitors, and in due course the drink effected its purpose—its victims dropped off one by one, until the whole party lay like logs upon the floor. Mrs. Arthur Jones then crept in, having even to step over the bodies of the inanimate Roundheads, released her husband, and a fresh horse being in readiness, by the time the effects of the wine had worn off the Royalist captain was far beyond ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea

... Napoleon's great drama of invasion. His men and horses had succumbed to summer heats as rapidly and extensively as to winter frosts; he had brought ruin to his enterprise by miscalculating the proportions of inanimate nature and human strategy, and by fatal indecision at critical moments when the statesman's delay was the soldier's ruin. Russia, like Spain, had the strength of low organisms; her vigor was not centralized in one member, the destruction of which would be the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... be in or around the place. Unlike the Serpent, whose imagination had acted through his traditions until he was ready to perceive an artificial, in a natural stillness, the others saw nothing to apprehend in a tranquility that, in truth, merely denoted the repose of inanimate objects. The accessories of the scene, too, were soothing and calm, rather than exciting. The day had not yet advanced so far as to bring the sun above the horizon, but the heavens, the atmosphere, and the woods and ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper

... to go in. He declared that the door was closed. She pushed it, and slipped into the immense nave, where the inanimate trees of the columns ascended in darkness. In the rear, candles were moving in front of spectre-like priests, under the last reverberations of the organs. She trembled ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France

... best authorities, the world in which we dwell is a huge, opaque, reflecting, inanimate mass, floating in the vast ethereal ocean of infinite space. It has the form of an orange, being an oblate spheroid, curiously flattened at opposite parts, for the insertion of two imaginary poles, which are supposed ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving

... lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty

... or influences, matter. Air is invisible, and practically imperceptible to our senses—when stationary. But set into motion, a current of air will close a door with a bang—will have the effect of definitely moving a heavy mass of inanimate matter, in the manner indicated. It may be that in somewhat the same way mind affects brain. Mind may reside in a sort of etheric vehicle, and be more or less stable or stationary, save at the times when volition or intense, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... shadows that oppress soul and mind. The clouds slowly crept over one another, sometimes melting in one, sometimes dispersing each other; they mingled their forms and colors, dissolving or reappearing with new contours, majestic and mournful. This slow moving of inanimate masses had something fatal about it. It seemed as though yonder at the confines of the sea, there was an innumerable quantity of them always crawling indifferently over the sky, with the wicked ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky

... march to Rome he had lassoed his beef in the Campagna after the American manner; he had been wounded in the defence of the Roman Republic; he was one of the four fugitives who, with the general, carried out of the woods the inanimate body of the general's wife into the farmhouse where she died, exhausted by the hardships of that terrible retreat. He had survived that disastrous time to attend his general in Palermo when the Neapolitan shells from the castle crashed upon the town. He had cooked for him on the field of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... with the depravity of inanimate things, had taken that occasion to leap all bounds and run wild where never before it had ventured. Not being content in carrying its legitimate burden of logs to the lower towns, it bore away, one black night, more than half ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... can I leave you like this?" moaned the girl, with a despairing glance at the inanimate figure which, as yet, had given no signs to ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... roadway, looking around for some inanimate thing upon which he might vent his anger, when the sound of hoofs coming toward him distracted him. He glanced over his shoulder... and his knees all but gave way under him. Caught! The rider was none other than his sister Nancy! It was all over now, ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath

... he would not be able to carry the inanimate figure, so he hurriedly put on his clothes and set out on a run for Colonel Zane's house. The first person whom he saw was the old negro slave, who was brushing one of ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey

... through which she had monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost in inconsequential shadows—and she continued firmly to the door which closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate silence. ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer

... happy home, where the same faces are assembled to smile on your late return which wept at your departure, so nothing can be imagined sadder or more depressing to the spirit than so returning to find all things inanimate unchanged, or if changed, more beautiful and brighter for the alteration, but all the living, breathing, sentient creatures—the creatures whose memory has cheered our darkest days of sorrow, whose love we desire most to find unaltered—gone, never to return, swallowed by the cold ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various

... these poor inanimate things outlast The life that used them. Yes. I should like to try This good old friend of his. You'll leave me here An hour or so?" His hands explored the stops; And, while the music breathed what else were mute, His mind through many thoughts and memories ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... boys have never mistaken your companion Paul for this table or this tree?—Oh, no!—Why?—Because the table and the tree are inanimate and insensible, whereas Paul lives and feels.—Good. If you strike the table it will feel nothing and you will not hurt it; but have you any right to destroy it?—No, we should be destroying something belonging to others.—Then what is it you respect in the table? the inanimate and insensible ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... now tell you a little about myself, and answer your questions. How I like the inanimate part of Rome you will soon perceive at my arrival in England; I am far gone in medals, lamps, idols, prints, etc." and all the small commodities to the purchase of which I can attain; I would buy the Coliseum if I could: Judge. My mornings ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... scene has become familiar. I will discharge your commissions punctually; don't hesitate to tell me what you want. I don't do it from a sense of duty, but it is a positive pleasure for me to have anything to do for you. I long for letters; as soon as possible send me photographs, and not merely inanimate photographs of scenes and places, but be sure that you make a part of them yourself. I want to see you standing, sitting, reading in the new house; and give me an exact and detailed account of your day, please; the food you ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... a heavy, inanimate body having been dragged through the wet grass were evidence enough, and Copplestone and Spurge followed them to a corner of the old tower where they ceased. Spurge glanced round that corner and uttered ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher

... constituted his individual existence. In fact, it was the display of vital energy in man and the lower animals from which the whole conception of the zi was derived. The force which enables the animate being to breathe and act, to move and feel, was extended to inanimate objects as well; if the sun and stars moved through the heavens, or the arrow flew through the air, it was from the same cause as that which enabled the man to walk or the bird ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... library, always to sing the airs from the opera of Cadmus and Hermione, to break all the china in order only to have cups of gold, to have only diamond buttons, to eat nothing but partridges, to drink only Hungarian or Shiraz wine—would one call that reason? Nature had need of animals, plants, inanimate bodies; there are in these creatures, devoid of reason, marvels which serve for exercise of the reason. What would an intelligent creature do if there were no unintelligent things? What would it think of, if there were neither ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz

... feet the scoundrel stole down-stairs, and there toiled alone, with the inanimate thing, once a stalwart man, lying there helpless and prone ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... hands will tend The nameless treasures I must leave behind,— My flowers, my birds, and each inanimate friend, Linked ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... cantered along the avenue at Brandon Beeches on a powerful bay horse, the gates at the end opened and a young man sped through them on a bicycle. He was of slight frame, with fine dark eyes and delicate nostrils. When he recognized Lady Brandon he waved his cap, and when they met he sprang from his inanimate steed, at which ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... along the shore; gaily-dressed natives pass hither and thither, engrossed in their work or play; and the little brown bodies of the naked children fleck the yellow sands. Seen across the dancing waves, and with the appearance of motion which, in this steaming land, the heat-haze gives to even inanimate objects, this scene is indescribably pretty, shining ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... upon the slippery, blackened ladder, grasping the inanimate form of a little child. Loud cheers rent the air. But they pierced the hearts of those who bent over the senseless forms of the deliverer and the child. Most of their clothing, their hair, and eyebrows ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee

... and turning from him with contempt, he listened to Macgregor, who, stooping toward the inanimate Helen, observed that her pulse beat. "Fool!" returned Soulis, "did you think I would so rashly throw away what I have been at such pains to gain? Call your wife; she knows how to teach these ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... my bed; again plaintive voices called to me out of the darkness. I stretched out my arms, but nothing met them, I fought with phantoms; at length a cold hand grasped mine and led me rapidly forward. Under a dark and damp vault a woman lay on the ground, bleeding, inanimate—it was my wife! At the same moment, a groan made me look round, and I beheld a man striking my son with a dagger. I cried out and awoke, bathed in cold perspiration, panting under this terrible vision. I was obliged to get up, walk about, and speak aloud, in order to convince myself it ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... with snow that it resembled a hummock, which ordinarily would have been passed without notice. The horses and the inanimate form within were like blocks of wood. The slight figure was lifted tenderly from its resting place and brought to ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... themselves, not the terms of their manifestations. For them thinking is seeing over again, it is going through the sensations that the real object would have produced. Everything which goes on within them is in the form of pictures, or rather, inanimate scenes in which life is partially reproduced. . . . Since the child has, as yet, no capacity for abstraction, he finds a stimulating power in words and a suggestive inspiration which holds him enchanted. They awaken vividly ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... palm of one's hand, as I had that evening, in order to be convinced that the evolutions, twangings of the strings, etc., all synchronized with the very delicate movements of her fingers.... I cannot describe the sensation one experiences when seeing an inanimate object moved, not for a moment merely, but for many minutes in succession, ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... and scorching desert as the scene of their amusements. Some were rolling on the ground amid a cloud of dust; others, with a hoarse rumbling bellow, were butting their large heads together, while many stood motionless, as if quite inanimate. Except their monstrous growth of tangled grizzly mane, they had no hair; for their old coat had fallen off in the spring, and their new one had not as yet appeared. Sometimes an old bull would step forward, and gaze at me with a grim and stupid countenance; ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... the Fifth Day in this chapter, but I want you to turn to the account of it given in the first chapter of Genesis, and you will see that there for the first time in the Story of Creation the word "life" is used. God speaks to us no longer of only inanimate or lifeless things, such as the sea and the dry land, the earth with its herbs and trees, and the two great lights which were made to give light upon it. He tells us now of creatures which live and move and have a being, each "after its kind"; each exactly fitted to enjoy ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham

... streams pour out their floods and the commingled volume hurries north in a mud-tinted, sharply delimited current, and whole trees are cast up on the beaches of far-away isles, vivid examples of the dispersion of animate and inanimate things by purely natural means are afforded. Weighty stones are found locked among roots which, as the wood decays, are deposited on alien sands, thereafter to invite speculation as to origin and means of transport. On one such raft voyaged a living specimen ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... chlorine, and incarnate zinc, of zinc. Their quality makes this career; and he can variously publish their virtues, because they compose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, does not forget his origin; and all that is yet inanimate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innumerable Werners, Von Buchs, and Beaumonts; and the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Norman, who thought her more inanimate and like a pretty little waxen toy, than when he had last seen her. "Is she ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... that daisy," Lily said, wonderingly. She herself was incapable of any such retaliation upon inanimate objects. She would have carefully untangled her silk, no matter ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... humanity is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought, on the other hand, the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But just there Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not yet learned to boast its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not yet ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... wholly disagreeable in the hazy character of the retrospect, especially to a nature such as Kafka's, full of undeveloped artistic instincts and of a passionate love of all sensuous beauty, animate and inanimate. The gorgeous pictures rose one after the other in his imagination, and satisfied a longing of which he felt that he had been vaguely aware before beginning the journey. None of these lacked reality, any more than Keyork himself, thought it seemed strange to the young man that ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... the American?" asked Madame Le Fort. "Is it possible that he is not in love with that fascinating young creature? Or are all your countrymen so cold and inanimate? Elle est ravissante, adorable! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... pay their monthly visit to Miss Hornblower! if she could only have gone there, and lived with them in their quaint, quiet, primitive way, instead of having to listen, without remonstrance, to hearing plans discussed about her, as if she was an inanimate chattel. ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... a letter came from you— You did not love me any more, it said. What breathless grief!—my love not true, not true ... I was afraid of people, and afraid Of things inanimate—the wind that blew, The clock, the wooden chair; and so I strayed From home, but could not stray from grief, I knew. And then at dawn I woke, and wept, and prayed, And knew my blessed love was still the same;— And yet I ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various

... resembling the bottom of a sea which has long retired from its bed, a beach covered with salt, dry mud, and moving sands, furrowed, as it were, by the waves. Here and there stunted shrubs vegetate with difficulty upon this inanimate tract; their leaves are covered with salt, and their bark has a smoky smell and taste. Instead of villages you perceive the ruins of a few towers. In the middle of this valley flows a discoloured river, which reluctantly throws itself into the pestilential lake by which it is ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... seashore and knew better than any other man of his times the exquisite seaweeds and the still more beautiful marine animals. He was the first to think of them as a linked series, the higher developing out of the lower under the pressure of what he called a perfecting principle. Out of the inanimate rocks had sprung the marine plants—the seaweeds. From these had developed first "plant animals" like the sea anemones and the sponges. These grew attached to the rocks, as plants do. With higher development came locomotion, with ever-increasing energy. At last man arose, the crown of all ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... survival of the fittest." As we look beneath the surface in any department of human endeavor, analyze things a little carefully, we discover that this contest is going on. We know that it is not confined to the lower forms of life or the order of the inanimate world. It is a universal law. We are not always conscious of it; but, when we do think and study, we discover it as ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... the lease. He tried his wife's love and patience as a man must to whom the future is easy in the mass but terrible as it translates itself piecemeal into the present. He experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipative homesickness that seemed to stop his heart. Again and again his wife had to make him reflect that his depression was not prophetic. She convinced him ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the soil spoke to him. Leaf and bud and blossom conversed with him in the old vocabulary of his careless youth—the inanimate things, the familiar stones and rails, the gates and furrows and roofs and turns of the road had an eloquence, too, and a power in the transformation. The country had smiled and he had felt the breath of it, and his heart was drawn as if in a moment back to his old love. The ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... panacea of domestic troubles, Faithful author of that sweet nepenthe which deadens all the ills that married folks are heir to. Cheery, glittering, soul-soothing, warmed hearted, inanimate friend! What wife can fail to admit the peace and serenity she owes to you? To you, who stand between her and all her early morning troubles— Between her and the before-breakfast grouch— Between her and the morning-after headache— Between ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... become active agencies in the tale. So vivid and eager is the display of fancy that everything is borne along with it; imaginary objects take the precision of real ones; living thoughts are controlled by inanimate things; the chimes console the poor old ticket-porter; the cricket steadies the rough carrier's doubts; the sea waves soothe the dying boy; clouds, flowers, leaves, play their several parts; hardly a form of matter without a living quality; no silent thing without its voice. Fondling and exaggerating ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... and the papers?" said Ruth. "It was remembering that, that put it into our heads. I never thought of the cracks and—" with a little, low, excited laugh—"the 'total depravity of inanimate things,' till—just a little ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... round the exterior, and thought it more beautiful than that of York; though, on recollection, I hardly deem it so majestic and mighty as that. It is vain to attempt a description, or seek even to record the feeling which the edifice inspires. It does not impress the beholder as an inanimate object, but as something that has a vast, quiet, long-enduring life of its own,—a creation which man did not build, though in some way or other it is connected with him, and kindred to human nature. In short, I fall straightway to talking nonsense, when I try to ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... made all things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue its laborious course around its axis, one half of its inhabitants ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

... it comes to moral questions we are still dominated by the idea of the fatalistic power of inanimate things. We cannot think it possible to be just or good, not to speak of being cheerful, without looking at some physical fact and saying humbly "By your leave." We personify our tools and machines, and the occult symbols ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... impressed by the gallant bearings of Dick and Phil, that when the two were seen to go down in the melee, the girls, moved by a common impulse, had dashed out of the house, the moment that a favourable opportunity had presented itself, and had dragged the apparently inanimate bodies indoors unnoticed in the prevailing confusion. And they also learned that, according to common report, some eight or ten survivors of the ill-advised landing-party had succeeded in fighting their way back to the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... the vast silver basin of Lake Milar, seen Stockholm in all its pride, Upsal, the city of the ancient gods, and Gebel, the active and industrious, he found himself amid a region entirely silent, inanimate, and wrapped in a snowy pall. Soon he penetrated the bosom of a long pine forest, the shafts of which seemed, as it were, giants wrapped in cloaks of white. Now he ascended steep hills, then rapidly hurried to the Gulf, the shores ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... them her green leaves, Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, Over the unreturniug brave,—alas! Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which now beneath them, but above shall grow In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe, And burning with high hope, ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... even after the conveyal of an apparently inanimate body downstairs, before his wife first made clear signs of intelligence; and even these were little more than grotesque expressions of fear—rolling eyes and exclamations. It was another quarter of an hour before any ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson

... placed at the heart of his philosophy because of the inestimable advantages man could derive from it, people loudly objected to on the ground that it robbed man's life of all moral and religious value. Determinism, they exclaimed, reduces man to the rank of inanimate Nature; without "free-will" man is no better than a slave, his life doomed by an inexorable fate. True enough, nothing is more abhorrent or more deadly to the striving soul of man than to be bound in a fatalistic doctrine. But ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza

... what he tolerantly calls "tricks" of horsemanship and marksmanship, he studied the signs of the trail, forest and prairie, as a sailing-master studies the waves and clouds. The knowledge he gathers from inanimate objects and dumb animals seems little less than miraculous. And when you ask him how he knows these things he always gives you a reason founded on some fact or habit of nature that shows him to be a naturalist, mineralogist, geologist, and botanist, and not ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... exasperation by Patrick an hour and a half later than usual—he smoked his pipe on the porch and stared reminiscently at the shifting clouds above the tree-tops, and with a tenderness about the lips that must have surprised and gratified the stubby, ill-used brier, inanimate confederate in many a lofty plot. He recalled all she had said to him in that sylvan confessional, and was content. His family? Pooh! He had a soul of his ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... could not brook it;— So seeing a huge brick-bat, up he took it; And aiming, like a marksman at a crow, Plump on the breast he hit his deadly foe; Who fell, like Pedants' periods, to the ground,— Very inanimate, ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger

... inanimate bundle with his foot. The spurs gave out a tinkling, musical jingle. The thing moved, stirred and finally galvanized into life. It was finally revealed as the figure of a rather ill-favored Mexican, unusually tall for one of his race who are, as a ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham

... number of the most edifying actions which our author had to relate, made it difficult for him to avoid a tiresome uniformity of narrative: but he has happily surmounted this difficulty. Another difficulty he met with, was the flat and inanimate style of the generality of the writers from whom his work was composed. Happy he must have been, when the authors he had to consult were St. Jerome, Scipio, Maffei, Bouhours, or Marsollier. But most commonly they were such as might edify but could not delight. He ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... that the three others are Vriddhi, Kshaya, and Sthana, all of which arise from policy. Some of the seven limbs are inanimate, such as the treasury. But it is said that the treasury supports the ministers, and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... defended by posts from the coaches and wheel- carriages; and though they are jostled sometimes in the throng, yet as this seldom happens out of design, few are offended at it; the variety of beautiful objects, animate and inanimate, he meets with in the streets and shops, inspires the passenger with joy, and makes him slight the trifling inconvenience of being crowded now and then. The lights also in the shops till eight or nine in the evening, especially ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales

... of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is in too much of a ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... differentiation between their supposed functions.[69] As the heart and the blood were obviously present in the dead body they could no longer be regarded as the "life". The breath was clearly the "element" the lack of which rendered the body inanimate. It was therefore regarded as necessary to set the heart working. The heart then came to be looked upon as the seat of knowledge, the organ that feels and wills during waking life. All the pulsating motions of the body seem to have been regarded, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... with the angels, and where they are, is neither evil, nor sorrow, nor pain. Much as I loved him, much as I grieved for his loss, I would not recall him if I could. But, our picture cannot die. And though it is mute and inanimate, yet it is something to awaken remembrances, that, even though sad, we delight to cherish. It is something to remind us, that we have a child ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur

... that Fanny Brandeis, the creative, was not being fed. And the creative fire requires fuel. Fanny Brandeis fed on people, not things. And her work at Haynes-Cooper was all with inanimate objects. The three months since her coming to Chicago had been crowded and eventful. Haynes-Cooper claimed every ounce of her energy, every atom of her wit and resourcefulness. In return it gave—salary. Not too much salary. That would come later, perhaps. Unfortunately, Fanny Brandeis did not ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber

... him vaguely, as if he wanted all the dumb, inanimate things around him to bear witness to this monstrous idea: Elsa flouted for another woman! Elsa! the most beautiful woman on God's earth, the purest, the best—flouted! And for whom? for what?—other girls—women—who were not worthy to walk in the same street as Elsa! The thought made ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... walked and talked continually together; when the theme of conversation was our companions or our masters we understood each other, and when I recurred to some sentiment of affection, some vague love of an excellent or beautiful object, whether in animate or inanimate nature, your sardonic coldness did not move me. I felt myself superior to that check THEN as ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... that locomotive, and how absurd it seemed now for a man to become so attached to a mere machine! But she was not inanimate. She lived, moved, breathed. How often, as they swept beneath the stars of an autumn night, had he felt her hot breath upon his face, heard the steel singing beneath her feet and felt her tremble, responsive to his lightest touch. How wild and free and glad she ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman

... a cat, Bradley sprang to his feet and with all his great strength, backed by his heavy weight, struck the Wieroo upon the point of the chin. Without a sound the thing crumpled to the platform, while Bradley, acting almost instinctively to the urge of the first law of nature, rolled the inanimate body over the ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... he called out, clutching hold of the corner of the blanket that enveloped one of my limp legs, which was hanging down almost as inanimate over the side of the bunk, and shaking this latter, too, as vigorously as he did the blanket. "Rouse out, it's gone eight bells and the port watch are already on deck, with Mr Mackay swearing away at a fine rate because you're not ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson

... as to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo

... eight-horse team, men who stood now with their hands high, horses for riders who were no longer to need them. Three hundred of those horses from the lines behind the dismounted skirmishers—far more valuable than any inanimate treasure to men who had lost mounts—one hundred ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton

... the good which is communicative, and depress the good which is private and particular, as the holy faith, well declaring that it was the same God that gave the Christian law to men, who gave those laws of nature to inanimate creatures that we spake of before; for we read that the elected saints of God have wished themselves anathematised, and razed out of the book of life, in an ecstasy of charity, and infinite feeling ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon

... gaily-dressed natives pass hither and thither, engrossed in their work or play; and the little brown bodies of the naked children fleck the yellow sands. Seen across the dancing waves, and with the appearance of motion which, in this steaming land, the heat-haze gives to even inanimate objects, this scene is indescribably pretty, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... and grotesque images. Their virtues were derived either from the material, from the shape, or from the magic rites performed at the time of their preparation. According to a popular belief, which prevailed throughout the East in the earlier centuries of the Christian era, all objects, whether inanimate stones and metals, or brutes and plants, possessed an indwelling spirit or soul, which was the cause of the efficiency of all amulets.[5:1] They were therefore akin to fetishes, in the present acceptation of the term; for a fetish, as defined in the classification ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... higher claim, and had he been willing to subordinate and adjust his own claim to it. The father considered his son disrespectful and hard-hearted, yet we know St. Francis to have been the most tender and loving of men, responsive to all possible ties, even to those of inanimate nature. We know that by his affections he freed the frozen life of his time. The elements of tragedy lay in the narrowness of the father's mind; in his lack of comprehension and his lack of sympathy with ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams

... interest of "The Blue Bird" depend on the way in which the author, while adapting his language and his legends to the intelligence of youthful readers, manages to show them the wonders and romance of Nature. He enlists among his characters a whole series of inanimate objects, such as Bread, Sugar, Milk, Light, Water, Fire and Trees, besides the Cat, the Dog and other animals, investing them all with individuality,—making for instance, with characteristic bias, the Dog the faithful friend of ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc

... about Paul. He was addicted to laying the faults of even inanimate objects to the charge of other people; and as for himself personally, he was never in the wrong! Now he felt that he must have somebody on whom to vent his vexation—and hunger; I was used to being that scapegoat, and it was seldom that I paid much attention to ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster

... inspiration of the love of virtue. He followed Winckelmann in believing that the expression of physical beauty was the supreme object of painting. This beauty exists only as an ideal, which finds its highest expression in man. Animals possess it to a slighter extent, vegetable and inanimate nature not at all. Those mistaken enough to occupy themselves with depicting the latter are imitating beauties deprived of all ideal. They work only with eye and hand; genius has little if any share in their productions. Lessing found the physical ideal to reside chiefly ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... other bird, will cost four or five pounds, and specimens that are larger may be worth many times that amount. Figures of men, horses, bears, dogs, and various animals, including dragons, are to be seen, as well as letters of the alphabet, triangles, or other inanimate objects, some trees being cleverly made to look like jugs, bottles, and bowls. Occasionally, a singular change has been made in a tree; thus, what was a boy with a rake, by a little alteration becomes a ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... radar. This poor inanimate piece of electronic equipment has taken a beating when UFO proof is being offered. "Radar is not subject to the frailties of the human mind," is the outcry of every saucer fan, "and ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... In the windows of a shop in Broadway, this strange, and to my mind revolting, article may be seen, shaped like a mummy, fitting hermetically tight, and with a plate of glass to reveal the features of the inanimate inmate. I have certainly read of the disconsolate lover who, on the death of her who ungratefully refused to reciprocate his affection, disinterred her body by stealth, supplied himself with scanty provision, and embarking in a small boat, launched forth upon the wide waters, to watch her gradual ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... blue," she said, with a tenderness great enough to compass inanimate things. "He always set ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown

... only constitutes the nature of God and the moral ideal of man, but it is also the purpose and essence of all created being, both animate and inanimate. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... when a stiff wind was abroad. She enjoyed hearing it roaring overhead, bending and twisting the tops of the pointed trees. The forest then seemed to be alive, and not so inanimate as on a cold frosty morning. It was more companionable in such a mood, and it seemed to her like a wonderful organ with all the stops out under the control of some mighty unseen master. It was a pleasure to her ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody

... she still retained a view of the stranger, from whose countenance she felt it to be impossible to withdraw her eyes. Isabella was too much engrossed by her own feelings to discover the trembling figure of the witness to her actions, and she pressed the inanimate image to her lips, with an enthusiasm that denoted the most intense passion. The expression of the countenance of the fair stranger was so changeable, and the transitions were so rapid, that Frances had ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... powerful bay horse, the gates at the end opened and a young man sped through them on a bicycle. He was of slight frame, with fine dark eyes and delicate nostrils. When he recognized Lady Brandon he waved his cap, and when they met he sprang from his inanimate steed, at which the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw

... other hand, if in the blackest midnight I should come to her, she would not need to ask who the comer was. It is by the mind, not the eye, that these people know one another. It is really only in their relations to soulless and inanimate things that they ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... out of the room, leaving Annie to scowl ominously at the new nurse, and vent her spleen by boxing her doll, because the inanimate little lady would not keep her blue-bead eyes open. Beulah loved children, and Johnny forcibly reminded her of earlier days, when she had carried Lilly about in her arms. For some time after the departure ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... charms to soothe the savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend the knotted oak; I've read that things inanimate have mov'd, And, as with living souls, have been inform'd, By magic numbers and persuasive sound. 1237 CONGREVE: Mourning Bride, Act ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various

... i. 283.) he now, with axes and torches is advancing on the very sanctuary of Justice. Sacrilegious; yet what help? The man is a soldier; looks merely at his orders; impassive, moves forward like an inanimate engine. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... papers quoted him—his doings, not his sayings. People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things. ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens

... he was viewing the slaughter and to avoid having the statue always covered up. For this act Claudius was well laughed at when people reflected how he sated himself with the sights that he did not think proper for even the inanimate bronze to behold. It might be noted particularly that he used to delight greatly even at lunch time in watching those who were incidentally cut down in the middle of the spectacle. Yet a lion that had been trained to eat men and on this account greatly pleased the ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio

... it lifted he saw, as in a pageant, war in mid-career. Sound, too, had organized. He could have beaten time to the gigantic rhythm. It rose and sank; it was made up of groaning, shouting, breathing of men, gasping, and the sounds that horses make, with louder and louder the thunder of the inanimate, the congregated sound of the allies man had devised,—the saltpetre he had digged, the powder he had made, the rifles he had manufactured, the cannon he had moulded, the solid shot, grape, canister, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... month Stefan brooded. He hung about the house, dabbled at a little work, and returned, all without signs of life or interest. He was kind to Mary, more considerate than he used to be, but she would have given all his inanimate, painstaking politeness for an hour of his old, gay thoughtlessness. They had reached the stage of marriage in which, all being explained and understood, there seems nothing to hope for. Alone together they were silent, for there was nothing to say. Each ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale

... more remarkable in this story than there is in scores of our nursery or household tales, in which not only animals but also inanimate objects are gifted with speech, and in which the love of the marvellous rises ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor

... good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not the first thing suggested ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds, But animated nature sweeter still To soothe and satisfy the human ear. Ten thousand warblers cheer the day, and one The livelong night: nor these alone whose notes Nice-fingered ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth

... increased every day. I think that we began to be influenced by this peculiar trait in his character. It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain. It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words. How many persons condemned to the horrors of solitary confinement ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne

... mistaking the meaning of those lines; love breathed from every letter, and, with a hasty look round to make sure she was alone, the happy girl pressed the inanimate paper, satin, printer's ink, and colours to her lips as though in answer to the message ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... of the world, according to the common signification—that is, in so far as it signifies what is called the universe—I say that, being infinite, it has no dimension or measure, is immobile, inanimate, and without form, notwithstanding it is the place of infinite moving worlds and is infinite space, in which are so many large animals that are called stars. If you ask according to the signification held by the true philosophers—that is, in so far as it signifies every globe, every star, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno

... depicts the pastoral life of the Patriarchs, the marvellous history of the Hebrew nation, the beautiful scenery in which they lived and moved, the stately ceremonial of their liturgy, and the promise of a Messiah. Its chief strength and charm is that it personifies inanimate objects, as in the sixty-fourth Psalm, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis

... the fact, that Art is the application of Science to a practical end. It is proposed, therefore, under the comprehensive title of Popular Science and Art, to include portions of our knowledge of animate and inanimate nature. The object will be to assist the general reader to regard with an intelligent eye the varied phenomena of nature, to gratify the laudable desire of understanding what he sees, and of preparing him in some measure to enter more fully upon the study of a given subject. In this way, it is hoped ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton

... dolphin that was attracted by Arion's song and carried him safely across the sea, are quite as significant as if they were true stories, for they show that the Greeks were so deeply moved by music that they could readily imagine it to have a similar effect on animals, and even on inanimate objects. Almost three thousand years ago, Homer represented Achilles as "comforting his heart with the sound of the lyre," after losing his sweet Briseis; "stimulating his courage and singing the deeds of the heroes." And, as Emil Naumann fancies, there is a moral underlying ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... to put it in training. All day long he was pulling faces. As an artist will sketch everything he comes across, so Mike would endeavour to imitate any characteristic expression or attitude, animate or inanimate, in the world around him. Dogs, little boys, and grotesque old men were his special delight, and of all his elders he had, it goes without saying, a private gallery of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne

... sympathy with the poor and the simple is infinite. He is full of pity and tenderness and enfolds in his heart and in his poetry, saint and sinner, man and beast, all that which is animate and inanimate. He is passionately religious with a profound and humble faith, but it has nothing in common with the sumptuous and decorative neo-catholicism of men like Huysmans or Paul Claudel. Rather one must seek his origins in the child-like faith of Saint Francis of ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes

... first look a father casts upon his babe; the infant, which to the whole world seems a mis-shapen, an unpleasant thing to look upon, to him is a being of most perfect beauty—the hope—the prop—the stay of his future life. Upon that weak, helpless, inanimate creature, his heart leans—the heart of the strongest man leans upon it. The world holds out no promise to tempt him like the well-doing of his child. It is a wonderful mystery," continued the Buccaneer, reverently uncovering his head, as men do when they are about ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... find in flies and swallows, who seem dead to all outward appearances, breathless and inanimate, and yet they live by that heat which is stored up in the heart and inward arteries. At the approach of summer, however, the internal heat, being restored to the outer parts, they are then brought to life again, out ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... gain them both from a space composition which shall combine unity with a tendency to movement. And this is given by the diagonal and V-shaped type. This type merely allows free play to the natural tendency of the "active" picture; but it constrains the neutral, inanimate landscape. The shape itself imparts motion to the picture: the sweep of line, the concentration of the vista, the unifying power of the inverted triangle between two masses, act, as it were, externally to the suggestion ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... thou art that thinkest love and a church do not well harmonize—so strangely, I say, full to overflowing of its own vitality, does it radiate life, that it would even of its own superabundance quicken into blessed consciousness the inanimate objects around it, thinking what they would feel had they a consciousness correspondent to their form, were their faculties moved from within themselves instead of from the will and operation ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald

... almost the universal errour of historians to suppose it politically, as it is physically true, that every effect has a proportionate cause. In the inanimate action of matter upon matter, the motion produced can be but equal to the force of the moving power; but the operations of life, whether private or publick, admit no such laws. The caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation. It is not always ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson

... moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was good enough, and that he was good enough himself. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... by year. She had come here in an exploring mood sometimes when she was quite a child, but she never remembered the room having been put to any use; and as she had grown older it had come to have a haunted air, and she had touched the inanimate things with a sense of awe, wondering what her mother's life had been like in that room—trying to conjure up the living image of a lovely face, which was familiar to her from more than one picture ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... close of day. Her manner instantly changed; she became eager and alert. Pausing only a second to make sure of her attack, she bit the snake sharply near the neck, then, withdrawing her head and limbs into the shelter of her spines, rolled over, an inanimate ball. The viper, mad with pain, thrust back its head from its sinuous coils, rose, and struck with open jaws at its assailant. Its fangs closed strongly, but failed to get a grip, and the smooth underside of its throat glanced past the hedgehog's slanting prickles with such force that the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees

... that had crossed his mind when he had looked on his brother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer dawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with the premature miseries of the gamester, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... over the strange harmony of Nature with the temperament of man, every phase of his passionate existence seeming to have its type in things inanimate, when a loud cheer from the land aroused me, and the words, "Charley! Cousin Charley!" came wafted over the water to where I lay. For some time I could but distinguish the faint outline of some figures on the shore; but as I came nearer, I recognized ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... I describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates, either among the Greeks or barbarians? It is horrible to speak of it and incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... said relative to the wind-pressure exerted on inanimate objects, the same applied, with even more point, to our persons; so that progression in a hurricane became a fine art. The first difficulty to be encountered was a smooth, slippery surface offering no grip for the feet. Stepping out of the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... should—on the whole. Pulse is poor. That's the worst sign." She picked up the hand lying outside the coverlet and put her finger-tips to the wrist, doing it with the easy nonchalant carelessness with which she might have seized an inanimate object, yet knowing exactly what she was about. "H'm! Fifty-six! That's pretty low. If we could get it above sixty—but still!" Dropping the hand with the same indifference, yet continuing to know what she was about, Miss Gallifer ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. 'All vice is nothing more than error and mistake' (i. 31). {205} 'We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford

... the beasts which were so eager to devour him. All things about him seemed to conspire for his death: the wind, lightning, thunder, rain and storm, as well as the beasts and falling trees; for in his mind he did not differentiate animate from inanimate objects. Slowly, through his groping mind there evolved the thought, due to past experience, that he could not contend with these things by physical force, but must subdue them with magic; his magic consisted of the beating of crude ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... disguised in the Norman armour which they had found in the armoury of the castle,— their strong, tall, and bulky forms, and motionless postures, causing them to look rather like trophies of some past age, than living and existing soldiers. Surrounded by these huge and inanimate figures, in a little vaulted room which almost excluded daylight, Flammock received the Welsh envoy, who was led in blindfolded betwixt two Flemings, yet not so carefully watched but that they permitted ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott

... general division into "animate" and "inanimate"—the good man gave the human race only one soul—followed a system that looked like a pyramid. On the top was God with the angels and spirits and other accessories, while the oysters and polyps and mussels were crawling about down near the base, or lying still—just ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli

... familiar language amongst us to call corn Ceres, and wine Bacchus, yet who can think any one so mad as to take that to be really a god that he feeds upon?"[141] And Plutarch condemns the whole practice of giving the names of gods and goddesses to inanimate objects, as absurd, impious, and atheistical: "they who give the names of gods to senseless matter and inanimate things, and such as are destroyed by men in the using, beget most wicked and atheistical opinions in the minds of men, since it can not be conceived how these things should be gods, for ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... the most rare and superb varieties, jasmines, honeysuckles, clematis, spice woods, and a great variety of other choice plants, were also in lavish abundance. There were locust trees of enormous size, and everything that was inanimate filled us with surprise and delight. But, within the mansion, we were met with the accustomed bitterness and want of civility. Among the slaves on the premises was a white-haired negro, who was one hundred and eight ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... attendants were there now, and the kind Dean with Lucas was trying to induce Aldonza to relax the grasp with which she embraced the body, whence a few moments before the brave and constant spirit had departed. Her black hair hanging over like a veil, she held the inanimate head to her bosom, sobbing and shrieking with the violence of her Eastern nature. The priest who had been sent for to take care of the corpse, and bear it to the mortuary of the Minster, wanted to move her by force; but the Dean insisted ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... refreshment, I reflect (I perceive that I shall have very frequent opportunities for reflection) that I was perhaps only too anxious to preserve the harmony of heaven. My sense of decorum—may it not have been excessive? From below, as I imagine, from the stations occupied—I will not say by the inanimate or half-animate creation, such as insects, or men, or minerals—but by the demi-gods, I take it that the dignity and orbic beauty of our court appeared sublimely immaculate. In the inner circle, alas! no one knows better than I do that there were—well, dissensions. I will go ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse

... urchins who ride them to water; the cows, and those who milk them. And then, country-folks are nature's freeholders; they enjoy a full portion of the earth, the air, the sky, with the thousand charms an ever-merciful Creator has lavished on them. Every inanimate object—this hill, that wood, the brook, the bridge, C.'s farm-house, and D.'s barn—to the very highway, as far as eye can reach, all form pleasing parts of a country home. In a city, on the contrary, we live surrounded by strangers. Home is entirely restricted to our own ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... Look at God's ways of doing with all His creatures. The animate and the inanimate creation are appealed to, the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field, the one in reference to food and the other in reference to clothing, which are the two great wants already spoken of by Christ in the previous verses. I am not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... so pitifully mean in the inverted Ambition of that Man who can hope for Annihilation, and please himself to think that his whole Fabrick shall one Day crumble into Dust, and mix with the Mass of inanimate Beings, that it equally deserves our Admiration and Pity. The Mystery of such Mens Unbelief is not hard to be penetrated; and indeed amounts to nothing more than a sordid Hope that they shall not be immortal, because they dare ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... used in the formation of figurative names; for example, kaun-engro, an ear-fellow, or creature with ears, serving to denote a hare; ruk-engro, or ruko-mengro, a tree-fellow, denoting a squirrel; it is also occasionally used in names for inanimate objects, as pov-engro, an earth-thing or ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow

... eyes with my hands I eagerly scanned the horizon in the direction indicated, and there, to my astonishment, saw a long thin black line. At first I could not distinguish whether it was a file of men or some inanimate object, but the keen eyes of the savages before and behind me soon detected its presence, and dozens of voices were in accord that it was a line of armed men, and that they were moving in ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... forth from her and locked the door upon her, as before; whereupon she took the book and sat perusing it awhile. Presently, she set it aside and taking the lute, tightened its strings; and smote thereon, after a wondrous fashion, such as would have moved inanimate things to dance, and fell to singing marvellous melodies ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... the universe, whether animate or inanimate, of created things, will at the end of the world, and after the expiration of the Yuga, be again confounded. And, at the commencement of other Yugas, all things will be renovated, and, like the various fruits of the earth, succeed each other in the due order of their seasons. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... to the origin of the worship of inanimate objects, or of the powers of Nature, this passage might fairly be cited as an example of the manner in which those objects, or those powers, can impress the mind with that awe which is the foundation ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... there entered a tall, thin, grave man, with a sunburned complexion, who at a single glance took in everything in the room, animate and inanimate. The chevalier recognized the ambassador of their Catholic majesties, the ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)

... the other a power of jurisdiction. The sacramental power is one that is conferred by some kind of consecration. Now all the consecrations of the Church are immovable so long as the consecrated thing remains: as appears even in inanimate things, since an altar, once consecrated, is not consecrated again unless it has been broken up. Consequently such a power as this remains, as to its essence, in the man who has received it by consecration, as long as he lives, even if he fall into schism or heresy: and this is proved ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... had passed that way twice a day for years on end—always in consciousness of that aloof spirit informing the inanimate, and in such resentment thereof as properly rewarded a studied insolence—never before to-day had Sarah Manvers found the genius of the neighbourhood so unmitigatedly intolerable. It was with downright relief that presently she turned ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... had delayed her; she was driven desperate by that and malice of inanimate thing: every 'bus and tram was against her, whisking out of sight just as she wanted them, or blocked by slow crawling carts and lorries. There was a tight, hard pain in her heart, like toothache, round which her whole ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various

... on returning there after the wedding she worships this. Women are often tattooed with representations of their totem animal, and men swear by it as their most sacred oath. A similar respect is paid to the inanimate objects after which certain septs are named. Thus members of the Gawad or cowdung sept will not burn cowdung cakes for fuel; and those of the Mircha sept do not use chillies. One sept is named after the sun, and when an eclipse occurs these perform the same formal ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The Midsummer Holiday group has two pictures of sweet homeliness—'The Mill ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... were poets or fabulists, and could invest inanimate objects with all the qualities and feelings of animate ones; if, with all the magic of old AEsop, we could make pots and kettles talk, and endue barn-door fowls with the spirit of philosophy, we should be tempted to say that the great gates of Beaufort House, together with the stone Cupids on the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... however, have a variety corresponding to that of the subjects on which they are occupied. A sagacity applied to external and inanimate nature, forms one species of capacity; that which is turned to society and human affairs, another. Reputation for parts in any scene is equivocal, till we know by what kind of exertion that reputation is gained. No more can be said, in commending men of the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... the storm, both of animate and inanimate nature, began to abate, and the weary overworked soldiers were dropping off to sleep when a tremendous ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne

... it from its nail, and, raising it over his head, smashed frame and glass, cursing all saints, all priests, and churchly people. Havoc followed him as he raged about the place wreaking his fury upon inanimate objects. When he had well-nigh wrecked the contents of the room, and when his first paroxysm had spent its violence, he hurled himself into a chair, writhing in agony. He bit his wrists, he pounded his fists, he kicked; finally he sprawled full length upon the floor, clawing ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach

... itself with my very childhood, fifty years back. The fancy of those who wrote the songs which I was obliged to hear in infancy was a very inanimate and sleepy fancy. I could enumerate a dozen songs at least which all described sleeping shepherds and shepherdesses, and, in one instance, where they both went to sleep: this is not fair certainly; it is not ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield

... it; it tires. A man who plays with it must be on his guard every second. To spend a lifetime on it is ridiculous—a whole life of intelligent effort, against perpetual, brutal, inanimate resistance—one endless uninterrupted fight—a ceaseless human manoeuvre against senseless menace; and then the counter attack of the lifeless monster, the bellowing advance, the shock—and no battle won—nothing final, nothing settled, no! ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... indomitable eyes, it is hard, at least for a young thing of nineteen, all aflush and aflurry with her new party gown, to realize that that old mother is infinitely more romantic than herself. She has sat there so long, perhaps, as to have come to seem part of the inanimate furniture of home rather than a living being. Well! the young thing goes to her party, and dances with some callow youth who pays her clumsy compliments, and Margaret remains at home with the old mother in ...
— Different Girls • Various

... for the slightest interference with them to have escaped me. What could that sound have been—some accidental shiver of the glass, stirred by a breath of wind, one of those mysterious movements of inanimate objects which are so apt to occur in the dead hours of the night, and which seem always more or less ghostly to a nervous watcher? Could it have been only accidental? or had Mrs. Darrell been prowling stealthily in and ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon

... them as principles of art. You wonder if art itself may not be merely a matter of right placing - the adjustment of a thing to its environment. You are certain that this is so as each coign and niche offers you its particular insight. Strange vagaries float through your mind - one's duty to the inanimate things of one's possession; the house too large for the personality of the owner; the right setting for certain idiosyncrasies; character building as a constructive process; the ideal as the limit of an infinite series - each pointing the way, as you think, to ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams

... by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... and he is once more surrounded by dew-gemmed hedges and silent slumbering trees. Broad meadows, or pasture land, with drowsy cattle, or low bleating sheep, lie on either side. But what to Turpin, at that moment, is nature, animate or inanimate? He thinks only of his mare—his future fame. None are by to see him ride; no stimulating plaudits ring in his ears; no thousand hands are clapping; no thousand voices huzzaing; no handkerchiefs are waved; no necks strained; ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth

... mood he thought that the entire island, together with all things inanimate, had joined in this mortal protest. When he passed houses they seemed to become depopulated, their inhabitants concealing themselves in order not to greet him; the dogs rushed into the road, barking furiously, as if they ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... but only a marriage from a natural origin; therefore there is no union of minds, but only a union of bodies from a lascivious disposition in the flesh; and this lust is from a universal law impressed upon and thus implanted in everything animate and inanimate from creation. The law is that everything in which there is force wills to produce its like and to multiply its kind to infinity and to eternity. As the posterity of Jacob, who were called the sons of Israel, were merely natural men, and thus their marriages were not spiritual but carnal, ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg

... body was wet, and seemed as if it had just been plunged into the water. She appeared to be severely wounded in the face; and her garments, which were raised up, in spite of the cold and rainy weather, left the upper part of her knees almost entirely exposed. At the sight of this half-naked and inanimate body, all the spectators were affected. People said that the first duty to pay to a dying woman was, to preserve her from the cold, to cover her. A physician examined the body; he declared that all remedies were useless; that Madame Peytel was ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Chicadees and the little speckled Woodpeckers, that tarry with us in midwinter, and make the still cold days lively and cheerful by their merry voices, are, in animated nature, what flowers would be in inanimate nature, if they were found blooming under the snow. Nature does not permit, at any season, an entire dearth of those sources of enjoyment that spring from observation of the external world; and as there are evergreen mosses and ferns that supply in winter the places ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... those which had passed him by. He was a boy—a fine-looking, skillfully modeled youth—as beautiful a thing, doubtless, as God ever created in His sense of form; better than his sisters, better than the four-foots, or the fishes, or the birds, and he meant so much more than the inanimate things, in so far as we can see. He had the body given to him and he wanted to keep it, but there were the mysterious demons of the darkness, the wind and the flames; there were the monsters from the shadows, and from under the waters; there were the machinations of his enemies, ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington

... lines and lights on her hands, and on the checkered table-cloth. There were two rough benches, and a square table; the coffeecups stood on a metal tray; the lid of the pot was odd, did not match the set: all these inanimate things, which, a moment ago, Maurice had seen without seeing them, now stood out before his eyes, as if each of them had acquired an independent life, and no longer ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... remainder of the canyon, considering all the circumstances, was for us impracticable and unnecessary, we prepared to leave for Kanab. We unpacked the good old boats rather reluctantly. They had come to possess a personality as such inanimate objects will, having been our faithful companions and our reliance for many a hundred difficult miles, and it seemed like desertion to abandon them so carelessly to destruction. We ought to have had a funeral pyre. The flags of the boats, which Mrs. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... cannot for a moment be doubted. Recent discoveries are every day revealing more and more that her strange magnetic influence has a power almost beyond belief in its effect upon the growth of vegetables, and even inanimate things. ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro

... matter. Air is invisible, and practically imperceptible to our senses—when stationary. But set into motion, a current of air will close a door with a bang—will have the effect of definitely moving a heavy mass of inanimate matter, in the manner indicated. It may be that in somewhat the same way mind affects brain. Mind may reside in a sort of etheric vehicle, and be more or less stable or stationary, save at the times when volition or intense, active conscious ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... some extraordinary or subtle appearance. The gods may in visions or dreams be met with in their own proper embodiments; or, as is more common, they may be regarded as present for practical purposes: in some inanimate object, as in the case of the fetish; in some animal species, as in the case of the totem; in some place, as in the case of the shrine; or even in some human being, as in the case of the inspired prophet and miracle worker. In more refined and highly ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature—that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno

... for example, of pain—in this sense our life is commensurate, or nearly commensurate, to the entire period, from the quickening of the child in the womb, to the minute at which sense deserts the dying man, and his body becomes an inanimate mass. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... from Axelson's throat as he raised his head and tried to speak, but the death-rattle was already in his throat. A slight struggle, and the massive form upon the couch was nothing but inanimate clay. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various

... of doom, the poor fellow turned ashen pale. He sprang to his feet, but the chair bound to his legs tripped him up and he fell sprawling on the floor. He apparently regarded the chair as some sort of German infernal machine clutching him, and he lay there wrestling with his inanimate antagonist as though it were a demon. As soon as the victim understood the joke he joined in the burst of merriment that ran round the room; but it was of short duration. The gloom got us again, despite all that de Burgher could do, and finally he succumbed to the prevailing atmosphere ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams

... discriminate between living things and, let us say, the rocks of the earth. The most primitive intelligence, then, must have made a tacit classification of the natural objects about it into the grand divisions of animate and inanimate nature. Doubtless the nascent scientist may have imagined life animating many bodies that we should call inanimate—such as the sun, wandering planets, the winds, and lightning; and, on the other hand, he may quite likely have relegated such objects as trees to the ranks ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... is true about the Central Power of the Universe, this is true: it is power. And it pours forth in Radiant Energy. All "inanimate nature," so called, expresses this Power, each form after its kind; and all animate nature, crowned with consciousness, not only expresses it, but feels ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... organized efforts of the young imagination, of which boys and girls of unusual inventiveness are capable, are imitated on a smaller scale by all normal children. They endow inanimate things with life, and play and suffer with them as with their real playmates. The little girl not only talks with her dolls, but weeps with and for them when disaster overtakes them. The boy faces foes of his own making in the woods, or at lonely places in the road, who are ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... of inanimate matter where you expect warmth is startling enough; but a colder temperature than that of the body being rather the rule than the exception in common substances, it hardly conveys such a shock to the system as finding warmth where utter ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... scorching desert as the scene of their amusements. Some were rolling on the ground amid a cloud of dust; others, with a hoarse rumbling bellow, were butting their large heads together, while many stood motionless, as if quite inanimate. Except their monstrous growth of tangled grizzly mane, they had no hair; for their old coat had fallen off in the spring, and their new one had not as yet appeared. Sometimes an old bull would step forward, and gaze at me with a grim and stupid countenance; then he would turn and butt his next neighbor; ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... characters and all dispositions? would subvert rather than promote the true purpose of the Divine counsels; which is, not to produce obedience by a force little short of mechanical constraint, (which obedience would be regularity, not virtue, and would hardly perhaps differ from that which inanimate bodies pay to the laws impressed upon their nature), but to treat moral agents agreeably to what they are; which is done, when light and motives are of such kinds, and are imparted in such measures, that the influence of them depends upon the recipients themselves? "It is not meet to ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... describe them so perfectly. Miss Mary also told her the names of the birds whose notes they heard as they walked about the grounds, and May in return described with a minuteness which surprised her blind friend a number of objects both animate and inanimate which she thought would interest her, while she asked a variety of questions which, though exhibiting her ignorance, showed a large amount of intelligence and desire to obtain information. The child was evidently natural and thoroughly unaffected, without either ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston

... did he not from the beginning entertain a suspicion that the open-hearted and straight-forward Neoptolemus will not be able to maintain to the end the character which, so much against his will, he has assumed. Not without reason after this deception does Philoctetes turn away from mankind to those inanimate companions to which the instinctive craving for society had attached him. He calls on the island and its volcanoes to witness this fresh wrong; he believes that his beloved bow feels pain in being taken from him; and at length he takes a melancholy leave ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... beginning, must culminate in a state of things in which the means of expense will exceed the demand for expense, in which the human race will have some surplus capital. The incessant manual labour which the ancients relegated to slaves will in course of time be more and more largely performed by inanimate machinery. Unskilled labour will for the most part disappear. Skilled labour will consist in the guiding of implements contrived with versatile cunning for the relief of human nerve and muscle. Ultimately there ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... subtle ether which filled up the space between the sun and the earth, and by its intermediate agency was the proximate cause of the phenomena of gravitation. "It is inconceivable," said Newton, in one of his letters to Dr. Bentley,(235) "that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact.... That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act on another, at ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... have a movement from east to west. Now the created rational nature alone is immediately subordinate to God, since other creatures do not attain to the universal, but only to something particular, while they partake of the Divine goodness either in being only, as inanimate things, or also in living, and in knowing singulars, as plants and animals; whereas the rational nature, in as much as it apprehends the universal notion of good and being, is immediately related to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... nature with his own mercurial temperament. The Spaniard, or perhaps the old Mexican, seemed to predominate in Fernando, as far as could be guessed in one so weak and helpless. He seemed very quiet and inanimate, seldom wanting or seeking diversion, but content to lie still, with half-closed eyes; his manner was reserved, and with something of courteous dignity, especially when Lady Price came to visit him; and the Yankeeisms that sometimes dropped ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... were now of little moment in my regard," he says, in "The Custom-House." "I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.... A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me." ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop

... believe in ghosts, became aware as he sat now by the fire that the old house was feeling for him to make him creep, feeling for him with its old disjointed fingers and all the artfulness of inanimate things. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilization to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the souls of his people; Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the world. But you can get the same language to cover both. And so you have the partnership of St Francis and Messalina. Dick, did you ever hear of a thing called ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan

... and would not be filled with that grudging hostility which our cramped and narrow existence forces upon average human nature. A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... poetry to be inspiration of the love of virtue. He followed Winckelmann in believing that the expression of physical beauty was the supreme object of painting. This beauty exists only as an ideal, which finds its highest expression in man. Animals possess it to a slighter extent, vegetable and inanimate nature not at all. Those mistaken enough to occupy themselves with depicting the latter are imitating beauties deprived of all ideal. They work only with eye and hand; genius has little if any share in their productions. Lessing ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce

... men, however, have a variety corresponding to that of the subjects on which they are occupied. A sagacity applied to external and inanimate nature, forms one species of capacity; that which is turned to society and human affairs, another. Reputation for parts in any scene is equivocal, till we know by what kind of exertion that reputation is gained. No more ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.

... MILITAIRE," [OEuvres de Frederic, vii. 73-90, 91-109.]—altogether pleasant reading, should there still be curiosity upon it. There is something of flowingly eloquent in Friedrich's account of this Battle waged against the inanimate Chaos; something of exultant and triumphant, not noticeable of him in regard to his other Victories. On the Leuthens, Rossbachs, he is always cold as water, and nobody could gather that he had the least pleasure in recording them. Not so here. And indeed here he is as beautiful as anywhere; and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... the perversity of the inanimate can lead I saw in a criminal case in which a big isolated hay-stack was set on fire. A traveler was going across the country and sought shelter against oncoming bad weather. The very last minute before a heavy shower he ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden

... lick or attempt to taste it, possibly, as Compayre suggests,[198] from a memory of the action of the lips protruded to seize the maternal nipple. The affectionate child, as Mantegazza remarks,[199] not only applies inanimate objects to its lips or tongue, but of its own impulse licks the people it likes. Stanley Hall, in the light of a large amount of information he obtained on this point, found that "some children insist on licking the cheeks, necks, and hands of those they wish to caress," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud— Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... the licentious libertine, was an event that cried for blood; and blood he had, for he murdered the seducer, and that with an insatiable rapacity of revenge that was terrible. He literally battered the head of his victim out of all shape, and left him a dead and worthless mass of inanimate matter. The crime, though desperate, was openly committed, and there were sufficient witnesses at his trial to make it a short one. On that morning, neither arrest, nor friar, nor chaplain, nor jailer, nor sheriff could wring from him one single expression of regret or repentance for ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... Patagonia and Panama in one sweeping glance along a sand hill. Cape Cod was as full of romance of remote regions as was Concord. He, too, notes the mirage. "Objects on the beach," he says, "whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually are. Later, when approaching the seashore several degrees south of this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what appeared like bold and ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... over thee? The Mighty and Just One has already judged thee, and perhaps above thou hast received pardon for thy crimes, which could not be pardoned here below; and now that thy feverish existence has closed, and thy once active form become inanimate dust, thy very memory all but forgotten, I will say a few words about thee, a few words soon also to be forgotten. Thou wast the most extraordinary robber that ever lived within the belt of Britain; Scotland rang with thy exploits, and England, too, north of the Humber; strange deeds also didst ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... highly organized efforts of the young imagination, of which boys and girls of unusual inventiveness are capable, are imitated on a smaller scale by all normal children. They endow inanimate things with life, and play and suffer with them as with their real playmates. The little girl not only talks with her dolls, but weeps with and for them when disaster overtakes them. The boy faces foes of his own making in the woods, or at lonely places in the road, who are quite ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various

... the trees the outline of the old bungalow was faintly visible, and thither their earnest contemplation was directed. For both of them it was something more than a ruin, something more than a relic out of the tragic past. It had become, above all for the Colonel, a part of their lives, a piece of inanimate destiny to which they felt themselves tied by all the bonds of possession. It was theirs, and they in turn were possessed by the influence it exercised over their lives. Their dear ones had died within its walls, and some intuition, feeling blindly through the ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... smack neared the shore on her voyage home, Hepburn looked wistfully out for the faint gray outline of Monkshaven Priory against the sky, and the well-known cliffs; as if the masses of inanimate stone could tell him ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... did it, and pa said it was gambling, and we ought not to do it, but he also wanted to know how we managed to win, and when we told pa about it pa said it was no sin to beat a slot machine, 'cause it was an inanimate thing, just a machine, and anybody who could beat a nickel in the slot machine at his own game ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck

... assassination of the hapless Empress, the beautiful villa was bought by the German Emperor. He at once ordered Heine's statue to be removed—whither no one knows. Royal (as well as popular) spite has before this been vented on dead or inanimate things—one need only ask Englishmen to remember what happened to the body of Oliver Cromwell. The Kaiser's action, by the way, did not pass unchallenged. Not only in Germany but in several other countries indignant voices were raised at the time, protesting ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine

... negative merit or demerit, whether it be a thing without a will or an unwilling human being. If we are not free, have no choice in the matter, must consent, we differ in nothing from all brutish and inanimate nature that follows necessarily, fatally, the bent of its instinctive inclinations and obeys the laws of its being. Under these conditions, there can be no morality or responsibility before God; our deeds are alike blameless and valueless in ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton

... sexual object is generally a part of the body but little adapted for sexual purposes, such as the foot, or hair, or an inanimate object which is in demonstrable relation with the sexual person, and preferably with the sexuality of the same (fragments of clothing, white underwear). This substitution is not unjustly compared with the fetich in which the savage sees the embodiment ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud

... been read in this way, if thought advisable it can be played informally and simply, with no attempt at costuming or theatric effects. It will often add to the interest of the play to have some of the children represent certain of the inanimate objects of the scene, as the forest, the town gate, a door, etc. Occasionally, for the "open day," or as a special exercise, a favorite play may be given by the children with the simplest kind of costuming and stage-setting. These can well ...
— Children's Classics in Dramatic Form - Book Two • Augusta Stevenson

... of Balliol and of Trinity, past the Ashmolean. From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... shivering branches made converse in the music of the wild, Jenny and I being the only seat-holders in that grand opera. Soon another caravan of belated folks drove up; but it was only a load of hay that had been over-tipped. Others came, but they were only bushes or some inanimate object. There was little life out on ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan

... Disease. The far-reaching effect which light has upon some inanimate objects, such as photographic films and clothes, leads us to inquire into the relation which exists between light and living things. We know from daily observation that plants must have light in ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark

... Doctor, "why, all things, whether in heaven, or upon the earth, or in the waters under the earth, whether small or great, visible or invisible, animate or inanimate; whether the eye can see, or the ear can hear, or the nose can smell, or the fingers touch; finally, whatever exists or is imaginable in the nature of things, past, present, or to come, all ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... includes our social circle, our parents, children, and friends, and contains the living and the dead; the past and the present generations of our race. By a very natural process, the scene of our affections soon becomes identified with them, and a portion of our regard is transferred from animate to inanimate objects. The streams on which we sported, the mountains on which we clambered, the fields in which we wandered, the school where we were instructed, the church where we worshipped, the very bell whose pensive melancholy music recalled ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... the hall at her back there came a whispering sound as the breeze moved like a ghostly footstep through an alcove window. With that strange power of reflecting the variable moods of humanity which one sometimes finds in inanimate objects, the face of the old house had borrowed from the face of its mistress the look of cheerful fortitude with which her generation had survived the agony of defeat and the humiliation of reconstruction. After nineteen years, the Academy still bore the scars of war ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... principle, the liberty of the blacks, but, in fact, slavery still existed. Two hundred thousand slaves served as human cattle to some thousands of colonists. They were bought and sold, and cut and maimed, as if they were inanimate objects. They were kept by speculation out of the civil law, and out of the religious law. Property, family, marriage, all was forbidden to them. Care was taken to degrade them below men, to preserve the right of treating them as brutes. If some unions furtive, or ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... stalk and leaf, stone and vine—yes, and that which surprised me at the beginning—that gleam of red in the wash of water upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of beauty in a ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... he managed to keep his eyes on the dim outlines of the object as he stealthily approached And he stepped as noiselessly as possible, notwithstanding he meditated an encounter with nothing more than an inanimate object. But his imagination was always on the alert, and as he often feared dangers that arose undefinable and indescribable in his mind, it was not without some trepidation that he had separated himself from the horses and groped his way toward the ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones

... the wildest terror and in helpless agony, while Philibert rushed without hesitation into the water, swam out to the spot, and dived with the agility of a beaver. He presently reappeared, bearing the inanimate body of her brother to the shore. Help was soon obtained, and, after long efforts to restore Le Gardeur to consciousness,—efforts which seemed to last an age to the despairing girl,—they at last succeeded, and Le Gardeur was restored to the arms of his family. Amelie, in a delirium ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... exceedingly cold weather. The billet of wood that shall blaze merrily, on a mild day, moulders and simmers, and seems indisposed to give out any heat at all, with the thermometer at zero. In a word, all inanimate substances that contain the elements of caloric appear to sympathize with the prevailing state of the atmosphere, and to contribute to render that which is already too cold for comfort, even colder. So it was now; notwithstanding ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper

... directed them all one by one to put an end to the life of their mother. They, however, were quite confounded and lost heart. And they could not utter a single word. Then he in ire cursed them. And on being cursed they lost their sense and suddenly became like inanimate objects, and comparable in conduct to beasts and birds. And then Rama, the slayer of hostile heroes, came to the hermitage, last of all. Him the mighty-armed Jamadagni, of great austerities, addressed, saying, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... steady without twinkling. The hardy, therefore, fix their look that they may see the longer; but the timorous see only glances—their eyes always twinkle at the first sight of the object. That which generally is seen by them are the species of living creatures, and of inanimate things, which be in motion, such as ships, and habits upon persons. They never see the species of any person who is already dead. What they foresee fails not to exist in the mode, and in that place where it ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous

... invectives? If Krishna in his infancy slew a vulture, what is there remarkable in that, or in that other feat of his, O Bhishma, viz., in his slaughter of Aswa and Vrishava, both of whom were unskilled in battle? If this one threw drown by a kick an inanimate piece of wood, viz., a car, what is there, O Bhishma, wonderful in that? O Bhishma, what is there remarkable in this one's having supported for a week the Govardhan mount which is like an anthill? "While sporting on the top of a mountain this one ate a large ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... river and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is in too much of a hurry to ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... make Thine utterance odorous. That from thy soul, As from an unseen presence of divinest light, Dartest into the spirit subtle rays That quicken life to blessing, as the breath Of being stirreth the inanimate, Making existence joy, and love, and power. O woods! and rustling forests! Ye that send Soft murmurs ever to the ends of heaven, And from your breast, as from a poet's soul, Issue all sweetest melodies of birds And leafy eloquence. ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... Park, intent on leaving a world that had become intolerable. Packed in all around her in the inadequate dressing-room, the other girls were chattering, squealing, scrambling into their clothes, as unaware of her tense motionless figure, as if it had been a mere inanimate lump. She couldn't have been more alone if she had been sitting out on the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... Cydnus swell'd above the banks, or for/The press of boats, or pride] [This is an agreeable ridicule on poetical exaggeration, which gives human passions to inanimate things: and particularly, upon what he himself writes in the foregoing play on ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson

... furious struggles, was effected in less space than we have taken to describe it. Then, leaving him in the hands of two of their number, who proceeded to bind him securely, the others rushed after Nathan, who, though encumbered by his burden, again inanimate, her arms clasped around his neck, as they had been round that of her kinsman, made the most desperate exertions to bear her off, seeming to regard her weight no more than if the burden had been a cushion of thistle-down. He ran for a moment with astonishing activity, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... such a sacrilege; for that only God, of whom you speak, is doubtless He who is acknowledged by the whole world, and concerning whom, as some of the ancients have said, the ignorant agree with the learned. Now, will you say that Mars, whose strength is represented by an inanimate man, is a portion of that God? That is to say, the dead statue controls Mars, and Mars is a subordinate god representing the infinite God, and is, therefore, a part of that God. Augustin adds, Not the Pantheon and all the ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... the three bodies [described above], which are impermanent, inanimate (jada), essentially painful and subject to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... superstitions of the Santee Sioux to treat disease from the standpoint of some animal or inanimate thing. That person who, according to their belief, had been commissioned to become a medicine man or a war chief, must not disobey the bear or other creature or thing which gave him his commission. If he ever ventured to do so, the offender must pay for his insubordination with his ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... "good house-keeper," as they say in New England. And in the second place, he knew the value to the aesthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of an orderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takes on the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when you return at night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you left me; I ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton

... is enchantment!" he said. But no,—it was one of those miracles that have not yet become commonplace. The poetic life that his perceptions were now able to enjoy, in inanimate nature, would be such a perpetual gratification to his taste,—such an incentive to explorations and discoveries! He could not felicitate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... true Catholic faith St Anthony won upon the fishes. Orpheus and Amphion went a little farther, and by the charms of music enchanted things merely inanimate. Wonderful, both! but neither history nor fable have ever yet ventured to record an instance of any one, who, by force of argument and reason, hath ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding

... each eye, and if any motion still persists, he breathes gin and peppermint over the face, till all sign of life is extinct. Then he talks the game over in detail with the barber at the next chair, each leaning across an inanimate thing extended under steaming towels that was once ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock

... veil. On a nearer view it seemed to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his features except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things. With this gloomy shade before him good Mr. Hooper walked onward at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat and looking on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue its laborious course around its axis, one half of its inhabitants ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

... laid the very same blow on a strong man, to whom it was a slight infliction? Clearly this would evade, not satisfy justice. To carry out the principle, the blow might be laid as well on a giant, an elephant, or on an inanimate thing. So, to lay our punishment on the infinite strength of Christ, who (they say) bore in six hours what it would have taken thousands of millions of men all eternity to bear, would be a similar evasion.—I farther asked, if we were to fall in with Pagans, who tortured ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... sublimity, forming, both to sight and in idea, orderly variety, the waving line, neither straight nor crooked. The waving line is the symbol, or memento, as I may say, of grace, wherever it is seen in whatever form, animate or inanimate; and may be justly styled the ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds

... forward. Great was his amazement to recognize, in this dark object, the negro, Cato! He lay upon his face, as lax and motionless as a piece of inanimate matter. ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis

... very soul of the bridegroom which goes forth to the bride: inanimate things are longing with him: all the sweetness of the imaginative loves [221] of the Middle Age, with a superadded spirituality of touch all its ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... when he deals with nature, is generally even more marvellous than the richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal passions or animal enjoyment, but human discursive intellect and moral sense, to inanimate objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more of a man than the poet is—as indeed they very often ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... new, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are mainly passed. We are supposed to have associations with the old things which render them precious, but do not the associations rather render them painful? If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it is of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives! Take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to the reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of years? Such a meeting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... into two classes, which do not correspond either with the Aryan genders or with the distinctions of animate and inanimate which prevail in the Algonkin tongues. These classes have been styled noble and common. To the noble belong male human beings and deities. The other class comprises women and all other objects. It seems probable, however, ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... guests had arrived. His mother presented him, using proudly her formula for such meetings, "Our son." Somehow it always made him feel like an inanimate object of virtue—as if she had said "our Rembrandt," ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland

... sphere for art as much nobler than that of sculptor or painter as the destinies of human life and society are higher than those of any inanimate object, even though carved by Phidias or painted by Raphael. It is, above all, an art that should touch by its inspiration the gallantry of the whole student class. The very breath of it is the shaping ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks

... stretched on the rock, inanimate, and no longer conscious of what passed around them. Ayrton alone, by a supreme effort, from time to time raised his head, and cast a despairing ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)

... conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's picture. There is more of imagination in it—that power which draws all things to one,—which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects, and their accessories, take one color and serve to one effect. Everything in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. Every part is full of "strange images of death." It is perfectly ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... any other place would do as well. But in the organic world we strike another order—an order where the relation and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak of human existence as a "matter of chance" in the sense, let us say, that the forms and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs

... the room which had been the scene of so many singular happenings. The detective and I seated ourselves, but the Scotsman, holding the Chinaman by the neck as though he had been some inanimate bundle, stood just within the doorway, one of the most gigantic specimens of manhood I had ever ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer

... poet, though they have not the same power of expression. The sparrow upon the wire, the cat in the doorway, the dray horse tugging his weary load, feel the long, keen breaths of winter. It strikes to the heart of all life, animate and inanimate. If it were not for the artificial fires of merriment, the rush of profit-seeking trade, and pleasure-selling amusements; if the various merchants failed to make the customary display within and without their establishments; if our streets were not ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... gifted beings who possess the secret of bringing order out of chaos; for them the total depravity of inanimate objects has no terrors; inanimate objects become docile to their will. Such a one was Mary Magdalen. In two days she had transformed a sooty cavern into a clean and orderly kitchen. For she was a singing and a scourful woman, and her Sign was the ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... interference with the subject of the drama: being deemed so indispensable a part of the performance, that the scene itself was hardly more so: consequently, there was no secret supposed to be more violated by speaking before them, than before the inanimate scene itself. But what was at least excusable, on this footing, in the antients, would be an unpardonable ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini

... feel better, she went to Bessie, who pale and inanimate, seemed to be gently fading away, and only now and then raised her little finger to play ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... (Weber, i. 283.) he now, with axes and torches is advancing on the very sanctuary of Justice. Sacrilegious; yet what help? The man is a soldier; looks merely at his orders; impassive, moves forward like an inanimate engine. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... smile And rest profound of lonely sun-lit plains, Nor cheerful morning song of birds in spring, Nor moonlight soft, that rests on hills and fields, Beneath the limpid sky, will move my heart; When every beauty, both of Nature, and Of Art, to me will be inanimate And mute; each tender feeling, lofty thought, Unknown and strange; my only comfort, then, Poor beggar, must I find in studies more Severe; to them, thenceforward, must devote The wretched remnant of unhappy life: The bitter truth must I investigate, The destinies mysterious, alike Of mortal and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi

... in dreams, swoons, death, may return or be brought back, and the body revive. Spirits which do not return or are not brought back may cause mischief, either alone, or by entry into another human or animal body or even an inanimate object, and should therefore be propitiated. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner

... propriety, dispense with the blood, and its symbol the wine, or with the Spirit, as with the water, if God has appointed it with the other two as a witness between him and us. You notice that the Spirit is named with the two inanimate things, the blood and the water. Take care, I say to my friends, lest, in setting aside the water, you shut out that divine Spirit, who, knowing how to deal with our nature, chooses the blood and the water to be used by us in connection with our most spiritual religious exercises ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams

... believe that man has a sympathy with even inanimate Nature, deduced from a common origin; a chain of co-existence and affinity connecting the outward forms of natural objects with his own fearful and wonderful machinery; something, in short, manifested in his love of flowing waters, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... admitted that these seemingly animistic doctrines may have originated in another way, and be due to later developments. The power of the gods to create living things naturally makes possible the belief that they had also power to endow with a soul, and therefore with life and intelligence, any seemingly inanimate object. Such was probably the nature of Babylonian animism, if it may be so called. The legend of Tiawthu (Tiawath) may with great probability be regarded as the remains of a primitive animism which was the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches

... all—he is grandfather of all living things. I think, however that the stone is merely the symbol of the everlasting, all pervading, invisible Ta-ku Wa-kan—the essence of all life,—pervading all nature, animate and inanimate. The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Tahkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon

... I don't think they have any such intention on this particular afternoon. Here he is, at last. The white trousers, blue coat, and yellow waistcoat—and more especially that cock of the hat—indicate, as surely as inanimate objects can, that Chalk Farm and not the parish church, is their destination. The girl colours up, and puts out her hand with a very awkward affectation of indifference. He gives it a gallant squeeze, and ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... mostly inanimate figures is not the only surprise given us by the personages of Count Fathom. It is a surprise to find few of them strikingly whimsical; it is a surprise to find them in some cases far more distinctly conceived than any of the people in Roderick ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... lengthened as I sped along, the tired yellow sun slipped down behind the hills like a penny-into-the-slot machine, and the early April twilight touched all inanimate objects with its own drab lack of coloring. I had no fear of losing my way in the darkness—I had too much locality sense for that—but the possibilities of my being ambushed appeared too many to be pleasant. A hurrying man, who is also heavily-laden, cannot pick his footsteps with the meticulous ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... and still it seemed that the remarkable figure was standing there fingering the books, pondering, deciding. Her emotions thrilled through her, uplifted her, and she had a sensation of being deliciously intimate with all things animate and inanimate. She touched the desk by her side, and it seemed to her that life tingled through her fingers into the wood. She smiled at the old man, and his eyes twitched, and he gave her a little happy sidelong nod. She wanted to tell him that the world was a very wonderful place, ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan

... community with inorganic aggregates. Some of these, as crystals, grow in a visible manner; and all of them on the hypothesis of evolution, have arisen by integration at some time or other. Nevertheless, compared with things we call inanimate, living bodies and societies so conspicuously exhibit augmentation of mass, that we may fairly regard this as characterizing them both. Many organisms grow throughout their lives; and the rest grow throughout considerable parts of their lives. Social growth usually continues ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... hands I eagerly scanned the horizon in the direction indicated, and there, to my astonishment, saw a long thin black line. At first I could not distinguish whether it was a file of men or some inanimate object, but the keen eyes of the savages before and behind me soon detected its presence, and dozens of voices were in accord that it was a line of armed men, and that they ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... If you did smash the piano, it wouldn't make me any less a musician. And"—lightly—"I really can't have you being jealous of an inanimate ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... incredible to most men, but, by Gad, I swear to you, it lifted me off my feet, and I've never known anything like it. The mind of that great fellow got hold of me, included me. He made the inanimate world—sea, stars, wind, woods, and mountains—seem all alive. The entire blessed universe was conscious—and he came straight out of it to get me. I understood things about myself I've never understood before—and ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... my Lord, to suggest on this branch of my subject, that it requires the utmost delicacy to personify inanimate objects so justly, as to render them adapted in every circumstance to the occasion on which they are introduced. Your Lordship however will permit me to observe, that as the happiest effect is produced upon the ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable nekapabla. Incapacity nekapableco. Incarnate korpigi. Incarnation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... difficulty, it seems, about laws—natural laws: we are not to suppose that they will ever he violated. But there is another law above all these; all at least of the inanimate world, i.e., that the forces of brute matter are subject to the will, or whatever is analogous to will, in any living creatures. The law of gravitation is one of the most universally operative; but every bird rising upon its wings, every dog in its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... rude in his efforts to break away. At last he flung her off, and she fell, her forehead striking on the sharp corner of a stone, which started the blood trickling down her fair white brow. The woman swooned. Sight of blood touched the heart of George Waters, and, stooping, he raised the inanimate form in his arms, as tenderly as if she had been an infant, and bore her to a public house ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick

... good Christians, oblige ye To believe man and beast have spoken in effigy, Why should we not credit the public discourses, In a dialogue between two inanimate horses? The horses I mean of Wool-Church and Charing, Who told many truths worth any man's hearing, Since Viner and Osborn did buy and provide 'em For the two mighty monarchs who now do bestride 'em. The stately brass stallion, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... water. There were at hand plenty of those strong, specially prepared soaps and other disinfectants constantly used by the women of their kind who still cling to cleanliness and health. With these they attacked him, not as if he were a human being, but as if he were some inanimate object that must be scoured before it ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... nevertheless have been brought into use more to express some remotion from God, rather than to express anything that exists positively in Him. Hence they assert that when we say that God lives, we mean that God is not like an inanimate thing; and the same in like manner applies to other names; and this was taught by Rabbi Moses. Others say that these names applied to God signify His relationship towards creatures: thus in the words, "God is good," we mean, God is the cause of goodness in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas

... firmly persuaded that various particular persons are what they term betuah (sacred, impassive, invulnerable, not liable to accident), and this quality they sometimes extend to things inanimate, as ships and boats. Such an opinion, which we should suppose every man might have an opportunity of bringing to the test of truth, affords a humiliating proof of the weakness and credulity of human nature, and the fallibility ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... what I have called the protoplasm of primitive religion, and one closely allied both to magic and fetishism. For our present purposes we may define it as a mysterious influence believed to exist in objects both animate and inanimate, which makes them dangerous, infectious, unclean, or holy, which two last qualities are often almost identical in primitive thought, as Robertson Smith originally taught us.[25] What exactly the savage or semi-civilised ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... throat; he is upon the point of retracing his steps, when his eye rests upon the features of his father. The daring boldness of the expression, which the artist had but too well portrayed, fires him with fresh courage; every nerve thrills with new life, and kissing the inanimate canvas, as if it were indeed his dear mother and sister, he tore himself away from home. Walking rapidly down the deserted street, without venturing a look back, he passes many an endeared object; the old white church, ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale

... accorded with the simplicity of the earliest ages, and the manners of the first men. The rules of Pythagoras were followed there. Like the Egyptians, who held wool unclean, they buried no Initiate in woolen garments. They abstained from bloody sacrifices; and lived on fruits or vegetables or inanimate things. They imitated the life of the contemplative Sects of the Orient; thus approximating to the tranquility of the first men, who lived exempt from trouble and crimes in the bosom of a profound peace. One of the most precious advantages ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... seconds I had the seemingly inanimate maiden safely deposited in the inside of the barouche and myself sitting by her side. The driver cracked his whip, and whilst I, happy but exhausted, was mopping my streaming forehead the chaise rattled gaily ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... the tidings to shepherds in the plains of Bethlehem; "and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying—Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." [15:3] Inanimate nature called attention to the advent of the illustrious babe, for a wonderful star made known to wise men from the east the incarnation of the King of Israel; and when they came to Jerusalem "the star, which ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... mind. The clouds slowly crept over one another, sometimes melting in one, sometimes dispersing each other; they mingled their forms and colors, dissolving or reappearing with new contours, majestic and mournful. This slow moving of inanimate masses had something fatal about it. It seemed as though yonder at the confines of the sea, there was an innumerable quantity of them always crawling indifferently over the sky, with the wicked and stupid intention of never allowing it to illumine the sleeping sea with ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky

... so covered with snow that it resembled a hummock, which ordinarily would have been passed without notice. The horses and the inanimate form within were like blocks of wood. The slight figure was lifted tenderly from its resting place and brought to ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... "He fell inanimate in the gallery. It was the same with Grossetti. Andreoli alone remained conscious. After long efforts, he ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... one highest, ultimate principle of all existence,—the Tae-keih, or Grand Extreme. This is absolutely immaterial, and the basis of the order of the universe. From this ultimate principle, operating from all eternity, come all animate and inanimate nature. It operates in a twofold way, by expansion and contraction, or by ceaseless active and passive pulsations. The active expansive pulsation is called Yang, the passive intensive pulsation is Yin, and the two may be called the Positive and Negative ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... minutes later he stood beside Harry Squires in the cellar below the kitchen. There was a smell of gunpowder on the close, still air. They looked down upon the black, inanimate form of the ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon

... she admitted. "We often played at getting married, and we had very large but inanimate families, and we quarrelled like real married people, and I used to cry and take my playthings home, and he used to stand outside our fence and make faces at me till I hated him ferociously. But all that was when we were very ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon

... for the Czar, and for my native land," and he had by a desperate effort gone. He did not see his old mother, who had fallen back almost inanimate on a bench. But when the Postmaster hastened to assist her, the aged woman raised herself. Suddenly the thought occurred to her: She denied by her own son! It was impossible! As for being herself deceived, it was equally impossible. It was certainly her son whom she had just seen; and if ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... recollection of what had been achieved, and what yet should be. If in her cooler moments she might not approve of their spirit in all things, still there was much to admire in their forgetfulness of themselves and the present, in their anticipated triumphs over all inanimate matter at some future time which none of them should live to see. She was rather startled when Mr. Thornton spoke to her, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... westward extension of cotton[7:3] culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: "It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner

... and stanch the blood; but he did not hear, or heed,—he was lost in grief. M. de Bois also appealed to him, but in vain; then Gaston attempted to use force to recall him to reason, and, seizing both of Maurice's arms, essayed to unclasp them from their hold of the inanimate form, saying ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... the character of life, and is transformed into inanimate units. Man is something different from the sum of the services he may be made to render, and from the sum of enjoyments which may be procured for him. We must not run the risk of lowering him to the level of a living tool; and from the moment ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... not to be turned aside. The Yankee gun, its eight-horse team, men who stood now with their hands high, horses for riders who were no longer to need them. Three hundred of those horses from the lines behind the dismounted skirmishers—far more valuable than any inanimate treasure to men who had lost mounts—one hundred ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton

... man?" said Arthur, whose seat on the gallery permitted him to hear, but not to see, all that was going on in the room. "Why don't you add, he speculates, he whittles, he chews tobacco, he is six feet two in his stockings, he knows the market value of every article and object, animate and inanimate, on the face of the earth, and is a living illustration of the truth of the proverb, that the cents being cared for, no apprehension need be entertained as to the safety ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... Where is he? Show him to us. If you cannot show him to us as flesh and blood, show him as flesh and sap; show him as a living cell; show him as protoplasm. Lower than this we should not fairly go; it is not in the bond or nexus of our ideas that something utterly inanimate and inorganic should scheme, design, contrive, and elaborate structures which can make mistakes: it may elaborate low unerring things, like crystals, but it cannot elaborate those which have the power ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... shook with the force of a shell that lodged in the work. The Pathfinder narrowly escaped the passage of this formidable missile as it entered; but when it exploded, Mabel could not suppress a shriek, for she supposed all over her head, whether animate or inanimate, destroyed. To increase her horror, her father shouted in a ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... suffering. Our Lord could not sin, therefore He reached our sympathies by His Death and Sorrows. Of course, if this life here were all, and this world were the only one, and we were animals with less beauty than many of the inanimate things in nature, and as much intelligence at best as the bees and birds and ants—then the Pagan way might be quite admirable. But this isn't the case, and ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... then Shall be a precious visitant; and then, And only then, be worthy of her name; For then her heart shall kindle, her dull eye, Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang Chained to its object in brute slavery; But taught with patient interest to watch The process of things, and serve the cause Of order and distinctness, not for this Shall it forget that its most ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... impatient and desperate. There is often a perverseness in inanimate things which is beyond endurance. He had started with the highest hopes a few minutes before, confident of finding the Indian canoe without trouble, and now he was baffled and held back when on the ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis

... well at first, but at length oblivion came. He waked to feel Bouche tugging at his blankets. It was noon. Late Carscallen and Cloud-in-the-Sky were still sleeping—inanimate bundles among the dogs. In an hour they were on their way again, and towards sunset they had reached the foot of Manitou Mountain. Abruptly from the plain rose this mighty mound, blue and white upon a black base. A few straggling pines grew near its foot, defying latitude, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... intended for the same use as statues in other religions. They are not adored nor worshiped in any sense of the word. They are looked upon as inanimate representations of a deity, and tributes of honor and respect are paid not to them, but to the spirits that they represent. I have seen rice actually put to the lips of these images and bead necklaces hung about their necks; but ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... voice, the half-inanimate form seemed suddenly inspired with life and vigor, and, bounding to her feet with a shriek of rage, she dealt him a blow with her open hand on the side of his head, which made him see more stars than can usually be discerned on the clearest ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick

... rare things to common ones; desirable things to those which you can easily do without; things complete to things which are only begun; wholes to parts; things proceeding on reason to things void of reason; voluntary to necessary things; animate to inanimate things; things natural to things not natural; things skilfully produced by art to things with which art has ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a sound of wheels, of horses and irons in the Place de Greve. She was somewhat aroused by it, knotted her hair upon her ears in order to deafen herself, and resumed her contemplation, on her knees, of the inanimate object which she had adored for fifteen years. This little shoe was the universe to her, as we have already said. Her thought was shut up in it, and was destined never more to quit it except at death. The sombre cave of the Tour-Roland alone knew how many ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo

... was black, as if charred, and so was likewise the adjoining wood for half an inch from the cavity. The tree, at the part where the latter existed, was 19 inches in diameter; the length of the trunk was 18 feet. When the Batrachia above mentioned were discovered, they appeared inanimate, but the influence of a warm sun to which they were subjected soon imparted to them a moderate degree of vigor. In a few hours from the time they were liberated they were tolerably active, and able to move from place to place ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... the earlier process. It is radical, always identical with itself, but transitory. It goes out from ourselves toward other things. It consists in attributing life to everything, in supposing in everything that shows signs of life—and even in inanimate objects—desires, passions, and acts of will analogous to ours, acting like ourselves in view of definite ends. This state of mind is incomprehensible to an adult civilized man; but it must be admitted, since there are facts without number that ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... "heart" and "breath," which eventually led to a differentiation between their supposed functions.[69] As the heart and the blood were obviously present in the dead body they could no longer be regarded as the "life". The breath was clearly the "element" the lack of which rendered the body inanimate. It was therefore regarded as necessary to set the heart working. The heart then came to be looked upon as the seat of knowledge, the organ that feels and wills during waking life. All the pulsating motions of the body seem to have been regarded, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... subtle directions. Nor had it taken him long to locate the most vulnerable point in Buck's armor. He had realized something of the possibilities at the first coming of Joan. He had seen then the effect of the beautiful inanimate body upon the man's susceptibilities. It had been instantaneous. Then had come that scene at the farm, and Buck's further insult over the gold which he had hated to see pass into the girl's possession. It was then that the first glimmer ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum

... Forth rolled the music of the forest of enchantments, moving its green and whispering tree tops before the rude Siegfried, the innocent child of Nature, eager to know the language of the soul and of inanimate things. The master-bird sang, his voice rising above the murmur of the foliage. Mary ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... that only so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The Midsummer Holiday group has two pictures of sweet homeliness—'The Mill Garden' and 'On a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... left to herself, Pollyanna had always found plenty to interest her within the four walls of the house; for, if inanimate things failed, there were yet Mary, Jennie, Bridget, and Perkins. To-day, however, Mary had a headache, Jennie was trimming a new hat, Bridget was making apple pies, and Perkins was nowhere to be found. ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter

... appearances Alwyn was DEAD—any physician would have certified the fact, though how he had come by his death there was no evidence to show. And in that condition, ... stirless, breathless ... white as marble, cold and inanimate as stone, Heliobas left him. Not in indifference, but in sure knowledge—knowledge far beyond all mere medical science—that the senseless clay would in due time again arise to life and motion; that the casket was but temporarily bereft of its jewel,—and that the jewel itself, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... causality of which must be regulated by empirical laws. As such, he must possess an empirical character, like all other natural phenomena. We remark this empirical character in his actions, which reveal the presence of certain powers and faculties. If we consider inanimate or merely animal nature, we can discover no reason for ascribing to ourselves any other than a faculty which is determined in a purely sensuous manner. But man, to whom nature reveals herself only through sense, cognizes himself ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant

... it tires. A man who plays with it must be on his guard every second. To spend a lifetime on it is ridiculous—a whole life of intelligent effort, against perpetual, brutal, inanimate resistance—one endless uninterrupted fight—a ceaseless human manoeuvre against senseless menace; and then the counter attack of the lifeless monster, the bellowing advance, the shock—and no battle won—nothing final, nothing ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... diadem-and-sceptre bearing—many people for reasons of heredity discovering such graces only in those whose vestibules are lined with ancestral mail, forgetting that a bear may be taught to dance. While this air of hers lasted, even the inanimate objects in the street appeared to know that she was there; but from a way she had of carelessly overthrowing her dignity by versatile moods, one could not calculate upon its presence to a certainty when she was round corners or in ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... for long in the breast of youth. Hope began to chase it away, and inanimate though the body was, the brain grew more active, offering suggestion after suggestion as ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn

... meant by "the spirit of God," is that life-giving breath or power of God which operates (continuously operates) to impart life to inanimate nature.[6] From the connection in which it here stands it means this, as in other connections it means the power which operates (continuously operates) to produce whatever is noble and good (God-like) in man. There is no implication in the text ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... her inanimate form from the carriage, bore it to the side of the brook, laid it gently upon the bank and dashed a handful of the cold water into her white face. She gasped, opened her eyes, and, sitting up, looked about her with an ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... the while, though unable to move, in an agony of self-consciousness; and at last, when Rowland in fiendish triumph pronounces the curse complete, to the extreme horror of both, by an effort of tortured mind over apparently inanimate matter, rolls her glazed eyes, and gives an involuntary groan: having thus to all appearance confirmed the curse, she lies more marble-white, more corpse-like, more entranced than ever. Then, after long ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... pretty morbid fellow," Rajcik said carelessly. "But at least I'm not blaming inanimate objects, the way Watkins is. Or permitting myself the luxury of shock, like you." He studied Somers' face. "This is your first real ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley

... the white mornings that split the sky as a boy splits up white firwood, we may feel for one instant the presence of an impetuous purity; but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate things not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton









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