|
|
|
More "Spontaneity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in ourselves that saddens, and may depress, and our joy in Him must always be shaded by penitent sorrow for ourselves. But that necessary element of sadness in the Christian life is not the cause why so many Christian lives have little of the buoyancy and hope and spontaneity which should mark them. The reason rather lies in the lack of true union with Christ, and habitual keeping of ourselves 'in the love ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I believe they will not make me swerve from equity. I shall exact neither service nor affection from my spouse. The value of these, and, indeed, not only the value, but the very existence, of the latter depends upon its spontaneity. A promise to love tends rather to ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... Spontaneity must be the soul of such a movement. "It was my strong conviction that the development of such a social movement should come from the people themselves, not that a ready-made program or plan should be given them, but that they should develop their own." One ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... his earlier and purely secular work there is something, though less of this inequality, and its cause is not at all dubious. No poet, certainly no poet of merit, seems to have written with such absolute spontaneity and want of premeditation as Wither. The metre which was his favourite, and which he used with most success—the trochaic dimeter catalectic of seven syllables—lends itself almost as readily as the octosyllable to this frequently fatal fluency; ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of New England where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. One of the prettiest, sweetest, and quaintest of old-fashioned love stories * * * A rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity. A dainty volume, especially suitable for ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... promise of correspondence had hitherto waited for fulfilment. It seemed natural to Marian that the younger of the two girls should write; Maud was attractive and agreeable, and probably clever, but Dora had more spontaneity in friendship. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... compels the frequent, "I didn't think, or I would not have done it!" The impulsive person may undoubtedly have credited up to him many kind words and noble deeds. In addition, he usually carries with him an air of spontaneity and whole-heartedness which goes far to atone for his faults. The fact remains, however, that he is too little the master of his acts, that he is guided too largely by external circumstances or inward caprice. He ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity toit. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... antitheses, and all the mechanical devices of the school were placed in abeyance. There was a general return to Nature, to simplicity, to straightforwardness—not without imagination, however. Wordsworth, besides insisting, in a famous passage, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, on the spontaneity of good poetry, recorded his tribute to the Reliques: 'I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques.' While failing often to catch the gusto of ancient poetry—witness ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... many inflections as we like. The mechanistic philosophy is to be taken or left: it must be left if the least grain of dust, by straying from the path foreseen by mechanics, should show the slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine of final causes, on the contrary, will never be definitively refuted. If one form of it be put aside, it will take another. Its principle, which is essentially psychological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so comprehensive, that one accepts ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... to dwell upon this exquisite flower of genius in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa Passes." Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book" and "The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the outset of the tremendous ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... dreadful and irrefragable, as if she stripped herself and showed a body scarred and burning. With all the forces of her nature she threw herself on Karen's pity, tearing from herself, with a humility far above pride and shame, the glamour that had held Karen's heart to hers. Deep instinct guided her spontaneity. Her glamour, now, must consist in having none; her nobility must consist in abasement, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of the society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so. Progress depends upon ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... not, he will agree with me that the fourth impromptu (in C sharp minor), Op. 66, is the most valuable of the compositions published by Fontana; indeed, it has become one of the favourites of the pianoforte-playing world. Spontaneity of emotional expression and effective treatment of the pianoforte distinguish the Fantaisie-Impromptu. In the first section we have the restless, surging, gushing semiquavers, carrying along with them ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Laurier in Ottawa and was still passionately devoted—as he remains—to Sir William Mulock, his political godfather. Nobody has ever criticized him for his ardent discipleship to the two older Canadians. There is an old-fashioned spontaneity about this mutual regard much above the common commercial admiration of one man for another in business. Many have blamed King for his attachment to Rockefeller, and have used that connection to his detriment ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... he was not attempting to deceive her this time. But he could say no more. Many a strong man would in that moment have sobbed aloud and shed tears, but Giovanni was not as other men. Under great emotion all expression was hard for him, and the spontaneity of tears would have ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... but yet only an illustration of one of the ordinary phases of human nature after all, as father would have said, I thought, this reflection passing through my mind with that instantaneous spontaneity with which such fancies do occur to one, as Rooney placed me in my assigned position. Then, recalling my mind to the present, I noticed that Matthews, my whilom fellow apprentice and lately promoted third mate, sinking the dignity of his new rank, had come forward to act as ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... made in natural knowledge has tended to extend and rivet in their minds the conception of a definite order of the universe—which is embodied in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the laws of Nature—and to narrow the range and loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other than such as arise out of that definite ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... emphatically declared that they did not believe that any such thing had happened. And when further asked for their opinion as to what had happened, they simply answered that they did not know what to think. But to Harry it seemed that there was a certain lack of spontaneity in this reply, which caused him to doubt whether the speakers were quite ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... — N. will, volition, conation^, velleity; liberum arbitrium [Lat.]; will and pleasure, free will; freedom &c 748; discretion; option &c (choice) 609; voluntariness^; spontaneity, spontaneousness; originality. pleasure, wish, mind; desire; frame of mind &c (inclination) 602; intention &c 620; predetermination &c 611; selfcontrol &c; determination &c (resolution) 604; force of will. V. will, list; see fit, think ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... reached, are a demonstration that in the sphere of aesthetics science does not produce the greatest artists—that something other than intelligent interest and technical accomplishment are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. M. Eugene Veron is the mouthpiece of his countrymen in asserting absolute beauty to be an abstraction, but the practice of the mass of French painters is, by comparison with that of the great Italians ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... instinct for society-making among children and youth lies one of the greatest opportunities for the prevention of crime and immorality the world has ever known. To turn to good ends this spontaneity of action, to divert into channels of usefulness these currents of child-activity, will be to add immensely to the equipment of mankind in the struggle with vice. A certain bishop of the early Christian Church is credited with having declared that, if ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... did the dramatic happen. At that moment a thin voice in the gallery exclaimed, "Hurrah for Blaine!" Instantly the audience was on fire. The burst of applause brought out by Smith's opening reference to the "never vanquished hero of Appomattox" had been disappointing because it lacked spontaneity and enthusiasm, but the sound of the magic word "Blaine," like a spark flying to powder, threw the galleries into a flame of cheering which was obstinate in dying out. Conkling, in closing the debate on the resolution, showed his customary audacity by hurling bitter sarcasm ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... though she had learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect of the wife's social arts, a husband necessarily sees the wrong side of ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... to discredit church-membership as placing us at the mercy of emotional suggestion, reducing spontaneity to custom, and lessening the energy and responsibility of the individual soul towards God. On the contrary, right group suggestion reinforces, stimulates, does not stultify such individual action. If the prayerful attitude of my fellow worshippers helps me to pray better, surely it ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... are notoriously varied and on principle subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and spontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think, however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in Protestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has become its substratum. Religion ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... planes with the dashing, fearless, showy mood of the other. Intellectually they were not equals either. Pauline's mind was almost purely receptive and her range of inquiry limited indeed. Zulma's mind was buoyant with spontaneity, and there was a quality of aggressive origination in it which scattered all conventionalities as splinters before it. Pauline was likely to lean upon Zulma, listen with admiration to her brilliant talk, ask her ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... distributed over the days of the week for use in due rotation. Such schemes, however, if drawn up and used, should be revised from time to time, and not suffered to become a mechanical burden or a legal bondage. There should be freedom and spontaneity in a Christian's prayers. It is well to have rules, and to try not to be prevented by mere slackness from keeping them. But it is important to see to it that the self-imposed rule is so framed as to prove genuinely ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... and tore it up, and sat down to write another. This she left open for such emendations and improvements as should occur to her in the night. Perhaps none did occur; perhaps she realized that a literary work loses its force and spontaneity in conscious elaboration; anyhow the note was put up just as it was and posted first thing in the morning at the pillar-box on ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... irritated him bitterly. 'It is the mind,' she said, 'and that is death.' She raised her eyes slowly to him: 'Isn't the mind—' she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, 'isn't it our death? Doesn't it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... independence and freedom. The prophet, rising above the legal standpoint and outward ceremonial, puts the essence of true worship in morality,[47] but recognizes also along with the deepest feeling of dependence upon God, in the independence[48] and spontaneity of the religious and moral life, the irresistible power of the divine spirit, by which the Most High, though apart from the world and throned in heaven, puts himself into the closest and most intimate communion with the true worshiper. Thus the gulf which divided Jahveh, as a God afar off, ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... in De Quincey's words, "moves in headlong sympathy and concurrence with spontaneous power." This is his definition, mark you; I lay no claim to it: "Genius works under a rapture of necessity and spontaneity." I do love that expression, "headlong sympathy"; it so well ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... little home. Or perhaps it had merely precipitated the wreck. Sooner or later, he told himself, she was bound to have wearied of the dullness of her lot. At any rate, dating from shortly after that disturbing night, a lack of ease and spontaneity seemed to creep into their relations. A blight ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... our nature.... The pages are perpetually brightened by quaintly humorous touches. Often in describing some character or something that is commonplace enough, a droll fancy seems to strike the author, and forthwith he gives us the benefit of it. Consequently there is a spontaneity in his pen which is extremely fascinating.... We can only say generally that Mr. Murray's plot is sufficiently original and worked up with enough of skill to satisfy any but the most exacting readers. We found ourselves getting duly excited before ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... His wife, I suppose. They never had anything in common but the kiddies. That means no more hunts at Blackburn Heath unless someone careless like Philip absorbs the estate. Mrs. Philip was a Pennsylvania girl. N'est ce pas? That accounts for her effulgent spontaneity. Isn't it a shame for me to wax bombastic over a girl who, if she were just a little brighter, might be called half witted. She's the girl with the massive mother, who suffers from dislocated adjectives. They say when she was married her prayer book was missing, ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... whole expression of the girl's face changed. All the animation seemed to leave her manner. For a moment she clung instinctively to her companion. Afterwards she looked at him no more. She came to Saton at once, and held out her hand without any show of reluctance, yet wholly without spontaneity. It was as though she was ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest figures for ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... call Strauss an intermediate type. So rapidly doth music speed down the grooves of time. From Vienna comes Schoenberg; in Vienna lives and composes the youthful Erich Korngold, whose earlier music seems to well as if from some mountain spring, although with all its spontaneity it has no affinity with Mozart. It is distinctively "modern," employing the resources of the "new" harmonic displacements and the multicoloured modern orchestral apparatus. Korngold is so receptive that ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... possess the interest and spontaneity of the oral recitation. There is no opportunity for the teacher to supplement with points brought in. Misconceptions are not cleared up in the minds of the pupils, at least during that recitation period, unless ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... carriage,—in short, makes matter a nutritive and downy pulp, clean and shining, in the midst of which the soul expires of enjoyment and the frightful monotony of comfort in a life without contrasts, deprived of spontaneity, and which, to sum all in one word, makes a ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... my books you will know what I mean. The chief charm of literature, old or new, lies in its high quality of surprise, unexpectedness, spontaneity: high spirits applied to life. We can fairly hear some of the old chaps you and I know laughing down through the centuries. How we love 'em! They laughed ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... he was offered the Tammany nomination as mayor of New York, and the secretaryship of the navy by Van Buren. And when three years later he was given a still more important post, it was only the evident spontaneity of the choice, and the feeling that in taking the office he should be representing country rather than party, which led him ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... rascal," said his aunt, smiling with very little spontaneity. "You have insulted us, you great atheist! but we forgive you. I am well aware that my daughter and myself are two rustics who are incapable of soaring to the regions of mathematics where you dwell, but for all that it is ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the generous manifestation of your sympathy I am honoured with in Mobile, is again a highly valuable benefit to my cause, because it has such a character of spontaneity, that, here at least, no misrepresentation can charge me with having even endeavoured to elicit that high-minded manifestation from the metropolis of the ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... consulted this scenario before they made an entrance, and then in the acting of the scene spoke whatever words occurred to them. Harlequin made love to Columbine and quarreled with Pantaloon in new lines every night; and the drama gained both spontaneity and freshness from the fact that it was created anew at each performance. Undoubtedly, if an actor scored with a clever line, he would remember it for use in a subsequent presentation; and in this way the dialogue of a comedy must have gradually become ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... you, brother," replied Frantz through his clenched teeth; and an angry flush rose to his brow at the idea that any one could have suspected the open-heartedness, the loyalty, that were displayed before him in all their artless spontaneity. Luckily he, the judge, had arrived; and he proposed to restore ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... you shall walk safely; and the path will carry you right into 'His presence where there is fulness of joy.' No great, noble, right, blessed life is lived without rigid self-control, self-denial, and self-crucifixion. Do not fancy that that means the absence of joy and spontaneity. 'I will walk at liberty for I keep Thy precepts.' Hedges are blessings when, on the other side, there are bottomless swamps of poisonous miasma, into which if a man ventures he will either drown or be plague-stricken. The narrow way that leads to life is the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... mixture of all three. Ordinarily there was a suspicion of hardness in her face but there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child which she once had been—a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity utterly unlike ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... may be classified as fanciful, realistic, and idealistic according to the character of the material used. Fanciful productive imagery is characterized by its spontaneity, its disregard of the probable and possible, its vividness of detail. It is its own reward, and does not look to any result beyond itself. Little children's imaginations are of this type—it is their play world of make-believe. The incongruity and absurdity of ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... too careful as it is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... Schiller, explained all art as being derived from the play instinct. It has been said that play is the overflow of life. Life, love, joy, all noble ideals, must awaken spontaneity or they will not grow. All parts of man's nature must have expression and not be repressed. Play is given to stimulate and to express the spontaneous in us, to manifest emotion and imagination and a sense of freedom. Freedom is a necessity of all unfoldment. Even the flower must bloom spontaneously ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If his story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrelevant anecdote, but told with such ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... wit, like a flash of lightning, can only be remembered, it cannot be reproduced. Its very marvel lies in its spontaneity and evanescence; its power is in being struck from the present. Divorced from that, the keenest representation of it seems cold and dead. We read over the few remaining sentences which attempt to embody the repartees and bon mots of the most famous wits of society, such as ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... renewed. I often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed, directed! Speculations are vain. Calvinism, though it had begun to make compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity and human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound, who preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it. I loved him, but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy, but punishment, the, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... living things are active, intelligent agents, personally continuous with all their ancestors, possessing an intense but unconscious memory of all that their ancestors did and suffered, and moving through habit from the spontaneity of striving to ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... did more than merely make martyrs. Its strength, its spontaneity, and the devotion of its adherents were such that they undoubtedly awakened not merely some alarm, but also some sense of ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... road to its goal, must have determined the character of his part-writing. In spite of his remarks in Playford's book, it is plain that he looked at music horizontally as well as vertically, and constructed it so that it is good no matter which way it is considered. His counterpoint has a freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school. Though he was pleased with musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill. Handel ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed—a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable spontaneity of it he was startled. He turned quickly, as though some one at his side had laughed and he was about to demand an explanation. He looked across the aisle and his eyes met squarely the ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... sober conviction, upon the part of the writers, that they accurately conveyed the meaning they desired. Intentionally humorous efforts have been carefully excluded, and the interest of the collection consists in the spontaneity of expression and in the fact that it offers fair samples of the possibilities which lie hidden in the orthography and construction of our language. Let it be remembered, then, that anybody can write English as she "should be wrote," and ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... shake our heads over the self-importance of the nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a friend, "You will observe at ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... conventionality will often exhibit a negative refinement, while a mind of real and subtile delicacy, but of rugged and irrepressible individuality, will occasionally shoot out irregular and uncouth branches. Yet between the symmetry of the one and the spontaneity of the other the choice cannot be doubtful. We are not defending coarseness in any guise. It is always to be assailed, and never to be defended. It is always a detriment, and never an ornament. No excellence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... rest of the day for her visit. If she had kissed the children out of policy Mrs. Jocelyn would have been resentfully aware of the fact; but they were "kissable" children, and no one knew it better than the fond mother, who was won completely by the spontaneity of the act. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... mainly that of selection. Creative work, when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity of his stories. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... enthusiastic praise of the labor-union official in question. The passage reads: "The idea of God must be destroyed. It is the keystone of a perverted civilization. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." Had the opponents of Socialism been familiar with the teachings of Marx, they would have known that he could not have said anything like this, that it is absolutely at variance with all his teaching. The man who formulated the materialist ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... in the room a constraint like a tangible inhibition against any natural spontaneity fell over them. Kendric read in Barlow's look no joy at the sight of him but only a sullen brooding; Betty flashed one look at him in which was nothing of last night's friendliness but an aloofness which might have been compounded ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... purpose of the artist- prophets; but his efforts after musical effects, as well as his untimely death, prevented the full fruitage of his admirable genius. Many of the poems that he has left us are lacking in spontaneity and artistic finish. Alliterative effects are sometimes obtrusive. His poetic theories, as presented in The Science of English Verse, often outstripped his execution. But, after all these abatements are ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... of design, and of the foot, have come together in our minds with sufficient spontaneity, we yet feel that there is a difference—and a wide difference if we could only lay our hands upon it—between the design and manufacture of the ligament and tendons of the foot on the one hand, and on the other ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... her face alight with joy and fine enthusiasm. All her spontaneity, her love and admiration were aroused. And she kissed him with so frank and glad a love that Stern felt his heart jump wildly. He thought she never yet had been ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the workings of the whole mind and the means by which we would fain render them articulate, there yawns a gap which no effort can bridge over? Even the poet fails—much more the scientist! To refuse to take cognisance of the fresh spontaneity of feeling and intuition is to rob life of its higher ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... author must also know when to let his material alone. In his excessive regard for style even so great a master as Robert Louis Stevenson robbed his work of much of the spontaneity and natural charm found, for example, in his Vailima Letters. The main thing is for a writer to say what he has to say in the best way, natural to himself, in which he can say it, and then let it alone—always remembering ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... meekly? No! It was the thoughtless brutality with which he went about this new affair that bit so poignantly. To show her, so indurately, that she was nothing, that, despite her magnificent sacrifice, she had never been more than a convenience, was maddening. There was no spontaneity in his heart; his life was a calculation to which various sums were added or subtracted. With all her beauty, intellect, genius and generosity, she had not been able to stir him as this young girl was unconsciously doing. She held no animosity for the daughter of her host; she was clear-visioned ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... that instinctive preference which we call Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would only do one of two things—either spoil his constitution, or produce a tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would get an animated moral code instead of living men ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... spontaneity are represented in only a few snatches in Chaucer. Other touches of the spring he has, for no man better loved the merry month of May, and he has sung it until he has become for ever identified with it in our minds. All the same, he represents also a reaction which ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... an engagement so informal as in England. We find all sorts of ceremonies connected with the plighting of a troth which seems but little less important than the tying of the marriage knot itself. There is less spontaneity and exercise of private judgment on the part of the young people; in fact, there are several countries in which they are allowed no voice ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... school, and that I have only three years and a half more to keep him by me. The flowers that blossom in his sunny childhood will fall before the scythe of a public school system; his gracious ways and bewitching candor will lose their spontaneity. They will cut the curls that I have brushed and smoothed and kissed so often! What will they do with the thinking being ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... The eighty-two sketches on the margins of that priceless copy of the Praise of Folly, which Basel preserves in her Museum, had been suited to their company. Admirable, though unequal, as are their merits, they are sketches, whose chief beauty is their happy spontaneity. Such things are among the trifles of art, and are not to be put into the scales at all with the finished perfection of his serious designs for wood engraving. These were drawn on the block; and even these cannot properly ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... the work—whose force and significance, of course, cannot be felt in this dry enumeration—are that language issues from the spontaneity of the human spirit,—"spontaneity, which is both divine and human"; that its origin is simultaneous with the opening of consciousness in the human race; that it preserves a constant parallel with consciousness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... indication of structural design in a hymn. Textual equations, such as distinguish Dr. Bonar's beautiful stanzas, are not necessarily technical. To emphasize them as ingenious by an ingenious tune seems, somehow, a reflection on the spontaneity of the hymn. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... themselves that her early style of acting—easy, flowing, impulsive, the natural translation in action of a strong and imaginative nature—must remain what, in the long absence of the actress, it had become, a beautiful tradition of the stage,—that her present personations were wanting in force and spontaneity,—that they were efforts, rather than inspirations,—were marked by a weary tension of thought,—were careful, but not composed, roughened by unsteady strokes of genius, freshly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... act with a certain degree of spontaneity on their environment, and they likewise react effectively to surrounding stimuli. Animals come to have definite "answers back," sometimes several, sometimes only one, as in the case of the Slipper Animalcule, which reverses ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... and he had not discovered his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment of his life. No scandal had darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing among his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his own spontaneity. One day he began: 'I have been inventing a Christian heresy,' and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father, of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and, escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... supernaturalise. Sing me a lullaby, O Mother eternal! Give me to drink of thy love, divine and diabolic; thy cruelty and thy kindness, I accept both, if thou wilt but whisper to me the secret of both. Anoint me with the chrism of spontaneity that I may be ever worthy of thee.—Withdraw not from me thy hand, lest universal love and sympathy die in my breast.—I implore thee, O Mother eternal, O sea-throned, heaven-canopied Goddess, I prostrate my face before thee, I surrender myself wholly to ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... majestically; but it takes depth of feeling and years rich with experience to express the gratification that now possessed him. He stretched his hands across the table to her and the laugh that came then came as a cataract of spontaneity. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... is supposed to have given Rembrandt the idea for his drawing, his genius made it his own in realism and movement, and in its beauties of line, color and texture. "An Old Woman Sleeping" (No. 129)), although scarcely to be included in this series, is another that has wonderful spontaneity. This is no posed model, but one who has actually fallen asleep over her book; Rembrandt sees her, and before her "forty winks" are over, she is immortalized, and probably she never knew it. About 1640 Rembrandt began ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... their disarmed understandings as far down the vale of tears as he deemed wise, then permitted himself a magnificent burst of spontaneity. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... refreshing each other's lives. Yes, Howard, this is your great opportunity to take your position and draw your wife up to it. Life will be a new thing to you, and all of us who can accept these truths. Our present forms and ceremonies hold us apart, and there is scarcely a ripple of spontaneity upon life's surface. The highest hours, and those most productive of good, are when two souls converse and reflect each ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... Shakspeare, Milton have left a deep and permanent impression upon the forms of thought and speech, the language and literature, the science and philosophy of nations. And inasmuch as a nation is the aggregate of individual beings endowed with spontaneity and freedom, we must grant that exterior conditions are not omnipotent in the formation of national character. Still the free causality of man is exercised within a narrow field. "There is a strictly necessitative limitation drawing an impassable boundary-line around the area of volitional freedom." ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... literature that did not owe its inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature—more especially poetry—was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a Vergil, a Horace, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... whole page of description is a task for a master, and very few attempt it; but for the uninitiated amateur about three sentences of description mark the limit of his ability to see and describe. To get started, to gain confidence in one's ability to say something, to acquire freedom and spontaneity of expression,—this is the first step in the practice of composition. Afterward, when the pupil has discovered that he really has something to say,—enough indeed to cover three or four pages of his tablet paper,—then it may be time to begin the study of description, and to acquire ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... They pay a price, and they want a good show of colour and gilding for their money. Presently they buy from outside, and a half-hearted imitation of foreigners is the best ambition of Venetian artists. Art, it has been said, does not declare itself with true spontaneity till it feels behind it the weight and unanimity of the whole body of the people. That true outburst was long in coming, but its seeds were fructifying deep in a congenial soil. They were fostered by the warmth and colour of Oriental intercourse, and at last the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... her favorite. By a strange contrariety the sunny-faced little mother had set herself to accomplish her son's union with the tall, dark, and haughty cousin, who had expired in giving birth to little Hildreth. There was nothing of spontaneity and no display of conjugal affection on the part of the young husband or his wife; but during the absence of her son, the invalid was well cared for and entertained by the wife, whom she came to love with an intensity second only to that ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... with the history of science will admit that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Letter-Writers has failed to provide are met by Mr. Parker with consummate discretion. His letters are to Senators, Shakers, Professors, Doctors, Slaveholders, Abolitionists, morbid girls, and heroic women: they are all equally rich in spontaneity, simplicity, and point. Keen criticisms of noted men, speculations upon society, homely wisdom of the household, estimates of the arts, and consolations of religion, all packed in plain and precise English, seem to have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... established form, without any qualms about the capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order, intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be laid on the second phase of the transformation, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... suspicions. They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver cracked his whip and turned the horses' heads towards the billowing sea of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... completed in August, 1861, and the first number of "Our Mutual Friend" appeared in May, 1864. This was an unusual interval, but the great writer's faculty of invention was beginning to lose its fresh spring and spontaneity. And besides he had not been idle. Though writing no novel, he had been busy enough with readings, and his work on All the Year Round. He had also written a short, but very graceful paper[30] on Thackeray, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... of spontaneity and natural force, I think what struck me most was the physical effect London has already exercised upon her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... deal with romantic incidents of daily life. The romances juglarescos are longer poems, mostly concerned with Charlemagne page 254 and his peers, veritable degenerate epics, composed by itinerant minstrels to be sung in streets and taverns to throngs of apprentices and rustics. They have not the spontaneity and vigor which ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... sadly decreased during the war and completely evaporated after it. For several years the place was entirely deserted and neglected, then Miss Woodhull, recently graduated from a New England college, and fairly bristling with degrees, for which she had exchanged the freshness, sweetness and spontaneity of youth and health, was ordered to spend at least a year in the south in the doubtful hope of recovering ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... precepts governing lyric form follow from the general principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits, should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... her life at Northampton, and thought she had come over from Canada only a year or two ago. Yes, she amused him. By contrast with the drawing-room young lady, of whom he had always been afraid, she seemed to have originality of character, spontaneity of talk. Of course her learning was not exactly profound; the quality of her mind left something to be desired; her breeding fell short of what is demanded by the fastidious; but there was something healthy and genuine about ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... me. But now, thank heaven, I breathe freely once more. I have lost my dear husband, but I have escaped from that prison-house; and with his memory to keep me merciless, I am eager to wage war against those influences which are conspiring to fetter the free-born soul and stifle spontaneity. Luella Bailey must be elected, and these people be taught that foreign ideas may flourish in New York, but cannot obtain ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... is its spontaneity. It has no ulterior aim, but delights in simple expression. These people write because they like to write. They are original because they sketch from life. There is something naive and fresh in their vivid pictures. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... of sitters that it is scarcely to be wondered at that it sometimes failed him. Occasionally he resorted to such artificial devices as were common among his contemporaries. Such fresh inspirations as the Strawberry Girl and Master Bunbury could come but rarely in a lifetime. The spontaneity of Miss Bowles is perhaps unexcelled in ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... is probably agreed, seem suddenly to flare before Becky and Rawdon, after the clear daylight that reigned in Thackeray's description of them; they appear upon the scene, as they should, but it must be owned that the scene has an artificial look, by comparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before. And this it is exactly that shows how and where Thackeray's skill betrays him. He is not (like Dickens) naturally inclined to the theatre, the melodramatic has no fatal ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... the sonata—to mention the three branches of composition to which his genius was specially directed. Acknowledged on every hand as the father of instrumental music, Haydn compels our admiration by 'his inexhaustible invention as shown in the originality of his themes and melodies; the life and spontaneity of the ideas; the clearness which makes his compositions as interesting to the amateur as to the artist; the child-like cheerfulness and drollery which charm away trouble and care.' His insistence on the importance of melody was a marked characteristic. 'It ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... fond of sport in every way, but the aristocrats lack sporting spontaneity; they like it, or pretend to like it, because it is the fashion, and they take up one sport after another as it becomes the fad. That this is true can be shown by comparing the Englishman and the American ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... oratory, his eyes rolling and flashing, his hands and head poised into beautifully effective gesture, and appealed to them in great rolling, fiery sentences that completely swept the conference like a whirlwind, and sat down amid a great burst of applause which broke with splendid spontaneity from the assembled delegates, and the winning golden smile upon his face which Robert's companion had described ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... laughed quietly, with an accent of indulgence. It was the habit of her world to find everything Madame de Sevigne did or said charming. Even her frankness was forgiven her, her tact was so perfect; and her spontaneity had always been accounted as her chief excellence; in the stifled air of the court and the ruelles it had been frequently likened to the blowing in of a fresh May breeze. Her present mood was one well ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... like Sterne's in an absolute whirl. The contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible; and, putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, these chapters are, for mere fun—for that kind of clever nonsense which only wins by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes ashamed the moment spontaneity fails—unsurpassed by anything of the same kind from the same hand. How strange, then, that, with so keen an eye for the humorous, so sound and true ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... of the will of God. No doubt that was an habitual attitude and not one taken up on the spur of the moment. It is indeed very rarely that what seem spontaneous actions are really such; and S. Mary's first word was nearer spontaneity than the second. Her exclamation in answer to the angelic Ave was the natural expression of her surprise at so unexpected a message: its variance from all her thought about her life was the thing that struck her; and therefore her ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... kept pace with her. He had noticed, even if she had not, that those two motionless figures at the bridge had not advanced one step to meet her, but were maintaining an attitude portentously watchful, it seemed to him, and boding ill for the warmth and spontaneity of the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... students would do well not only to take advantage of such training in college, but to have their teacher, if it were possible, follow them, for a time, into their professional work. This idea was well exemplified in the case of Phillips Brooks—a speaker of spontaneity, simplicity, and splendid power. It is said that, in the period of his pulpit work, in the midst of his absorbing church labors, he made it a duty to go from time to time for a period of work with his teacher of voice, that he might be kept ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... fussiness about petty detail, and insistence on non-essentials, is a deterrent from which the robust are free. Over-attention to the mechanics of voice production is a kindred deterrent. Both deterrents prevent that prime characteristic of expression—spontaneity. ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... anything else. What you say about the vagueness of what I have called the direct action of the nervous system, is perfectly just. I felt it so at the time, and even more of late. I confess that I have never been able fully to grasp your principle of spontaneity, as well as some other of your points, so as to apply them to special cases. But as we look at everything from different points of view, it is not likely that we should agree closely. (Professor Bain expounded his theory of Spontaneity in the essay ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... finer than the originals," but, however this may be, there is no question whatever as to the excellence of the ballads in their English form. They have vigor and swiftness of movement, grace and picturesqueness, simplicity and spontaneity. And there are exquisite lyrics amongst them, witness The Wandering Knight's Song. Mr. Lang has made a few selections from Lockhart's scattered verse in Blackwood as further illustrations of his poetic gift,—a number of admirable stanzas ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... enthusiastic theater party, oblivious of surroundings, and lost in wonder at the strange sights. Billy's laugh rang out frequently, with refreshing spontaneity. Their enjoyment was so evident that Redding was surprised, at the close of the first act, to see them put on their wraps and march solemnly out of the theater. He hastened to the lobby, and touched Billy ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... in it, he insisted on it; I will not say that he affected minute daily acts of devotion, for that word would not accord with the spontaneity of his nature; but he accented his demonstrations, he spoke constantly of his religion. Without any intention to wrong the serious side of his religious feelings, it seemed to be a bravado put on for the incredulous, a toy which ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... has worth has several elements. First, It must be individual. It must be joyfully done: there must enter into work the vitality of a happy spirit. It must be spontaneous. This is why machine-work can never be thoroughly beautiful: it lacks the spontaneity of life. The hand never makes two things alike. With the mood, the weather, the occasion, there are little touches added which a machine cannot give. Life always varies and thinks of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... do not play the organ as well at St Blank's as I played it in the little church where I gave my services and was unknown. People are praising me too much here, and this mars all spontaneity. ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that gives any true idea of the sailor's life. Sea stories generally depend for their interest on the inventive skill of their authors; Dana knew how to hold the attention by a simple statement of facts. The book has all the charm and spontaneity of a keenly observant yet imaginative and cultivated mind, alive to all the aspects of the outer world, and gifted with that fine literary instinct which, knowing the value of words, expresses its thoughts with precision. Seafaring men have ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... over what he had written, but there was nothing left for him to do but to correct in cold blood, make plain the meaning, and reduce all to such order as he could. One result of this method was that his verse preserved an unparallelled rush and spontaneity, which is perhaps as great a quality as anything attained by the more bee-like toil ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... motives of hostility to such modifications in these gigantic departments as changing circumstances might make needful, in the breasts of the only men who could produce these modifications without a violent organic revolution. Such a system left too little course to spontaneity, and its curse is the curse of French genius. Some of its evil effects were obvious and on the surface. The man who should have been a soldier found himself saying mass and hearing confessions. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with an intensity and curiosity that in any one else would have seemed pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a human Baedeker; but, in this case, it assumed an air of mysterious purpose and significant design—as though Maury Noble were some predestined anti-Christ, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there was to go along the earth ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... as I did not at the time, how closely my father and mother studied in all things the welfare and cultivation of their children. They were not formal or oppressive about it; all went pleasantly and with seeming spontaneity, as if in accordance with our own desire; but we were wisely and needfully guided. We were never sent to school during our seven years in Europe; but either we were taught our lessons by our parents at home or by governesses. In addition ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... come to love that boy. I find myself clinging to him. I think it is because he stands to me for the spirit of my own boyhood; perhaps that, perhaps because he stands for the spirit of the woods he loves; because he stands for simplicity, honesty, spontaneity. At any rate he is rare, what with his musical gift and his high melody of living—and—oh well, I've sometimes felt sorry that he is not all wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... testimony as comes to hand leaves the inquirer in a very perplexed condition, and inclines him rather to accept than reject the old-fashioned theory of a "general corruption of the atmosphere" as the only working hypothesis whereby to account for the startling spontaneity of the outbreak and its appearance at so many and such distant points at ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... nonsense, but from the standpoint of literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity. ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... subject been omitted. Not a few modern writers have attempted the formal treatment of friendship but while the relation of kindred minds and souls has lost none of its sacredness and value, the establishment of a code of rules for it ignores on the one hand the spontaneity of this relation, and on the other hand, its entire amenableness to the laws and principles that should restrict and govern all human ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... Switzerland the rupture with the church of Rome, had approved of the arrangement that the sovereign authority in matters of religion should pass into the hands of the civil powers. Luther himself, at the same time that he reserved to the new German church a certain measure of spontaneity and liberty, had placed it under the protection and preponderance of laic sovereigns. In this great question as to the relations between church and state Calvin desired and did more than his predecessors; even before he played any considerable part in the European ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... pantomime until his image has become so clear that he can express it in a less real way. Few children fail to draw and paint reasonably well when afforded this opportunity that should be denied to none. In order to secure the best results the teacher should be careful not to repress spontaneity by criticising too severely; on the other hand she should induce the child to make such comparisons of his work with his image and with the object when present, as to prevent the formation of careless habits of work. Although ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the classroom trust your spontaneity and fling away ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... had fled, peace was restored, the Long Parliament was dissolved, Cromwell was Lord Protector. Outwardly the young Roundhead was not altered by the campaign. He had passed through it unscathed. He was somewhat graver in manner; there seemed to be a little less warmth and spontaneity in his greeting; his voice had lost one or two of its cheerier notes; his laughter was less hearty and more easily controlled. Perhaps this only meant that the world was doing its work with him. Otherwise ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... does not love its music. Self-consciousness represents the stage of work and endeavor where faults are being overcome, power enlarged, and new forms of activity mastered. This may be at first a hindrance to spontaneity, and seem to hamper the imagination; but as facility is acquired joy comes back, and the joy of conquest with the adustment of means to ends is a stage of self-consciousness dangerous for the egotist, but is inspiration and incitement to larger effort. This ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick
... Along nearly the whole of one side of the banquet-hall ran a fireplace, a recess of the proportions of a spare bedroom in an ordinary English house. There were no "dogs" or other contrivance for minimising the spontaneity of a fire. There are granite quarries near, and these had contributed an enormous block which formed a hearth raised about six inches above the level of the floor. On this an armful of brushwood was placed; and the match applied, it began to burn with cheerful ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... minds. Hence they can see little more than what they have been taught to see; they can only think what they have been taught to think. For independent vision, and original conception, we must go to children and men of genius. The spontaneity of the one is the power of the other. Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them. Then comes an independent mind which sees; ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... attention. The expression will often be broken and faulty, partly because of the immaturity of the pupil, and partly because of the newness and difficulty of the theme. Do not let the endeavour to secure excellent expression check a certain freedom and spontaneity that should be encouraged in the pupil. When the teacher desires to place special stress on excellent presentation, it is wise to assign topics beforehand, so that each pupil may know definitely what is expected of him, ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... were too many unuttered and unutterable thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... into unmurmuring resignation and calm. In the prosecution of such a process there must be loss as well as gain. And Katherine had, in great measure, atrophied impulse, and, in eradicating personal desire, had come near destroying all spontaneity of emotion. She could still give, but the power of receiving was deadened in her. And she had come to be jealous of the quiet which surrounded her. It was her support and solace. She asked little more than not to have it broken up. She dreaded even ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... original creation, and one of the few masterpieces of humor. In spontaneity, freshness, breadth of conception, and joyous vigor, it belongs to the spring-time of literature. It has entered into the popular mind as no other American book ever has, and it may be said to have created a ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... England where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. One of the prettiest, sweetest, and quaintest of old-fashioned love stories * * * A rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity. A dainty volume, especially suitable for ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... consultation. Colonel Talbot told Harry that he would be wanted presently as a messenger, and he stood on one side while the others talked. It was then that he first heard Jubal Early swear with a richness, a spontaneity and an unction that raised it almost to the dignity ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wrecked the peace of their little home. Or perhaps it had merely precipitated the wreck. Sooner or later, he told himself, she was bound to have wearied of the dullness of her lot. At any rate, dating from shortly after that disturbing night, a lack of ease and spontaneity seemed to creep into their relations. A blight settled ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... we never recover the rapture of the First, the humour touches a higher level; but what it gains in finesse it loses in spontaneity. Here we meet Emily's father, returned from lecturing in the States on social ethics. The scandal of his daughter's conduct leaves him indifferent, for a long and varied experience of the morals of many lands, in the course of which he has married ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... the generations on whose lips they were fashioned, and to all who care for the fresh note, the direct word, the unrestrained emotion, rarely touch the highest points of poetic achievement. Their charm lies, not in their perfection of form, but in their spontaneity, sincerity, and graphic power. They are not rivers of song, wide, deep, and swift; they are rather cool, clear springs among the hills. In the reactions against sophisticated poetry which set in from lime to time, the popular ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid law of mine and thine must now restore ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... and Angie promptly responded, not with the dignity for which she was famous but with an entirely human spontaneity: ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... lamented. As might be expected from his almost total want of regular education, H. was often greatly wanting in taste, but he had real imagination and poetic faculty. Some of his lyrics like The Skylark are perfect in their spontaneity and sweetness, and his Kilmeny is one of the most exquisite fairy tales in the language. Hogg was vain and greedy of praise, but honest and, beyond his means, generous. He is a leading character, partly idealised, partly caricatured, in Wilson's ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... is electricity—spontaneity. It is instantaneous. I knew I should love you from the moment I saw you. Do you not ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... usual spontaneity. And she felt, if she did not explain, the wideness of her eyes. Her father did not look as if anything worried him. It was a way of his, however, not to show stress or worry. Lenore ate in silence until Rose left the dining-room, and then ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... "But I am still grateful." The words came, however, with a certain unwillingness, a certain lack of spontaneity. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... much impress one, at first sight, with a sense of strength, spontaneity, and inevitableness. And yet, as more is known of the steps that led up to the closer union of the German States, that feeling is disagreeably warped. Even then it was known that Bavaria and Wuertemberg strongly objected to the closer form of union desired by the northern patriots, which would ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... had now been taken at Lyons. A second soon followed. The affairs of the Ligurian Republic were in some confusion; and an address came from Genoa begging that their differences might be composed by the First Consul. The spontaneity of this offer may well be questioned, seeing that Bonaparte found it desirable, in his letter of February 18th, 1802, to assure the Ligurian authorities that they need feel no disquietude as to the independence of their ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... to talk of money! That is the secret of the whole criminal business. Money controls art. Money rejects art. Money's a sensitive thing, too. It rejects force, spontaneity, originality. It wants repetition, immutability, things calculable. Money... You can talk with satisfaction of money controlling Butcher after our heavenly day with the sweet ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... which furnishes abundant and striking instance of his jealous and suspicious temper. Much of it is given in the form of dialogue, the terms of which are perhaps a little too precise to carry conviction of its entire sincerity and spontaneity. It was probably written just after the final cause of quarrel in 1545, and its main object seems to be to set the author right in the sight of the world, and to exhibit Cardan as a meddlesome fellow not to be trusted, and one ignorant of the very elements ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... He never blamed himself when rash speculations failed, and he never profited by bitter experience. Simply, he was by nature a spendthrift, high-spirited, impulsive, weak, with little thought for the future and none at all for the past. Wherever he went he was popular. His gaiety and spontaneity won him favour. But no one took him very seriously. No one ever dreamed that his ill-luck was a cause for anything ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... which Colonel Benton likened to "shooting on the wing." So deficient is Mr. Schurz in this talent, that he has been known to use a manuscript in an after-dinner response, a style of speech whose chief merit consists in its spontaneity, with apt reference to incidents which could ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... of expression are realised through a method at once plastic and unlaboured; his art has spontaneity—the deceptive spontaneity of the expert craftsman. It is not, in its elements, a strikingly novel style. His harmony, per se, is not unusual, if one sets it beside the surprising combinations evolved by such innovators as d'Indy, Debussy, and Strauss. ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... you or your works would expect anything else. What you say about the vagueness of what I have called the direct action of the nervous system, is perfectly just. I felt it so at the time, and even more of late. I confess that I have never been able fully to grasp your principle of spontaneity, as well as some other of your points, so as to apply them to special cases. But as we look at everything from different points of view, it is not likely that we should agree closely. (Professor Bain expounded his theory of ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... but Mr. Rowe really means to say that he was as great an artist as natural poet,—that his creative and executive powers wrought in almost perfect spontaneity and harmony,—the work of the making part of him being generally at once approved by the shaping part, and each and both being admirable. When a man creates an Othello, feigns his story and his passion, assumes to be him and to observe him at the same time, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... effort, as well as independence of thought and action, is everywhere frowned upon; but without freedom of thought and action there can be no great individualities, which is the same as saying that there can be no poets like Longfellow, or writers like Hawthorne and Emerson. Spontaneity is the life of the true artist, and in a mechanical civilization there can be neither spontaneity nor the poetic material which is essential to artistic work of a high order. There can be no great orators, for masses of men are no longer influenced by oratory, but by newspapers. Genius ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... young writers who begin a promising career with so much spontaneity and charm of expression as is displayed by Miss Rives.—Literary ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... Yanagi said that the spontaneity and naturalness of Eastern religions ought to be recognised. "You will find Christians admiring Walt Whitman, but it is Whitman the democrat they admire, not Whitman the prophet of naturalness." He spoke with appreciation of the Zen sect of Buddhists. Many of the Zen devotees were ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... is putting it a bit too strongly." Sheldon laughed, but the strain in his voice destroyed the effect of spontaneity. "You know yourself how impossible the ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... the radical, young, insurgent spirit which was just beginning to ferment in the world below Fourteenth Street. In those days it was poor and struggling too (as is altogether fitting in a Village paper) and lost nothing in freshness and spontaneity and vigour ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... freedom {158} and the mere spontaneity which is recognised by the followers both of Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by Martineau.[10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which "has its antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences." [11] Man, in this view, is "free" to do what he wants, because he wants ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... a matter of surprise, if in the lapse of time, which is unlimited, while fortune[101] is continually changing her course, spontaneity should often result in the same incidents; for, if the number of elemental things is not limited, fortune has in the abundance of material a bountiful supply of sameness of results; and, if things ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... true that 'the history of progress is the history of successful struggles against coercion and authoritative direction, and in favor of human spontaneity and free motion' (Slack); it is also true, as we have seen in tracing the course of the administration of justice, that 'the progress of civilization consists in the substitution of the general for the individual will, of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... write another. This she left open for such emendations and improvements as should occur to her in the night. Perhaps none did occur; perhaps she realized that a literary work loses its force and spontaneity in conscious elaboration; anyhow the note was put up just as it was and posted first thing in the morning at the pillar-box on her ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... and thought of it as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing old, shrinking, becoming atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its life, and specified all its actions by the strangest words in our language, speaking of its spontaneity, its strength, and all its qualities with a kind of intuition which enabled him to recognize all the manifestations of ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... and of law. It is evident from the equally rich and careful investigations of Otto Gierke[1] that in the political and legal theories of a Bodin, a Grotius, a Hobbes, a Rousseau, we have systematic developments of principles long extant, rather than new principles produced with entire spontaneity. Their merit consists in the principiant expression and accentuation and the systematic development of ideas which the Middle Ages had produced, and which in part belong to the common stock of Scholastic science, in part constitute ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... singularly enthusiastic theater party, oblivious of surroundings, and lost in wonder at the strange sights. Billy's laugh rang out frequently, with refreshing spontaneity. Their enjoyment was so evident that Redding was surprised, at the close of the first act, to see them put on their wraps and march solemnly out of the theater. He hastened to the lobby, and ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... machine-tending is never of course absolutely automatic or without spontaneity and skill. To a certain limited extent the "tender" of machinery rules as well as serves the machine; in seeing that his portion of the machine works in accurate adjustment to the rest, the qualities of care, judgment, and responsibility are evolved. For a customary skill of wrist ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... than the possibilities of his nature. It was not the fine and essential difference between man and woman, but that more fatal gulf in which there would appear no certain glimpses of a royally endowed love in all its spontaneity, its glow of feeling, its variation of rich emotions. How would she, with her versatile, changeful soul, with its cycle of moods, ever live in the strong, steady prison of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... Words of Poor Mailie, and another bewitching song, The Rigs o' Barley, which is surely an expression of the innocent abandon, the delicious rapture of pure and trustful love. But what he had written was work of promise, while at least one or two of his songs had the artistic finish as well as the spontaneity of genuine poetry. In all that he had done, 'puerile and silly,' to quote his own criticism of Handsome Nell, or at times halting and crude, there was the ring of sincerity. He was not merely an echo, as too many polished poetasters in their first attempts have been. ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... the curtain on my college days I must relate a little adventure which is amusing as an illustration of my reverend friend Napier's enthusiastic spontaneity. My own share in the farce is a ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... in common but the kiddies. That means no more hunts at Blackburn Heath unless someone careless like Philip absorbs the estate. Mrs. Philip was a Pennsylvania girl. N'est ce pas? That accounts for her effulgent spontaneity. Isn't it a shame for me to wax bombastic over a girl who, if she were just a little brighter, might be called half witted. She's the girl with the massive mother, who suffers from dislocated adjectives. They say when she ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... genial person; she also, in De Quincey's words, "moves in headlong sympathy and concurrence with spontaneous power." This is his definition, mark you; I lay no claim to it: "Genius works under a rapture of necessity and spontaneity." I do love that expression, "headlong sympathy"; it so well ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with which they come here; the fact that without organization, almost as a matter of spontaneity, 35,000 names should have been gathered and sent to this Capitol to a committee, whose voluntary duty it was made to receive them; the fact that other names are now coming in at the rate of some 500 ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... mechanism, a doctrine with fixed rigid outlines. It admits of as many inflections as we like. The mechanistic philosophy is to be taken or left: it must be left if the least grain of dust, by straying from the path foreseen by mechanics, should show the slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine of final causes, on the contrary, will never be definitively refuted. If one form of it be put aside, it will take another. Its principle, which is essentially psychological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... but, doubtless equally, a locked church is a confession of failure; while to urge that one has but to ask for the key to be able to enter a church is no true reply, since hospitality, whether to the body or the soul, loses in sweetness and effect as it loses in spontaneity. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... the position cautiously with Colonel House, and find out the intentions of Mr. Wilson. A peace movement on the part of the President which bore the outward appearance of spontaneity would be seriously considered by us, and this would also mean success ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... painted to mimic life. The breeze entered at the mouth and passed out somewhat less freely at the tail, thus keeping them well bellied and constantly in motion. The way they rose and dove and turned and wriggled was worthy of free will. Indeed, they had every look of spontaneity, and lacked only the thing itself to turn the sky into an ocean, and Tokyo into a sea bottom with a rockery of roof. Each fish commemorates the birth of a boy during the year. It would thus be possible to take a census of the increase ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... cannot operate otherwise than by inflicting injury upon the tender germ in her womb. This germ, it must be remembered, derives every quality it possesses from the parents, as well as every particle of matter of which it is composed. The old notion of anything like spontaneity in the development of the qualities of a new being is at variance with all the latest facts and inductions concerning reproduction. And so is that of a creative fiat. The smallest organic cell, as well as the most complicated organism, in form and quality, is wholly ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... expression; a grace that is statuesque without being studied; an inherent laziness which commands the respect of no one, but a gentle nature that wins the affections of all; poor as he is honest, jolly as he is poor, unfortunate as he is jolly, yet possessed of a spontaneity of nature that springs up and flows along like a rivulet after a rain; the man who can not forget the faults of the character which Jefferson pictures, nor feel like taking good-natured young Rip Van Winkle by the ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... the great catastrophe destined to annihilate Israel's national existence, humor and spontaneity vanish, to be superseded by seriousness, melancholy, and bitter plaints, and the centuries of despondency and brooding that followed it were not better calculated to encourage the expression of love and humor. The pall was not lifted until the Haggada performed its mission ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... negroes of the "new issue" infest the old slave-cabins and on sight of visitors rush out with almost violent demands for money, in return for which they wish to sing. Their singing is, however, the poorest negro singing I have ever heard. All the spontaneity, all the relish, all the vividness which makes negro singing wonderful, has been removed, here, by the fixed idea that singing is not a form of expression but a mere noise to be given vent to for ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... of regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and it is above all the negation of the spirit of protest ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... sitters that it is scarcely to be wondered at that it sometimes failed him. Occasionally he resorted to such artificial devices as were common among his contemporaries. Such fresh inspirations as the Strawberry Girl and Master Bunbury could come but rarely in a lifetime. The spontaneity of Miss Bowles is perhaps unexcelled ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... man then and there obtainable is the German. But if I wanted to train Herbert Spencers and Faradays, I would certainly not send them to Bonn or to Berlin. John Stuart Mill was an English Scotchman, educated and stuffed by his able father on the German system; and how much of spontaneity, of vividness, of verve, we all of us feel John Stuart Mill lost by it! One often wonders to what great, to what still greater, things that lofty brain might not have attained, if only James Mill would have given it a ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... marked distrust of Wegg and an alertness to fly at him on perceiving the smallest occasion. In the hard-grained face of Wegg, and in his stiff knotty figure (he looked like a German wooden toy), there was expressed a politic conciliation, which had no spontaneity in it. Both were flushed, flustered, and rumpled, by the late scuffle; and Wegg, in coming to the ground, had received a humming knock on the back of his devoted head, which caused him still to rub it with an air of ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... touch with the cosmic forces, over her book, "The Beautiful Within," her particular chapter being headed, "Psychology of Rest: Rhythms and Sub-rhythms of Activity and Repose; their Synchronism with Subliminal Spontaneity." Over this frank revelation of hidden truths Aunt Bell's handsome head was, for the moment, nodding in sub-rhythms of psychic placidity—a state from which Nancy's animated entrance sufficed to arouse her. As the proud wife spoke, she divested herself of ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... or gracious than the compliments passed between them in their subsequent correspondence. There are two published letters from Holbach in Mr. Hedgecock's recent study of Garrick and his French friends, excellent examples of the happy spontaneity and sympathy that were characteristic of French sociability in the eighteenth century. [19:27] Holbach in turn spent several months with ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... plain," cried the poorly dressed girl, with some spontaneity now. "For you are very pretty. But I ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... is the key-stone of the arch of a tottering civilization; let us destroy it. The true road to liberty, to equality, and to happiness, is atheism. No safety on earth, so long as man holds on by a thread to heaven.—Let nothing henceforward shackle the spontaneity of the human mind. Let us teach man that there is no other God than himself, that he is the Alpha and the Omega of all things, the superior being, and the most real reality." We have still to explain the nature of this spontaneity, free from every shackle. One of the editors of the journal ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... parallax, without calculable elements, which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, if the least mark of independence appear? The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense of being which ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... grimly as he held out a languid hand. He liked Miss Foster. She was a good sort, and she had stood by the boys nobly through the awful days after the fight. He liked her humor, too, though he sometimes had suspicions as to its spontaneity. Then his eye fell on the top envelope of the little package she had given him, and at the sight of the handwriting he caught his breath, and the blood rushed suddenly to his face. He closed his eyes for a moment in an effort ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... their restless, nervous, frequently erratic and aimless activity, bear witness to the fact that the mind of man has had revealed to it its own limitations, and is well on the way towards despair of ever arriving at truth. The Greek mind no longer exhibits that elasticity and spontaneity and enthusiasm in the search for truth, or that confidence in its results, which characterized the representatives of the best period of the thought of the race. The political fortunes of Greece do but typify the process which was going ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... the most interested—perhaps because his sensitive ears had recognized in it that peculiar inflection, the true ring of earnestness. For it was essentially a human cry, a cry of sorrow, a strange note charged in its very hoarseness and spontaneity with an unutterable pathos. It was as though it had been actually drawn from the heart to the lips, and long after the house had become deserted, Matravers stood there, his hands resting upon the edge of the box, and his dark face turned steadfastly ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... have molded their life. The chief objections to their system may be summarized in the statements, that it takes too little account of the value of the inexpert; that it tends to suppress latent spontaneity; and, especially in the sphere of government, that it ascribes to the expert a knowledge of the needs of the people such as no ruling class can ever possess. And it overlooks the highest aim of political life and activity, which ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... looked on, this love-making seemed an idyll without a disturbing breath. Joanna, though she had lost the gay spontaneity of her Paris holiday, smiled none the less adorably on Paragot and myself. She wore a little air of defiant pride when she introduced him to her acquaintance as "my cousin, Monsieur de Nerac," which was very pretty to behold. Convention forbade the announcement ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... purely secular work there is something, though less of this inequality, and its cause is not at all dubious. No poet, certainly no poet of merit, seems to have written with such absolute spontaneity and want of premeditation as Wither. The metre which was his favourite, and which he used with most success—the trochaic dimeter catalectic of seven syllables—lends itself almost as readily as the octosyllable ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... stole a look at the painter and at the pictures in the studio. Her expression and her glances revealed perfect propriety; her curiosity seemed rather absence of mind, and her eyes seemed to speak the interest which women feel, with the most engaging spontaneity, in everything which causes us suffering. The two strangers seemed to forget the painter's works in the painter's mishap. When he had reassured them as to his condition they left, looking at him with an anxiety that was equally free from insistence and from familiarity, without ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... the unhappy period from seven to fourteen when he who formerly was all grace and spontaneity discovers that he has too many arms and legs. How disagreeable the boy then becomes! Before, we liked to see him playing about the room. Now we ask why he is allowed to remain. For he is a ceaseless disturber; constantly ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... plays, as Mr Pinero found and pointed out at Edinburgh: both defeat the true end, but in the written book mere art of style and a naivete and a certain sweetness of temper conceal the lack of nature and creative spontaneity; while on the stage the descriptions, saving reflections and fine asides, are ruthlessly cut away under sheer stage necessities, or, if left, but hinder the action; and art of this kind does not there suffice to conceal ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... no spontaneity in men's actions, nor in anything that happens on this earth, it would be all the more difficult to imagine a first cause for all motion. For my own part, I feel myself so thoroughly convinced that the natural state ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... you are going to be a literary giantess it is well that you should be initiated into the mysteries of producing what I shall call the illusion of spontaneity. Now take this story here. Here on this old ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... dangerous," he said in the same key. In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Bells" and "Annabel Lee," commends itself to the many and the few. I have said elsewhere that Poe's rarer productions seemed to me "those in which there is the appearance, at least, of spontaneity,—in which he yields to his feelings, while dying falls and cadences most musical, most melancholy, come from him unawares." This is still my belief; and yet, upon a fresh study of this poem, it impresses me more than at any time since ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... quoted as using the word in the sense of office, or function. Surely this would suit Spinoza's definition of the mind. For he treats it as a centre of phenomenal activity amidst the infinite modes of the divine attribute. Its apparent individuality is a consequence of its spontaneity as a centre of action—always understood that the spontaneity is consistent with the absolute eternal order ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... adaptation, establishes itself as a result of the spontaneity of the exercises; the free development of a personality which grows and organizes itself is that which determines such an internal condition, just as in the body of the embryo the heart, in process of development, makes a place for itself in the space of the diastinum between the lungs, and the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... under their auspices. I suppose there was no personal feeling against me, only an Orthodox one. Well, no matter. It was a noble enterprise, better than any sectarianism ever suggested, and worthy of record, especially considering its spontaneity, ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... to express or even to feel regret," he answered, and his eyes twinkled delightfully; "if youth lost its spontaneity it would at one and the same moment lose its charm. Did your cry refer to this?" He pointed with his umbrella to a scrimmage which was taking place a few yards ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... milking-time, the blossoming of "high-boughed hedges"; but it is not every one who has sung out of the fullness of his heart and with a naive delight in that of which he sung: and so by reason of their faithfulness to every-day life and to nature, and by their spontaneity and tenderness, his lyrics, fables, and eclogues appeal to cultivated readers as well as to the rustics whose quaint speech he ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... none of the syllables which she was to work below. And it was to be worked at regularly for half an hour before bed-time. Trust Aunt Jane for seeing that any one under her dominion did what had been undertaken! Only thus the spontaneity seemed to have departed, and the work became a task. Fergus meanwhile had set his affections on a big Japanese top he had seen in a window, and was eagerly awaiting his weekly threepence, to be able to complete the purchase, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is the mind,' she said, 'and that is death.' She raised her eyes slowly to him: 'Isn't the mind—' she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, 'isn't it our death? Doesn't it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... to encompass by faithful plodding. Hard work is the price of all that is valuable. All the great strides in the world's achievements were made possible only by forced activity and prolonged effort. Spontaneity is a foreign element in the process of healthy and rugged development. The spider spins its web and the morning bespangles it with dew, creating a thing of beauty, but valueless. It would require the entire existence of several hundred silkworms ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... English usage, the Princess extends the hand, palm down, to favored guests, and these reverently touch the finger-tips and lift the hand to their lips. Perhaps the spontaneity of the American girls' welcome was esteemed a pleasing variety to the established custom. At all events, her Highness, true to her breeding, appeared not to notice any breach of etiquette, but took the proffered hands and ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... occasional use, and put back when the need is over. It is difficult to mention God to a Caucasian reader without inducing an artificial frame of mind. As there are people who put on for strangers and guests an affected, unnatural politeness different from their usual breezy spontaneity, so the Caucasian assumes at the thought of God a mental habit which can only be described as sanctimonious. God is not natural to the Caucasian; the Caucasian is not natural with God. The mere concept takes him into ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... more important subjects in the disguise of the parable, than it is in the open statement; that it is philosophy in both these cases, and not philosophy in one of them, and a brutish, low-lived, illiterate, unconscious spontaneity ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... fatality; that is to say, into the Mohammedan fate, which is the worst of all, because it does away with foresight and good counsel. However, it is well to explain how this dependency of our voluntary actions does not prevent that there may be at the bottom of things a marvellous spontaneity in us, which in a certain sense renders the mind, in its resolutions, independent of the physical influence of all other creatures. This spontaneity, but little known hitherto, which raises our empire over our actions as much as it is possible, is a consequence ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... Velasquez or Manet, he prophesied not merely the new artist or the new man of science, but the new man who is to free himself from his inheritance and to see, feel, think, and act in all things with the spontaneity of God. That is why he is a legendary hero to us, with a legend that is not in the past but in the future. For his prophecy is still far from fulfilment; and the very science that he initiated tells us how ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas, taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would have left any but a most ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... so intent on doing good to others, and on making others good, that they accomplish less than they would if their actions and intentions were less direct and obvious. I cannot here explain all I mean, but if my readers will study what Li Yu and Chuang Tsz have to say about "Spontaneity" and "Not Interfering", I think they will understand my thought. The theater, as I have already said, was in several countries religious in its origin; why not use it to elevate people indirectly? The ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct. He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images—which would be entirely ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... halves, and thus, at times when he could have earned forty pounds a day by sheer literary work, he would spend hours in answering people whom he had never seen, and, what is more remarkable, these "task"-letters were marked by all the brilliant strength and spontaneity of his finest chapters. He was the last of the true correspondents, and we shall not soon look upon his like again. With all the contrivances for increasing our speed of communication, and for enabling us to cram more varied action ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... at the glibness and spontaneity with which the words fell from her tongue. She even took a sort of secret joy in the dramatic values which that scene ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Garibaldi, scholars, artists, every form of the national character, were gratefully exhibited in reunions, of which he was the presiding genius, and to which his American friends were admitted with fraternal cordiality. It was then that his clear and strong mind often displayed itself with the spontaneity of his race. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... a sort of censorship was at work, an effective if comparatively modest precursor to that noble volunteer committee which was presently with touching spontaneity to fasten itself upon an astonished Ship of State before it could gather enough way to escape ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... practically no branch of literature that did not owe its inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature—more especially poetry—was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a Vergil, a Horace, and—most ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... August, 1861, and the first number of "Our Mutual Friend" appeared in May, 1864. This was an unusual interval, but the great writer's faculty of invention was beginning to lose its fresh spring and spontaneity. And besides he had not been idle. Though writing no novel, he had been busy enough with readings, and his work on All the Year Round. He had also written a short, but very graceful paper[30] on Thackeray, whose death, on the Christmas Eve of 1863, had greatly affected him. Now, however, he again ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... conjecture may be hazarded, the decision will probably depend mainly on one consideration, viz., which of the two systems is consistent with the greatest amount of human liberty and spontaneity. It is yet to be ascertained whether the communistic scheme would be consistent with that multiform development of human nature, those manifold unlikenesses, that diversity of tastes and talents, and variety of intellectual ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... complete. Everything spoke at once the stereotyped Society style of a dozen years ago (before Mr. Morris had reformed the outer aspect of the West End), entirely free from anything so startling or indecorous as a gleam of spontaneity in the possessor's mind. To be sure, it was very far indeed from the centre round-table and brilliant-flowered-table-cover style of the utter unregenerate Philistine household; but it was further still from the simple natural taste acd graceful ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... There is no spontaneity in the matter. It is simply the principle of creation, and acting under laws and by ways that, however ill-understood by us, have existed from the beginning ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... inadequacy. And who can fail to see that between the rich complexity of the workings of the whole mind and the means by which we would fain render them articulate, there yawns a gap which no effort can bridge over? Even the poet fails—much more the scientist! To refuse to take cognisance of the fresh spontaneity of feeling and intuition is to rob life of its higher joys and its ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... riding cavalcades to neighboring points of interest; some to visit certain notable mansions which the wealth of a rapid civilization had erected in that fertile valley. One of these in particular, the work of a breathless millionaire, was famous for the spontaneity of its growth and the reckless ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte
... of his part-writing. In spite of his remarks in Playford's book, it is plain that he looked at music horizontally as well as vertically, and constructed it so that it is good no matter which way it is considered. His counterpoint has a freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school. Though he was pleased with musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill. Handel frequently adopted his free contrapuntal ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... only too careful as it is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... depress, and our joy in Him must always be shaded by penitent sorrow for ourselves. But that necessary element of sadness in the Christian life is not the cause why so many Christian lives have little of the buoyancy and hope and spontaneity which should mark them. The reason rather lies in the lack of true union with Christ, and habitual keeping of ourselves 'in the love ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Clemens speak when I thought he quite failed; some burst or spurt redeemed him when he seemed flagging short of the goal, and, whoever else was in the running, he came in ahead. His near-failures were the error of a rare trust to the spontaneity in which other speakers confide, or are believed to confide, when they are on their feet. He knew that from the beginning of oratory the orator's spontaneity was for the silence and solitude of the closet where he ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... moment at which God selected it, with all its details, as the best which could exist; but it is carried on by the action of individual creatures (monads as he calls them) which, though necessarily obeying the laws of their existence. yet obey them with a "character of spontaneity," which although "automata," are yet voluntary agents; and therefore, by the consent of their hearts to their actions, entitle themselves to moral praise or moral censure. The question is, whether by the mere co-existence of these ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... Homer, Plato, Cicero, Bacon, Kant, Locke, Newton, Shakspeare, Milton have left a deep and permanent impression upon the forms of thought and speech, the language and literature, the science and philosophy of nations. And inasmuch as a nation is the aggregate of individual beings endowed with spontaneity and freedom, we must grant that exterior conditions are not omnipotent in the formation of national character. Still the free causality of man is exercised within a narrow field. "There is a strictly ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And it is this same lack of play that produces so many dull men and women; for the spirit of play is the spirit of youth and spontaneity and joy. Yet work and play have so much in common that it seems unfortunate indeed that all of us have not learned to retain our youth ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... in politics and morality and overstep that union between religion and the State which has for thousands of years supported society. According to his views, the practical wisdom of men could not have a higher object than the introduction into society of the greatest spontaneity and freedom, but precisely because of this one should safeguard as sacred and irrefragable the natural laws of society—one should respect the existing order of things and, continually verifying it, inculcate its rational sides, not overlooking nature for the sake of culture, or vice ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... all lies in the mere act of cutting up the teaching of the New Testament into five rules. It precisely and ingeniously misses the most dominant characteristic of the teaching—its absolute spontaneity. The abyss between Christ and all His modern interpreters is that we have no record that He ever wrote a word, except with His finger in the sand. The whole is the history of one continuous and sublime conversation. ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... sight worth seeing. The natural gayety of the Parisians, a characteristic noticed (if we are to believe the historians) as far back as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, breaks out in all its amusing spontaneity. If the day is fine, the entire population gives itself up to amusement. From early morning the current sets towards the charming corner of the Bois where the Longchamps race-course lies, picturesquely ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
