"Acquisitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... stud, a white waistcoat, black moustache, and hawk-like face. This was, in fact, one of those interesting houses occupied by people of the upper middle class who have imbibed a taste for smart society. Its inhabitants, by nature acquisitive and cautious, economical, tenacious, had learnt to worship the word "smart." The result was a kind of heavy froth, an air of thoroughly domestic vice. In addition to the conventionally fast, Shelton had met there one or two ladies, who, having been divorced, or having yet to be, still ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... fat, squat, slimy-looking person in a black alpaca coat, with a black umbrella for protection from the sun, and an air of sour dissatisfaction for general business purposes—an air that was given the lie direct by a small, acquisitive nose and bright brown eyes that surely never made bad bargains. Yasmini's hooded figure brought him to a halt just at the corner, where the little road below the Blaines' wall joined the wider road that led down-hill. Business is business, and time a ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... insatiate that it not only combines with itself but seizes upon other substances, particularly those having an acquisitive nature like its own. Such a substance is carbolic acid (phenol) which, as we all know, is used as a disinfectant like formaldehyde because it, too, has the power of attacking decomposable organic matter. Now Prof. Adolf von Baeyer discovered in 1872 that when phenol and formaldehyde were ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... no exposure, and she need not be "disgraced" in the eyes of her neighbors. Hugh would simply return the spoons to their owner, who certainly would never hold it against Sarah. But after that, should Brutus be invited to the old lady's house, his actions would be carefully watched lest his acquisitive propensities again get the better ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... is equaled perhaps only in the finely drawn distinctions of philosophy and in the painstaking statements of limitations and the rapid generalizations of pure mathematics; and let us not forget the value of discipline, outgrown and unheeded though it be in the acquisitive life of ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... He has no imagination. His feeling runs straight in the direction of sensuality. He's as ignorant and as clever as they're made. He's never done a stroke of honest work in his life, and despises all those who are fools enough to toil, me among them. He is as acquisitive as a monkey and a magpie rolled into one. His constitution is made of iron, and I dare say his nerves are made of steel. He's a rare one, I tell you, and I'll make a ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... their conquerors. They were merely intelligent animals—and that was all they would ever be until the human race changed its cultural pattern or was overthrown. The one alternative was as unlikely as the other. Humanity had met some fierce competitors, but none with its explosive acquisitive nature, and none with its drive to conquer, colonize, and rule. And probably ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... order to turn somewhere. Her old friend was at home and by extreme good fortune alone; looking up from her book, in her place by the window, she gave the girl as she came in a sharp glance over her glasses. This glance was acquisitive; she said nothing, but laying down her book stretched out her two gloved hands. Laura took them and she drew her down toward her, so that the girl sunk on her knees and in a moment hid her face, sobbing, in the old woman's lap. There was nothing ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... two ends of twine, and dropped the balls dexterously one on either side of the tree, the string thus remaining steadied against possible winds by the weight at the bottom. Then, talking carelessly, he led his friend on, both hoping that no acquisitive small boy might chance to poke about along the base of the wall during the afternoon. Rukn-ud-din and Amrodh Chand had already been informed that their services were desired that night, and at the appointed time they slipped away from their quarters into the darkness and joined ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... collects postage stamps can infect his whole school with the complaint, and make them all jealous of his fine specimens. England has been collecting, for many centuries, islands and suchlike; she is paying the penalty of her acquisitive mania. She has infected others with the craze and cannot help incurring their envy, seeing that they are now equally acquisitive, but less fortunate. All the ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... her. She had meantime married another man, and was now a widow. In 1730 he married her. Meantime, entering into the printing business on his own account, he often trundled his paper along the streets in a wheelbarrow, and was intensely occupied with his affairs. His acquisitive mind was never idle, and in 1732 he began the publication of the celebrated "Poor Richard's Almanac." This was among the most successful of all American publications, was continued for twenty-five years, and in the last issue, in 1757, he collected the principal matter of all preceding numbers, ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... his skill and daring in the matter of foraging to keep themselves from actually dying of hunger on their journey. Yet there was about him such a prudent and circumspect air that he might well have hesitated to pick up a pin that "wasn't his'n." He was evidently of an acquisitive turn, however, for over his shoulder was slung a bag which appeared to contain a collection of the most heterogeneous and unserviceable rubbish conceivable. "Eh!... possono servire!" ... was all he would volunteer on the subject when I once chaffed him on the subject ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... far, her idea of "l'arnin'" embraced the three R's only. And, yet, the "fotched-on" teachers at the "college" thought her the most voraciously ambitious pupil they had ever had, so unflaggingly did she toil, and the most remarkably acquisitive, so fast did she learn. But her studies had again been interrupted, and Miss Grover, her teacher, riding over one day to find out why her prize scholar had deserted, met in the road an empty "jolt-wagon," ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... was to be smarter than his fellows, get his hands, as he put it, "on the dibs," and have a good time. He was, in fact, the sort of man who had made England and America what they were. The luck had been against him so far, but that was by the way. He was a mere aggressive and acquisitive individual with no sense of the State, no habitual loyalty, no devotion, no code of honour, no code even of courage. Now by a curious accident he found himself lifted out of his marvellous modern world for a time, out of all the rush and confused appeals of it, and floating ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... that good theatres, owing to the excessive rents they have to pay, can never be kept going without a State subsidy. But these admirable theatres can hardly be called the vehicles of a high native culture. Their famous Reinhardts are more efficient only because more acquisitive than our own Jewish impresarios. The ideas they have acquired are chiefly Russian or English: and they have profited by the ideas of Granville Barker and Gordon Craig in order to produce the plays of Shakespeare and Shaw—(just as industrial Germany profited by the ideas ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... do it in a peaceable way. That fellow wasn't interested in peace, by any means. So I think it's a government ship, and an unfriendly government. They sent that ship out either for scientific research, for trade research and exploration, or for acquisitive exploration. If they were out for scientific research, they'd proceed as would the inventor, to establish friendly communication. If they were out for trade, the same would apply. If they were out for acquisitive exploration, they'd investigate the planets, the sun, the people, only to ...
— The Ultimate Weapon • John Wood Campbell
... reduced them to a few scattered communities and some stragglers, and a legend, the admiration of boyhood. Boys they were, pugnacious, hunters, loyal, and cruel, older than the merrier children of the South Seas, younger and simpler than the weedy, furtive, acquisitive youth who may figure our age and type. "We must be a Morally Higher race than the Indians," said an earnest American businessman to me in Saskatoon, "because we have Survived them. The Great Darwin has proved it." ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... when through lack of further ambition, or rather of the sting of that spur of necessity which drives most men on, he rested upon his oars, and in practice abandoned his labours, drifting down the tide. No man of high intelligence and acquisitive brain can toil arduously for a period of years and suddenly cease from troubling to find himself, as he expects, at rest. For then into the swept and garnished chambers of that empty mind enter seven or more blue devils. Depression marks him for its own; melancholy ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... years the sensitive, injured and pathetic little orphan had become a plump, rosy beauty of the Russian type, a woman of bold and determined character, proud and insolent. She had a good head for business, was acquisitive, saving and careful, and by fair means or foul had succeeded, it was said, in amassing a little fortune. There was only one point on which all were agreed. Grushenka was not easily to be approached and except her aged protector ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... her none of the acquisitive pleasure he had expected. To her they were interesting as museums might have been. She could not, she did not see the use of them. The women thronging the windows and departments of a great store through which they walked roused ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... Notwithstanding our busy and acquisitive propensities, we of the metropolis have found time to wish one another a happy new-year, and to send friendly greetings to our country cousins also. We don't like to take the step from one year into another without a coup d'amitie. Besides ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... Chinese, who are also a cold-blooded race: slow, watchful, inquisitive, acquisitive, and full of the sense of humour. There are fishes in the Great Aquarium whose faces twinkle again ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... true that the subordination of our affairs to this spirit of gain placed our world in the hands of a peculiar, acquisitive, uncreative, wary type of person, and that the mass of people hate serving the spirit of gain and are forced to do so through the obsession of the whole community by this idea of Private Ownership, but ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... unwavering pursuit of a certain kind of well-being congenial to her—goes steadily on, less susceptible to temporary humiliation than many peoples much less excitable on the surface, and always coming back into sight when the commotion is over, acquisitive, money-making, profit-loving, uninjured in any essential particular by the most terrific of convulsions. This of course is to be said more or less of every country, the strain of common life being always, thank ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... the stereotyped dodge for compromising a lady's reputation is to force a present or a loan of money on her. Nowadays Lovelace's anxiety is just the other way—to keep the acquisitive propensity of his liege lady within tolerable bounds. It would be a great mistake to suppose that a woman can play this game without special gifts and aptitudes for it. It requires peculiar talents, and peculiar antecedents. First and foremost, she must have ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... asked. For no cloak had been found on the sands, and it was unlikely that she had worn it into the water. The disappearance of the blue cloak was the only point which seemed to contradict the theory of accidental drowning. There were those who held that the cloak might have been carried off by some acquisitive individual. But it was not likely; the islanders are, as a rule, honest, and it was too late in ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... Wilfrid the Gunner, but this particular scion was known by the ignominious and expressive label of Wilfrid the Snatcher. From his late schooldays onward he had been possessed by an acute and obstinate form of kleptomania; he had the acquisitive instinct of the collector without any of the collector's discrimination. Anything that was smaller and more portable than a sideboard, and above the value of ninepence, had an irresistible attraction for him, provided that it fulfilled the necessary condition ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... class inclines toward France, the learned class toward Germany, and the mercantile class toward England. The zeal for France grew cold after the Commune. Against Germany a secret animosity has arisen, generated by the fear that in her acquisitive tastes she might turn toward Holland. This feeling still ferments, though it is tempered by community of interest ...
— Holland, v. 1 (of 2) • Edmondo de Amicis
... tepid and self-regarding a creed is not a religion. Christianity cannot allow its sphere to be determined by the convenience of politicians or by the conventional ethics of the world of business. The whole world of human interests was assigned to it as its province (The Acquisitive Society). ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... d'Europe—there is only an armed and trading continent, the home of slowly maturing economical contests for life and death and of loudly proclaimed world-wide ambitions. There are also other ambitions not so loud, but deeply rooted in the envious acquisitive temperament of the last corner amongst the great Powers of the Continent, whose feet are not exactly in the ocean—not yet—and whose head is very high up—in Pomerania, the breeding place of such precious Grenadiers ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Bull is a prosperous and wealthy citizen somewhere, the proprietor of a curved waistcoat and a gold watch. Possessions other than these he would regard with the amiable tolerance of a philosopher regarding a child with toys. So strongly acquisitive a nature must win the particular little battles which it is fitted to wage. When a conscienceless mind is buttressed by a pugnacious temperament then houses and land, and cattle and maidservants, and such-like, the small change of ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... the greatest crimes of the slave system was that in practically denying to the slave the right to the product of his labor or any part thereof; it, to all intents and purposes destroyed his acquisitive faculty; thus he had small incentive to labor when free; and as the years went by, accumulated little in the shape of capital; showed little interest in profitable investment of his savings, if he were so fortunate as to have any. The great number of secret orders, and other schemes for ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... idea as yet unborn. Under these circumstances, with the growth of modern machinery, the ownership of the implements of production passed, by what Marx looked upon as a kind of historical fatality, into the hands of a class whose activities were purely acquisitive, and had no true connection with the process of production at all; and this class, he said, constitutes the capitalists of the ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... but fulfilled itself within the narrow boundaries of village-communities—was it not, I say, natural there, or, if you like, was it not intended there, that another side of human nature should be developed—not the active, the combative, and acquisitive, but the passive, the meditative, and reflective? Can we wonder that the Aryans, who stepped as strangers into some of the happy fields and valleys along the Indus or the Ganges, should have looked ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... much for man in his natural state, breathing his natural air, surrounded by his natural horizon, and luxuriating in his natural prerogatives. But this is a very limited view of the question. Man is expansive, aggressive, acquisitive. Vox populi, vox Dei. Having acquired, he wills to acquire. Acquisition suggests acquisition. Conquest promotes conquest. And, speaking of conquests, the greatest of all conquests is that which a man obtains over himself—provided always that he does obtain it. This secured, he may ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... were all Jews and all very rich: Mannheim was the son of a banker: Mai the son of the manager of a metallurgical establishment: and Ehrenfeld's father was a great jeweler. Their fathers belonged to the older generation of Jews, industrious and acquisitive, attached to the spirit of their race, building their fortunes with keen energy, and enjoying their energy much more than their fortunes. Their sons seemed to be made to destroy what their fathers had builded: they laughed at family prejudice and their ant-like mania for economy and delving: they ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... our minds are merely acquisitive, storing up impressions and information; and it prolongs that period of acquisition to maturity by always throwing facts in our way. Its purpose is not to "sow doubts," far from it, for that would have for its ideal mere intelligence ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... The verbal memory seems to be an exception to this statement, however, for it may be abnormally cultivated without involving to any profitable extent the other faculties. But only things that are rightly perceived and rightly understood can be rightly remembered. Hence whatever develops the acquisitive and assimilative powers will also strengthen memory; and, conversely, rightly strengthening the memory necessitates the developing and training of the other powers." (R.N. Roark, Method in ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... which exist independently of the individual's environment. Hunger and thirst imperiously check the tendency to laziness, or heedlessness, and stimulate to industriousness and prudence. To this day the mere need of food and clothing and shelter is the main bulwark of these virtues. The acquisitive impulse, which is also rather early in appearance, has an increasing share in this sort of moralization. The craving for action, which is the natural result of abundant nervous and muscular energy, the combative instinct, the joy of conquest and achievement, and ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... expect to find the master hunger specially active through the many chances presented for exploitation after the fall of feudalism—beginning, let us assume, with the invention of power machinery—the "Age of Steam". It is apparent that from that time to our own day, man's acquisitive tendency has so expanded, that if we were capable of an unbiased opinion it might be said to be a form of megalomania gripping the entire white race, where highly-developed commerce and industry are found in ...
— Crime: Its Cause and Treatment • Clarence Darrow
... the Bight of Tyee, a quarter of a century passed. A man may prosper much in twenty-five years, and Hector McKaye, albeit American born, was bred of an acquisitive race. When his Gethsemane came upon him, he was rated the richest lumberman in the state of Washington; his twenty-thousand board-feet capacity per day sawmill had grown to five hundred thousand, his ten thousand ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... establishment, and how we knew what was going on in the world I cannot tell; yet in some way it penetrated our seclusion. In such a small and socially affiliated school, what one knew, all the others soon imbibed. We were every one of us Yankee boys, acquisitive and resolved to make the most of ourselves and our small opportunities. The library of the institution contained about a hundred volumes, and of these some were religious books. There was a ragged, ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee |
