"Adoptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... conversation may assist it, but adopt neither blindly and implicitly; try both by that best rule God has given to direct us—reason. Of all the truths do not decline that of thinking. The host of mankind can hardly be said to think; their prejudices are almost all adoptive; and in general I believe it is better that it should be so, as such common prejudices contribute more to order and quiet than their own separate reasonings would do, uncultivated as they are. We have many ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... wife should compete in amateur operettas with the duchesses in question, for the most part of comparatively recent origin; but he held that a gentleman may take his amusement where he finds it, that he is quite at liberty not to find it at home, and that even an adoptive daughter of his house who should hang her head and have red eyes and allow herself to make any other response to officious condolence than that her husband's amusements were his own affair, would have forfeited ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... adoptive son of Little Turtle, who led the Indians at St. Clair's defeat, and he had fought on the side of the savages in that battle. But after it was over he foresaw that the war must end in favor of the white ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... victorious general, Bonaparte; the emperor, Napoleon. There was likewise a change in this person's handwriting analogous to the change in his nationality and opinions. It was probably to conceal a most defective knowledge of French that the adoptive Frenchman, as republican, consul, and emperor, abandoned the fairly legible hand of his youth, and recurred to the atrocious one of his childhood, continuing always to use it after his definite choice of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... that so many of the monuments still preserved comparatively intact should have been set up by the adoptive line of the so-called Antonines, from Trajan to Marcus Aurelius, and that the two monster columns, the one in Piazza Colonna and the one in Trajan's Forum, should be the work of the last and the first ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... though devious. He was preparing to qualify for a place on the board, for there was going to be a vacancy by superannuation in about five years. This was down South, in the slavery days. It was the nature of the negro then, as now, to steal watermelons. They stole three of the melons of an adoptive brother of mine, the only good ones he had. I suspected three of a neighbor's negroes, but there was no proof, and, besides, the watermelons in those negroes' private patches were all green and small and not up to indemnity standard. But in the private patches of three other negroes ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Her adoptive mother had twice found her at the window and had forbidden her, not unkindly but very positively, to look out into the street. Arsinoe had followed her unresistingly into the interior of the house, but as soon as she knew that Paulina was out or engaged, she slipped ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... seen such tenderness lavished upon infants as upon the pet dogs that the women carry about with them. Though they are so deficient in adhesiveness to family ties, that wives seek other husbands, and even children desert their parents for adoptive homes, the tie of race is intensely strong, and they are remarkably affectionate to each other, sharing with each other food, clothing, and all that they possess. There are no paupers among them but the lunatics and the lepers, and vagrancy ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... chamber furnished in dark oak and leather of a reign or two ago, sat Sir Richard Everard at a vast writing-table all a-litter with books and papers; and Sir Richard watched his adoptive son with fierce, melancholy eyes, watched him until he grew ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... high birth. Darrell's eyes were of that clear gray which it is difficult to distinguish from blue by day and black at night; and his rich brown hair, which he could not consent to part with, even on the promise of a new and modish peruke from his adoptive father, fell in thick glossy ringlets upon his shoulders; whereas Jack's close black crop imparted the peculiar bullet-shape we have ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... irritation, had, strangely enough, remained unsmudged in his memory; but the passage suggested nothing, alas! out of which he could fabricate a sermon. Could it have proved otherwise with a heart that was quite content to have God no nearer him than a merely adoptive father? He found at the same time that his late interview with the soutar had rendered the machinery of his thought-factory no fitter than before for weaving a tangled wisp of loose ends, which was all he could command, into the homogeneous ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... the gifts of Joshua Bates (of London), and since enriched by the city and private donors, Theodore Parker among them. But after conversation with two or three friends, I had decided that Harvard College was the right beneficiary, as being the mother real or adoptive of a great number of your lovers and readers in America, and because a College is a seat of sentiment and cosmical relations. The Library is outgrown by other libraries in the Country, counts only 119,000 bound volumes in ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... these and other methods, therefore, Andrea learnt not a little in his youth; and the competition of Marco Zoppo of Bologna, Darlo da Treviso, and Niccolo Pizzolo of Padua, disciples of his master and adoptive father, was of no small assistance to him, and a stimulus to ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... It may be that, in accordance with a custom which obtained during the generations that followed, and which possibly originated about this period, this daughter of Osorkon III. was only the adoptive ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 7 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... afternoons, and the pale splendor of her auroral nights. Never was city so faithfully explored; never did city so abound in objects of interest; for Kitty's love of the place was boundless, and his love for her was inevitable friendship with this adoptive patriotism. ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... present Rajah of Bhuderee, a fine, handsome, and amiable youth, of sixteen years of age, who is now learning Persian. He was one of the many chiefs who took leave of me yesterday, and the most prepossessing of all. His adoptive mother, however, absorbs the estates of her weaker neighbours, by fraud, violence, and collusion, like other landholders, and the dispossessed become leaders of gang robbers ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... the true explanation of the Babylonian practice of adoption is clear from the case mentioned above in which Bel-Katsir was prevented from adopting his step-son, because his uncle and adoptive father, whose property would then have passed to the latter, objected to his doing so. It was entirely a question of inheritance. Bel-Katsir had been adopted in order that he might be his uncle's heir, and consequently the uncle had the right of deciding ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... active life are indicated in the merits: but the acts of the gifts pertaining to the contemplative life are indicated in the rewards, for the reason given above. Because to "see God" corresponds to the gift of understanding; and to be like God by being adoptive "children of God," corresponds to the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... keeping with the simple kindliness of the great town whose homelikeness arises from its immense habitability. This always strikes the New-Yorker, whether native or adoptive, if he be a thoughtful New- Yorker, and goes about the different regions of the ampler metropolis with an abiding sense of the restricted spaces where man may peacefully dwell, or quietly lodge over-night, in his own city. In assimilating ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... grew out of childhood into girlhood, her attitude towards her adoptive father changed. In the great matters of her life he still cared for her, planning always for her good, and withholding from her nothing suited to her station in life that money could buy. In the matter of her music, Aunt ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... understood, and that race has a great deal to do with community of blood. If we once admit the Roman doctrine of adoption, our whole course is clear. The natural family is the starting-point of every thing; but we must give the natural family the power of artificially enlarging itself by admitting adoptive members. A group of mankind is thus formed, in which it does not follow that all the members have any natural community of blood, but in which community of blood is the starting-point, in which those who are connected by natural ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... first care as emperor was to write to the Senate an assurance like that which had been given by Nerva, that he would neither kill nor degrade any senator. He ordered the establishment of a temple and cult in honor of his adoptive father, but he did not present himself at Rome for nearly two years after his accession. Possibly he had taken measures before Nerva's death to secure the revenge which Nerva craved, but probably ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... hands as a house on a rock—a house from whose open doors and windows, open to grateful, to thirsty millions, the higher, the highest knowledge would shine out to bless the land. In this house, designed as a gift, primarily, to the people of his adoptive city and native State, the urgency of whose release from the bondage of ugliness he was in a position to measure—in this museum of museums, a palace of art which was to show for compact as a Greek temple was compact, a receptacle of treasures sifted to positive sanctity, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... great idea to the actual birth is apt to be obstructive to national pride. It is even said that the Chinese of centuries ago understood the value of the screw-propeller—for inventing which our adoptive citizen Ericsson stands in bronze ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... which besought him to aid the Greek or Armenian tyrant of Edessa. As Alexius had done to his brother, so this chief welcomed Baldwin as his son; but Baldwin, having once entered into the city, cared nothing for the means which had brought him thither, and the death of his adoptive father was followed by the establishment at Edessa of a Latin principality which lasted for fifty-four, or, as some have thought, forty-seven years. Baldwin had anticipated the unconditional surrender of Samosata; but the Turkish governor had some of the Edessenes in his power, and he refused ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... brought forward a robe embroidered with the imperial emblems, the most prominent of which was the Rising Sun. I was divested of the dress lent me by Katahashi, and my adoptive father flung the ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... laws concerning many other things, so did he upon adoption, which they call adoptive laws; and this he in particular did to preserve the number of families. Charondas did nothing new, except in actions for perjury, which he was the first person who took into particular consideration. He also drew up his laws with greater elegance ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... little as an adoptive Californian in his most earnest mood." While they talk—Campbell bending over the teapot, on which Mrs. Somers keeps her hand—the others form a little ...
— Five O'Clock Tea - Farce • W. D. Howells
... is the story of a girl who, having been found as an infant by a villager, is brought up by his wife, and is a kind of general pet, till an accident causes a rich widow to adopt her. On the death of her adoptive mother Hetty, who is left unprovided for, is taken by the widow's relatives to be educated with a view to her gaining her livelihood as a governess, an event which is prevented by a rather ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... triumph for medical science, for national efficiency, and the cause of humanity generally. Even on the lower financial plane, it is easy to see that an enormous saving of public and private money will thus be effected. The Act is adoptive, and not compulsory. This was a wise precaution, for an Act of this kind cannot be effectual unless it is carried out thoroughly by the community adopting it, and it will not be adopted until a community has clearly realized its advantages ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis |
