"Atavism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chord, extracting from the sombre facts of city life a throbbing, many-tinted romance, even as out of that foul coal-tar some, who know the secret, craftily distil most delicate perfumes and colours exquisite. The bard of the future ... h'm! Will he ever appear? As an atavism, perhaps. Take away from modern poetry what appeals to primitive man—the jingle and pathetic fallacy—and the residue, if any, would be better ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... is the love idea in him, that it has suscitated all that is inherent and essential in the character. It sent him to Boulogne so that he might fight a duel; and the other day a nun left her convent for him. Curious atavism, curious recrudescence of a dead idea of man! Say, is it his fault if his pleasures are limited to clandestine visits; his fame to a summons to appear in a divorce case; his danger to that most pitiful of modern ignominies—five shillings a week? ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... long as the matrimonial candidate himself is not a criminal, the ancestral criminality should constitute no bar to the marriage. It is not likely to show itself atavistically in the children. Altogether a good deal of nonsense has been written about atavism. And people forget that the same rules of heredity that are applied to physical conditions cannot be applied to spiritual and moral qualities, the latter being much more dependent upon environment ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Coke, rascal though he was, and pot-bellied withal, was no Falstaff. Rather did he suggest the present-day atavism of some robber baron of the Middle Ages, whose hectoring speech bubbled forth from a stout heart. But the ragged ex-President heeded him not. After a moment of placid scrutiny of his enraged countenance by those bright, watchful ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... remotest ages, to the depths of the geological night, and does not hesitate to regard these cruelties as "remnants of atavism," the lingering furies of an ancient strain, and he ventures a profound and ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... conscience, for it is all we have to trust to for the stability of character. My poor lad called me his Australian mother. When I saw his real mother, I wondered more and more what sort of a husband she had, or what atavism Edward drew from to produce a character so unlike hers. I heard nothing from herself of what she went through, but from her friends I gathered that he had several outbreaks, and cost her far more than she could afford. She paid everything that he owed in Adelaide, except ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... loafer will be extinct. The sponge and the parasite will have perished. Even crime itself, so the socialist tells us, will diminish to the vanishing point, till there is nothing of it except here and there a sort of pathological survival, an atavism, or a "throwing back" to the forgotten sins of the grandfathers. Here and there, some poor fellow afflicted with this disease may break into my socialistic house and steal my pictures and my wine. Poor chap! Deal with him very gently. He is ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... The Dream A Ruler of Men The Atavism of John Tom Little Bear Helping the Other Fellow The Marionettes The Marquis and Miss Sally A Fog in Santone The Friendly Call A Dinner at ——* Sound and Fury Tictocq Tracked to Doom A Snapshot at the President An Unfinished Christmas Story The Unprofitable ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... a more tragic interpretation, from which the fanatic and the place-hunter would recoil—when too late. The blatant publican who strangles a neighbourhood in the toils of usury and illicit drink, and the bestial survivor of half-forgotten murder-rings take note of these signs. The atavism of cruelty returns. Emboldened by Mr. Birrell's bland acquiescence in milder prologues to Home Rule, a new plan of campaign is, even now, being devised, charged with sinister consequences from which all men in 1903 trusted ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... Norman, and, according to those who knew him best, many of his traits of character show that atavism is not always ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... retrogression of species, which shows signs of a former state already overcome, atavism. The same term may be applied to the advanced section of the Jewish population, which has listened to the call of the Nationalists. They have retrogressed from a universal view of things to a philosophy fenced in by boundary lines; from the glorious ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... "The Redemption", is intended to portray a righteous transformation from conventional false morality to true Christian life, but in reality presents a very repulsive picture of bestial atavism. The meaner character was not "reformed by mercy", but merely withheld from wholesale vice by isolation. Mr. Hart is so plainly in earnest when he relates this dismal tale as a sermon, that we must not be too harsh in questioning his taste or condemning his free standards ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... age of reproduction appears to be the principle underlying longevity. There does not appear at first sight to be much connection between such distinct and apparently disconnected phenomena as 1, the orderly normal progress of development; 2, atavism and the resumption of feral characteristics; 3, the more ordinary resemblance inter se of nearer relatives; 4, the benefit of an occasional cross, and the usual sterility of hybrids; 5, the unconsciousness with which alike bodily ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler |
