"Automaton" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not long since, a man talking to a bright woman on the train, and his manner of comporting himself set me to thinking of the peculiar ways men have of addressing themselves to women. Some talk to a woman very much as they might talk to the wonderful automaton around at the museum when it plays a game of chess. "Why, bless my soul, it really seems to be thinking! What apparent intelligence? What evident faculty of mental independence! It almost appears to possess the power of coherent thought!" Others sit in the presence ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... next twenty-four hours, my existence is that of an automaton merely. I know I am being conducted away from the spot where this awful tragedy was enacted. I am mounted behind my guard, to whose waist I am firmly bound by raw hide thongs. We encamp in a belt of cotton woods, near a small stream. Fires are lighted, food ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... Mantua. Bonaparte was much weaker, having only forty-two thousand, and of these some eight thousand were occupied in the siege of that place. Wurmser was a master of the old school, working like an automaton under the hand of his government, and commanding according to well-worn precept his well-equipped battalions, every soldier of which was a recruit so costly that destructive battles were made as infrequent as possible, because to fight many meant financial ruin. In consequence, like ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the Pole for slight articles of luxury. Men made perilous journies to possess themselves of earth's splendid trifles, gems and gold. Human labour was wasted—human life set at nought. Now life is all that we covet; that this automaton of flesh should, with joints and springs in order, perform its functions, that this dwelling of the soul should be capable of containing its dweller. Our minds, late spread abroad through countless spheres ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... up and down. And he looked to them so comical in his queer costume that they had a difficulty in suppressing their inclination to laugh. With a pensive air and a bent back, he walked, like an automaton, from the window to the door and the door to the window, taking each time the same number of steps and turning each ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... indicate that they had landed, always crowding forward, carrying the battle to his adversary, refusing to yield a step when to yield meant to evade punishment. Passion, deep and gripping, had made him for the moment an insensate automaton; he was devoid of any feeling except a consuming desire to punish the despoiler of ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... function—but his legs moved regularly. In the grasp of this mental, metal monster he was a mere automaton. Phobar noticed idly that he had to step down from a flat disk a dozen yards across. By some power, some tremendous discovery that he could not understand, he had been transported across millions of miles of space—undoubtedly to the ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... always slow and scant of speech, and the new-comer rarely opened his mouth, and then only to utter a monosyllable. His manner, too, was embarrassing; he turned his white and stony face from one woman to the other, like an automaton, but with a weird ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... the room. She seemed to be too much absorbed to know it was necessary for her to leave. Next day she would steal into the chamber as often as she could, to weep over his remains, and ponder his last words to her. She moved about the house like an automaton. Every duty performed—but an abstraction from all, which shewed her thoughts were busied else- where. Susan wished her to attend his burial as one of the family. Lewis and Mary and Jack it was not thought best to send for, as the season would not ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... often little in a transfer of a person who has tended a machine of one kind to a machine of a different kind. Instances there still are of manual skill brought to naught by the invention of a mechanical automaton that does the work more rapidly and accurately than the hand of man can do it; and the worker who possesses this skill must usually, in such cases, content himself with an employment where his more general aptitudes may stand him in good stead and insure him at least ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... entered alone into the wards, where I felt that I was without friendly encouragement and support. During the three days that intervened before the burial of Dr. Schmidt, I was hardly conscious of any thing, but moved about mechanically like an automaton. The next few days were days of confusion; for the death of Dr. Schmidt had left so many places vacant that some fifty persons were struggling to obtain some one of his offices. The eagerness, servility, and meanness ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... permission to eat. They all had tolerable stallions for their service, and seemed to live pleasantly enough, in their wild way. The fat, stumpy corporal, with his enormously broad pantaloons and automaton legs, went down to the fountain with his musket, and after taking a rest and sighting full five minutes, fired at a dove without hitting it. He afterwards joined us in a social pipe, and we sat on a carpet at the door of the guard-house, watching ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... reluctantly, as though still afraid. Then suddenly the banker's hoarse voice rang out through the room. All the time he had been sitting like an automaton. Now he was on his feet, swaying backward and forward, his eyes almost ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Thorndyke. "There is no reason to suppose that he knew how he was dressed. You have heard Jervis's description of his condition; that of a mere automaton. You know that without his spectacles he was practically blind, and that he could not have worn them since we found them at the house in Kennington Lane. Probably his head was wrapped up in the veil, and the skirt and mantle put on afterwards; ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... such unyouthful gravity, that the whole face seemed gloomed over, as when a heavy cloud shuts out the brilliant sunshine of an August day. He did not deign so much as a glance towards the visitors, but like an automaton blew the graceful bulb, shaped it upon his marver, with a light, skilful blow detached it from his blowing-iron, received from his assistant the foot and joined the two, with a dextrous twist and turn shaped the slender handle and added that, all the time keeping his "divining-rod" ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... of the possibility of winning the marquise; but from the moment in which his brother, with no apparent motive of personal interest, aroused the idea that he might be beloved, every spark of passion and of vanity that still existed in this automaton took fire, and he began to be doubly assiduous and attentive to his sister-in-law. She, who had never suspected any evil in this quarter, treated the chevalier at first with a kindliness that was heightened by her scorn for the abbe. But, before long, the chevalier, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE GANGES—1657 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... don't like him!" ejaculated Bessie. "You are always talking about Mr. Bradley, as if he had an automaton for a servant." ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... things. A day or two after that early morning when he had told the outlines of the Batesons' story to the two ladies who had entertained him at breakfast he had found her in Bateson's cottage with his wife. Bateson was dead, and his wife in that dumb, automaton state of grief when the human spirit grows poisonous to itself. The young girl who came and went with so few words and such friendly timid ways had stirred, as it were, the dark air of the house with a ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame. A mechanized automaton. Queen Mab, Pt. III. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... look up accordingly, with the action of an automaton which suddenly obeys the impulse of a pressed spring. But, strange to tell, not even the haste he had made to attend his patron's mandate, a business, as Master Heriot's message expressed, of weight and importance—nay not even the ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object,—all of them being subordinate to ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... Cleopatre of Marmontel, he fancied that he could reproduce the hissing of the asp, just as the automaton invented for the purpose by Vaucanson might have done it. The abortive effort made them laugh all the evening. The tragedy sank in ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... plunged the repentant sinners. For the last hour that he stood in the stream, his whole body was numb; he had ceased to feel life in his feet, and his arms worked with a mechanical stiffness like the arms of some automaton over which ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... before morning. The sleep was deep, and nothing seemed to arouse her. Gairdner mentions the case of a woman who, for one hundred and sixty days, remained in a lethargic stupor, being only a mindless automaton. Her life was maintained by means of the stomach tube. The Revue d'Hypnotisme contains the report of a young woman of twenty-five, who was completing the fourth year of an uninterrupted trance. She began May 30, 1883, after ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... left no definite impress upon my brain. I have indistinct remembrances of alternating between hope and despair, between joy and sorrow. I remember, too, that I was called upon to perform certain actions, but to this day I do not know what they were. I was more like an automaton than ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... of his free will," it is said, "makes him a mere machine, an automaton. Without liberty, he will no longer have either merit or virtue." What is merit in man? It is a manner of acting, which renders him estimable in the eyes of his fellow-beings. What is virtue? It is a disposition, which inclines ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... etiquette for him to do anything for himself: one Cardinal kneeling, holds the book open before him, another carries his handkerchief, a third folds and unfolds his robe, a priest on each side supports him whenever he rises or moves, so that he appears among them like a mere helpless automaton going through a certain set of mechanical motions, with which his will has nothing to do. All who approach or address him prostrate themselves and kiss his ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... this point, as has been done, they say, by Luther. If God has determined all things beforehand by a sovereign decree, if there really is no such thing as human choice, and all things occur according to a foreordained plan, man no longer has any responsibility. He is reduced to an automaton. Free will is denied him; he cannot elect by voluntary choice to engage in any God-pleasing action; for he is told that his natural reason is blinded by sin and his understanding darkened, rendering it impossible for him to discern good and evil, and leading ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... from opportunities of vice that their souls lay in no great danger of damnation. The activities of Considine were practically limited to his Sunday services, but though the softness of the climate might eventually have transformed him into a likeness of the ancient automaton who had preceded him, it was not in his nature to take things easily. He came of a vigorous stock. The clear, thin air of the Wiltshire downland that his ancestors had breathed makes for energy of temperament. At Roscarna he had given vent to this in the ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... who cannot make an error! The balance between the frigidly correct and the abominably loose is a most difficult one to maintain. It is, of course, desirable that the young student pass through a certain period of strict discipline, but if this discipline succeeds in making an automaton, of what earthly use is it? Is it really necessary to instruct our little folks to think that everything must be done in a "cut and dried" manner? Take the simple matter of time, for instance. Listen to the playing of most young pupils and you will hear nothing but a kind ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... train swept rustling over the stairs; behind her came a servant, not immediately in the wake of his mistress on the red carpet, but at the side along the wall with irreproachable gravity. The absurd contrast between the magnificent creature and the automaton following her brought a smile to ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... drive about in, with such tidy dukes as yours, comrade!" said the humble hackney-coachman to this automaton, who remained mute and impassible, without even appearing to know that he ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... ashamed to tell you, sir—I was a mere automaton, a machine, in the hands of others. A new publication was sent to me, with a private mark from my employer, directing the quantum of praise or censure which it was to incur. If the former were allotted to it, the best passages were selected; if condemned to the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... much from the actual things heard, the actual facts mastered, is the lecture-system valuable to the student, as for the method of study which he derives from it. He is no longer like an automaton, a school-boy guided by his teacher and text-book, but is spoken to as an independent thinker. Authorities are quoted, which he may consult at his leisure. No subject is exhausted,—it is only touched upon. He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... Council of the California Psychical Research Society. Dr. J. C. Anthony is a well and favorably known physician, who has practised here for many years, also a member of our Council. Dr. Cecil E. Nixon is a Dentist, best known as a Magician, and as the inventor of "Isis," a wonderful automaton which plays any tune you request of her on the zither. Mr. Henry Huppert is one of the partners in the Preston-Huppert X-Ray Laboratory, a man with scientific training and ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... being cheated. The idea he incarnates, that of a man whose soul is aflame with patriotism, is finely suggested, but an idea, even a great one, does not make an individuality. And in fact Insarov is not a man, he is an automaton. To compare Shubin's utterances with his is to perceive that there is no spontaneity, no inevitability in Insarov. He is a patriotic clock wound up to go for the occasion, and in truth he is very useful. Only on his deathbed, when the unexpected ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... at you," the bandit replied. He was appraising her already. "Turn around." She obeyed, like an automaton, "'Ow old ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... himself learns the authorities for his opinions only later on, when they serve merely to strengthen both them and himself; while the book-philosopher starts from the authorities and other people's opinions, therefrom constructing a whole for himself; so that he resembles an automaton, whose composition we do not understand. The other man, the man who thinks for himself, on the other hand, is like a living man as made by nature. His mind is impregnated from without, which then bears and brings forth its child. Truth that has been merely learned adheres ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... things for their growth and change and discipline and enlightenment. The present living idea informing the cosmos, is nobler than all forsaken perfection—nobler, as a living man is nobler than an automaton. ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... driver ahead was an automaton, a man whose brain did not know the meaning of fear. He knew that from his hideout Caleb Barter was directing the flight of the escaping car. He could fancy the old man of the apple-red cheeks, sitting in a chair in his hideout, his hands ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... courses: I asked the tempest its bourn, and questioned the winds of their path. This was not sufficient to satisfy my thirst for knowledge, and I searched in this lower world of new sources to content it. Unseen and unsuspected, I saw and agitated the springs of the automaton that we call 'the Mind.' I found a clue for the labyrinth of human motives, and I surveyed the hearts of those around me as through a glass. Vanity of vanities! What have I acquired? I have separated ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of judgment shuddered as one man, when he came to his awful disclosure, hitherto unsuspected, unimagined, of that second strangulation: as to feelings, he might as well have been a galvanized mummy, an automaton lay-figure enunciating all with bellows and clapper, for any sense he seemed to have of shame, or fear, or pity; he admitted his lie about the door, complimented Burke on the accuracy of his evidence, and declared Roger Acton not merely innocent, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... hands the mason's trowel would assuredly have been better adapted than the painter's pencil. It was the very dotage of incapacity. The colouring, the treatment, the coarse obtrusive mechanical touch, seemed those of a clumsily constructed automaton, rather than of a human painter. Thus musing, our artist stood for some time before the vile daubs that excited his disgust, gazing at them long after the train of his reflections had led him far from them; whilst the master of the shop, a little, gray, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Charlotte abruptly or ungraciously, upon any consideration. They gave me a home when I most bitterly needed one. They took me away from the dull round of schoolroom drudgery, that was fast changing me into a hard hopeless joyless automaton. My first duty is ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Bridget, turning instantly from a friend into an automaton, as was her custom on the rare occasions when I hardened myself to find fault. The words were submissive enough, but her manner announced that she had said her say, and would stick to it, though Herself, poor ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... noble scorn I heard recounted the history of our Proteuses of politics! With what disdainful glances I regarded the Turcarets of finance, lolling on the cushions of some magnificent carriage, and conducted by a laced automaton to the boudoir of some Aspasia. But if I heard told the mighty deeds of the Knights of the Round Table, or the valor of the crusaders celebrated in flowing verse; if chance placed in my hand the great actions of our modern Rolands, recounted in an army bulletin ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... the salute she got in acknowledgment was perfection; Jules faced about like a military automaton, strode off briskly, stopped at some distance to light a cigarette, and in effect faded out with the ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... much like lovers, Rainey fancied. They lacked the little intimacies that he, though he made himself somewhat of an automaton at the wheel, could not have failed to see. If the girl slipped, Carlsen's hand would catch and steady her by the arm; never go about her waist. And there was no especial look of welcome in her face when the doctor came ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... mastered all other feelings. Although she repeated to herself that she wanted never to see him again, Margaret could scarcely resist an overwhelming desire to go to him. Her will had been taken from her, and she was an automaton. She struggled, like a bird in the fowler's net with useless beating of the wings; but at the bottom of her heart she was dimly conscious that she did not want to resist. If he had given her that address, it ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... This colossal automaton, almost terrifyingly impersonal, loomed always above them, throwing its powerful and gigantic shadow across their lives. As they grew old enough to understand, it became to them the embodiment of occult and unpleasant authority ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... different with an automaton. Such a man is like a machine,—a spring. Weight carries him away, making him move and turn forever in the same direction, and with equal motion. He is uniform, and never changes. Once seen, he appears the same at all times and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... speechmaking at his own home, the ax-grinders in his interest rounding up audiences for him and herding them before his door. One of the two corpses, too, was galvanized into a kind of ghastly activity and became a talking automaton; but the other had been too long dead. In a few years more the decent tradition that a man should not blow his own horn will be obsolete in its application to the high office, as it is to all the others, but the popular saying will lose none of ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... spiritual in the song of the chaffinch. There he sits within sight, motionless, a little bird-shaped automaton, made to go off at intervals of twelve or thirteen seconds; but unfortunately one hears with the song the whirr and buzz of the internal machinery. It is not now as in April, when it is sufficient in a song that it shall be joyous; in the leafy month, when roses ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... stay on at this heart-breaking work, so do I," said Dayton-Philipps, and toiled gamely on at the pump. There he was still when day broke, sawing up and down like an automaton. But before the sun rose, utter weariness had done its work. His bleeding fingers loosed themselves from the break, his knees failed beneath him, and he fell in an unconscious stupor of sleep on to the wet ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... lost the thing itself, but they had lost the power of conceiving of it. Religion unquestionably is a state of mind towards God; and devotion is a mental act resulting from that state of mind. We cannot conceive of an automaton performing an act of devotion, or of being religious; and yet, if religion be what it is taken to be at Rome, there is nothing to hinder an automaton being religious, nay, far more religious than flesh and blood, inasmuch as timber and iron will not so ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... Hamden-place, in Kent. Exact Gilbert! most punctual of valet de chambres!—and a young fellow, as he is, too! It is admirable!—Ay, though he looks as if he were made of wood, and moves like an automaton, he has a warm heart, and a true English spirit—true-born English every inch of him. I remember him, when first I saw him ten years ago at his father's, Farmer Ashfield's, at the harvest-home; there was Gilbert in all his glory, seated on the top ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... repeated Miss Holmes after him, as though in polite acquiescence, but speaking as an automaton ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... untuneable harshness corresponded with the awkwardness of his figure. They were the first words which Mannering had heard him speak; and as he had been watching with some curiosity, when this eating, drinking, moving, and smoking automaton would perform the part of speaking, he was a good deal diverted with the harsh timber tones which issued from him. But at this moment the door opened, and ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... made to cramp human emotion and originality of thought in the individual into a straight-jacket from its earliest infancy; or to shape every human being according to one pattern; not into a well-rounded individuality, but into a patient work slave, professional automaton, tax-paying citizen, or righteous moralist. If one, nevertheless, meets with real spontaneity (which, by the way, is a rare treat,) it is not due to our method of rearing or educating the child: the personality often asserts itself, regardless of official and family barriers. Such a discovery ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... (ca. 950-1150) and attention may have been concentrated on the more mathematical protoclocks. Towards the end of the 12th century, however, there was a revival of the old tradition, mainly at the court of the Emperor Saladin (1146-1173) when a great automaton water clock, more magnificent than any hitherto, was erected in Damascus. It was rebuilt, after 1168, by Mu[h.]ammad b. 'Al[i] b. Rustum, and repaired and improved by his son, Fakhr ad-d[i]n Ri[d.]w[a]n b. Mu[h.]ammad,[18] who is most important as the author ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... revealing the sticks on which they had been draped. When Mr. Lavender saw this he called out in a loud voice Sir, you have deceived me. I took you for a human being. I now perceive that you are but a selfish automaton, rooted to your own business, without a particle of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... aumentar increase, enlarge, magnify. an, aun adv. yet, still, even, nevertheless. aunque conj. although. aura f. breeze, zephyr. aurora f. dawn, break of day, aurora. ausencia f. absence. autmata m. automaton, mere machine, puppet. avanzar advance, go forward. avariento, -a avaricious. avaro, -a avaricious, covetous. avaro m. miser. ave f. bird. aventura f. adventure, affair. avergonzarse ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... beginning to wear upon her, for she is not accustomed to our late hours, and sometimes falls asleep while Esther is dressing her. But go she must, for Wilford wills it so, and she is but an automaton to do ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... herself, it was a mere automaton that moved off in the dance and said the two or three lines that remained to her in the act as if nothing had happened, because all her mind and all her capacity for feeling were occupied and tested by ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... months after his arrival, Muriel had been to Roland Bleke a mere automaton, a something outside himself that was made only for neatly-laid breakfast tables and silent removal of plates at dinner. Gradually, however, when his natural shyness was soothed by use sufficiently to enable him to look at her when she came ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... The mesmerizer then led him, with his eyes shut, to the front of the stage, and pointed out to the spectators the phrenological development of his head; he then touched the bump of language, and set the seeming automaton talking. But here the professor was caught in his own trap. After once setting him going, he of the mnemonics refused to hold his tongue until he had given, to his weary listeners, the whole lecture he had delivered a few nights before. He pranced to and fro on the platform, declaiming in the most ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... again, and like an automaton—lifeless and thoughtless—she began putting the dingy, squalid room to rights. The Abbe helped her demolish the improvised screen; with the same gentle delicacy of thought which had caused him to build it up, he refrained from speaking to her now: he would not intrude himself ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... scene in Larry's, Fool Art sat in that wild abstraction which characterizes the unhappy class to which he belonged. He muttered to himself, laughed—or rather chuckled—shrugged his shoulders, and appeared to be as unconscious of what had taken place as an automaton. When the coast was clear he rose up and plucking Phelim's skirt, beckoned ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... not a woman, but a personified passion. The vehemence and strength were wonderful. It was in parts very touching. There was as fine an opportunity for Aricia to show some power as for Phedre, but the automaton who represented Aricia had no power to show. Oenon, whom I took to be the sister Sarah, was something of an actress, but her part was so hateful that no one could applaud her. I felt in reading 'Phedre,' and in hearing it, that it was a play of high order, and that I learned some little philosophy ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... spent therein, in which nothing happened in the way of development of germ diseases, and nothing happened to him except regular good food, pure drinking-water, and absolute isolation from contact with all life save the youth-god who, like an automaton, attended on him. ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... The woman's voice was on the edge of hysteria. She came through the crowd like an automaton, not seeing the people she ...
— The Cuckoo Clock • Wesley Barefoot
... which was thrown over the balustrade, was employed in watering the flowers: a man with movements so mechanical—with a face so rigidly grave in its tawny hues—that he seemed like an automaton made out of mahogany. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... will not, deem thee a deceiving, Illusive mockery of human feeling, A body organized, by fond caress Warmed into seeming tenderness; A mere automaton, on which our love Plays, as on puppets, when their wires we move. No! when that feeling quits thy glazing eye, 'Twill live in some ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... are exposed to are taken into consideration. Men early flattered and coaxed, and told they are fitted for the higher regions of genius and unfit for anything else,—that they are a superior kind of automaton and ought to move by different impulses than others,—indulge their friends and the public with freaks and caprioles like those of that worthy knight of La Mancha in the Sierra Morena. And then, if our man of genius escapes this ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... rode the mile more as an automaton than as a living, conscious human being. He had no memory of time, place, events—save for the instants of rationality he forced his will ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... disfavor a line-backed, dry cow, with one horn tipped rakishly toward her speckled nose; she blinked silently at wind and heat, and forged steadily ahead, up-hill and down coulee, always in the lead, always walking, walking, like an automaton. Her energy, in the face of all the dry, dreary days, rasped Pink's nerves unbearably. For nearly a week he had ridden left point, and always that line-backed cow with the down-crumpled horn walked and walked and walked, a length ahead of her most ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... your majesty that such is not the case," said Maelzl, touching a spring on the neck of the automaton, and taking ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... an automaton might have got up, and Donnington, pushing forward one of the painted chairs, drew the low, tapestry covered prie-dieu from ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... accompanying conscious purpose or meaning. Thus, for example, the plus sign may be a stimulus to perform the act of writing one number under another and adding the numbers, but the person performing the act will operate much as an automaton would unless he realizes the meaning ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Steadily—with a precision that was almost uncanny—the half-breed led the way. He did not hurry, he did not hesitate. He was like a strange spirit of the night itself, a voiceless and noiseless shadow ahead, an automaton of flesh and blood that had become more than human to Philip. In this man's guidance he lost his ...
— God's Country—And the Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... remained seated on his throne, looking straight before him, immovably. All the sea of human life and motion seemed to surge around and below him, and to die away into stillness about his feet. A censer was brought to him; and he raised his hand with the action of an automaton, and put the incense into the vessel, looking neither to the right ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator—such fancies are in dreams; then he regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward into his body, and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert and fierce as that ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... took the initiative, overcoming the bashfulness of that timid overgrown boy; and he, submissive rather than seeking, allowed things to take their course, like a superior being with thoughts absorbed in higher things, and responding to affairs of earth like an automaton. ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... mental flash that Wagg did know exactly what he was about in his tactics. Lacking all idea of the scheme, Vaniman had not the heart to begin to ask for any details of the big plan at the crucial moment. He allowed himself to be an automaton. It was easy to do one thing at a time, as Wagg commanded; knowing nothing about what Wagg intended to do. Vaniman was not in a position to delay matters by doubts as to the best way of doing the thing. He walked behind the board screen, conscious that his movements ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... sled whirled along. Once he stopped and mechanically gave the dogs a meal. He became transformed into an automaton, acting by some subliminal power that set his direction correctly and assisted to maintain his body in an ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... of business, and all for what—our wives and children! If they needed such a sacrifice we would not begrudge it, but the more they have the more they want, until the head of the family is a mere automaton—a machine ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... beaver cut it off again; again it dropped and refused to fall; he cut it off a third and a fourth time: still the tree stood. Then he gave it up. Now, so far as I can see, the only independent intelligence the animal showed was when it ceased to cut off the tree. Had it been a complete automaton, it would have gone on cutting—would it not?—till it made stove-wood of the whole tree. It was confronted by a new problem, and after a while it took the hint. Of course it did not understand what was the matter, as you and I would have, but it ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... consciousness. No mental analysis now; no long hours of retrospection, no tete-a-tete interviews with my soul. At times I felt as if I had lost my identity. I was a slave of the genie Gold, releasing it from its prison in the frozen bowels of the earth. I was an automaton turning a crank in the frozen stillness ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... doll automaton she accepted the booklet from him; like a doll automaton she followed Charley Chubb out into the street, and her limbs were trembling so she could ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... Griggs severely, puckering his old, smooth, lined face, "are you a chess automaton or a human pincushion? Cherry's crying her heart out for you—calling 'Bob, Bob,' every second, with them holding her hands and keeping her from ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... still hammering on the rudiments! The wretched boy, I should say, was quite unspoiled by the inevitable familiarities of the journey. He turned out at each stage the pink of serving-lads, deft, civil, prompt, attentive, touching his hat like an automaton, raising the status of Mr. Ramornie in the eyes of all the inn by his smiling service, and seeming capable of anything in the world but the one thing I had ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and said in a low but very grave and impressive tone, "Nathanael, my darling Nathanael, throw that foolish, senseless, stupid thing into the fire." Then Nathanael leapt indignantly to his feet, crying, as he pushed Clara from him, "You damned lifeless automaton!" and rushed away. Clara was cut to the heart, and wept bitterly. "Oh! he has never loved me, for he does not ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... bit of manhood? Steam machinery is slowly taking out of his hands even this fragment of intelligent work, and he is set at feeding and watching the great machine which has been endowed with the brains that once were in the human toiler. Man is reduced to being the tender upon a steel automaton which thinks and plans and combines with marvelous power, leaving him only the task of supplying it with the raw material, and of oiling and ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... all the others, and before leaving the bed, he had the nurse take the patient's temperature. "Only two degrees of fever," he commented mechanically; "that is very good. Has his wife—has any one been in to see him?" The head nurse, who stood like an automaton at the foot of the bed, replied that she had seen no one; in any case, the doorkeeper would have refused permission unless explicit orders had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... with the action of an automaton, which moves at a touch of a spring, and half hanging upon her husband, half dragging herself on by her own efforts, had nearly reached the door of the room, when Hartley following, asked if he ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... feeling in it as in the quarter that I handed to the stage-driver. I have spent thousands on your education, but you don't sing for me, you don't read to me, you never think of soothing my overtaxed nerves by cheerful, hopeful talk. Were I a steel automaton, supplying your wants, I should answer just as well, and in that case you might remember the laws of matter and apply a little oil occasionally. What are the motives of your life but dress, admiration, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... and yours kindred blood runs, because it is hardly possible to do otherwise. The land gave me life, that is all; I never knew till lately that it was anything to be thankful for. It is not sufficiently a country to kindle enthusiasm; it has no national life, you know,—is an automaton put through its motions by paid and cunning mechanists. I thought it right to obey orders and serve it. But now you are my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... has acquired the habit of leaving the door open. Now occasionally scolding him, when it is specially cold, and now and then shutting him up in a closet for half an hour, will never cure him of the fault. But if there were an automaton figure standing by the side of the door, to say to him every time that he came through without shutting it, Door! which call should be a signal to him to go back and shut the door, and then sit down in a chair near by and count ten; and if this slight penalty was invariably enforced, he would ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... relief. He saw him at the head of his firm, hated and despised by every employee. He saw him deceiving Madam Bartlett, sneering at Mr. Ranny's efforts at reform, terrorizing little Miss Leaks. Then he had a swift and relentless vision of himself in his new position, a well trained automaton, expected to execute Mr. Bangs's orders not only in the factory but in the ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... somewhat suspicious of systems. I am more than suspicious of any constrained formal method, bringing up children in a mere manual drill, crimping them into a mould of mincing proprieties, and making them speak with an automaton click. Perhaps the most headlong young men that can be found, are those who spent their early days in a sort of strait jacket with a clock-work movement. They were wound up so tight when they were boys, that now they take great pleasure in going fast, and running ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... hand that held the lather brush, turned about like an automaton, tripped over the mat, recovered himself with an effort, and preserving what dignity a man can preserve in pink-striped pyjamas and a sun helmet, stalked majestically back to his quarters. Half-way across ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... at. Her world was the artificial one of hotels, and shops, and numbered streets—in the real world, of which the lonely wastes of the Mendips provided no meager sample, she was a profound ignoramus, a fat little automaton equipped with atrophied senses. But she blundered badly in composing herself so cozily for the remainder of the run to Bristol. Medenham had dwelt many months at a time in lands where just such simple indications of mood on the part of man or beast had meant to him all the difference between ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... surrounding world. Save in the deep centre of her soul, where she agonized, she seemed to have lost all capacity for emotion. Nothing moved her, or even interested her. She sat in the house, and ate a little, and talked a little, like an automaton. She walked about the streets like a bored exile, but an exile who has forgotten his home. Her spirit never responded to the stimulus of environment. Suggestions at once lost their tonic force in the woolly cushion of her apathy. If she continued to live, it was by inertia; ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... animal body is an automaton, which is competent to perform all the animal functions in exactly the same way as a clock or any other piece of mechanism. As he puts the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... a thing of lead, and the blood it pumped was cold, for the winter had closed in upon it. The elasticity of my life, that ineffable resiliency of the soul which makes us more than beasts of burden, was gone forever. An automaton, informed only with the material life, remained,—the spirit followed that fleeting figure down the hill. More than twenty years have passed and still the ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... not fit to teach children, or to be with them: I had already reduced the boy to little better than an automaton; I had broken his fine spirit with my rigid severity; and I should freeze all the sunshine out of his heart, and make him as gloomy an ascetic as myself, if I had the handling of him much longer. And poor Rachel, too, came in for her share of abuse, as usual; he ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... thinks he finds a responsive echo in her. There is dancing, and she waltzes him off his feet. A Dr. Coppelius comes in to say he has been swindled by Spalanzani. He slips into Olympia's room, from which a noise of breaking is heard. Coppelius, out of revenge, has smashed Olympia. She was only an automaton. ...
— The Tales of Hoffmann - Les contes d'Hoffmann • Book By Jules Barbier; Music By J. Offenbach
... twenty-five years wondering why the devil I liked you, and now I know. Why, you cold-blooded, efficient, human automaton, you've actually got a heart! Bow! wow! Faithful Fido Skinner was just a-tugging at the chain and dragging the dog house after him in his efforts to eat me up! I hope I go bankrupt if ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... major at his mechanical pursuits. He quoted Allan's extravagant account of the clock, and expressed his own anxiety to see it in terms more extravagant still. He paraded his superficial book knowledge of the great clock at Strasbourg, with far-fetched jests on the extraordinary automaton figures which that clock puts in motion—on the procession of the Twelve Apostles, which walks out under the dial at noon, and on the toy cock, which crows at St. Peter's appearance—and this before a man who had ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... sharper than a savage. What is the cause of this difference? The peasant has always done as he was told, what his father did before him, what he himself has always done; he is the creature of habit, he spends his life almost like an automaton on the same tasks; habit and obedience have taken ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... middle of the parlor carpet, was stretched Meshech Little, dead drunk. In nearly every chair was a barefooted, coatless lout, drunk and snoring with his hat over his eyes, and his legs stretched out, or vacantly staring with open mouth at Desire, who, with a face like ashes and the air of an automaton, ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... Posh, a man of a most scientific imagination, assigned the role of hero in his story to a marvellous automaton. Unfortunately for him he was not content with generalities, but described the process by which this artificial superman was produced in such minute detail that his publishers realised that it might be positively prejudicial ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... antitheses Apex apices Appendix appendixes or appendices Arcanum arcana Automaton automata Axis axes Basis bases Beau beaux or beaus Calx calces or calxes Cherub cherubim or cherubs Crisis crises Criterion criteria Datum data Diaeresis diaereses Desideratum desiderata Effluvium effluvia Ellipsis ellipses Emphasis emphases Encomium encomia ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... reasons it had been decided to start the Cast-iron Canvasser there, and then move him on to more populous and active localities if he proved a success. They sent up the Genius, and one of their men who knew the district well. The Genius was to manage the automaton, and the other was to lay out the campaign, choose the victims, and collect the money, geniuses being notoriously unreliable and loose in their cash. They got through a good deal of whisky on the way up, and when they arrived at ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... twos to the hall, the lowest grade leading. Every boy was in his best clothes, and every one showed his nervousness in his own peculiar way. Keith laughed hysterically a few times before they started, and then he turned into an automaton that breathed and moved and heard and saw only as part of a gigantic machine. His own individuality seemed to melt and become a mere drop in the all-exclusive individuality ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... coolly, quietly, relentlessly judged men and women and their works; neither loving nor hating, pitying nor despising his race; looking neither to right nor left; laboring steadily as a thoroughly well-balanced, a marvellously perfect intellectual automaton. ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans |
