"Faculty" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and they were soon slowly ascending the mountain. He felt that this was his special opportunity, not to break her trustful unconsciousness, but to reveal his power to interest her and make impressions that should be enduring. He exerted every faculty to please, recalling poetic and legendary allusions connected with the trees, plants, and scenes by which they ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... not, however, extinct in Spain, a country where poetry seems to be an inherent faculty. One is constantly reminded of the Spanish proverb, De poetas y de locos, todos tenemos un poco (We have each of us somewhat of the poet and somewhat of the fool). No one can tell whence the rhymed jeux d'esprit come; they seem to spring spontaneously ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... Institutions has been somewhat extensive. As was said at the beginning of the chapter, the great freedom and simplicity of the Mildmay methods, as well as the happy faculty that its directors possess of utilizing all varieties of individual talent, make this deaconess establishment one that is full of valuable suggestions to the similar institutions that are now arising in American Methodism. No working force is wasted; if a deaconess ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... pioneers and the worst of colonists. Tardily, upon their trail, came the English and the Dutch, slow to acquire but strong to hold; not so rash in adventure, nor so adroit in intrigue, as fond of fighting, but with less of the gift of the woods, and much more the faculty for government. There was little interchange of friendliness and trade between the rival colonists; and Frenchmen were as rare on Manhattan Island as Englishmen on the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... animals have never been modified by any act of deliberation and forethought on their own part. Recent researches have thrown absolutely no light upon the origin of life—upon the initial force which introduced a sense of identity, and a deliberate faculty into the world; but they do certainly appear to show very clearly that each species of the animal and vegetable kingdom has been moulded into its present shape by chances and changes of many millions ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... great day for Brownsville, it was a great day for Thayer and Noyse, it was a great day for Alfred. Charley Stowe had another faculty, shy in most agents, memory. He remembered the editor and the office force, particularly the latter. He gave Alfred his first sight of the inner sanctorum of the show world, namely, the dressing rooms. He introduced him to big, good-natured Dr. Thayer, to natty little Charley Noyse, ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... February 28, 1807, and, consequently, is in his sixty-third year, although he has lost little of the elasticity of his step or his business faculty. ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... dumb.—We might indeed, if we chose it, candidly confess to one another that we are greatly swayed by these feelings, and are by no means so rational in all points as we could wish; but this would be a betraying of the interests of that high faculty, the Understanding, which we so value ourselves upon, and which we more peculiarly call our own. This, we think, must not be; and so we huddle up the matter, concealing it as much as possible, both from ourselves and others. In Books indeed, wherein ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... stood by Jabez, who I must say stood by his job in that respect, but I guess they went out into the hall, I thought I ketched a glimpse of 'em, as I havin' regained my faculty, run in. We got in jest after the deluge poured out agin, higher, louder and more steaminer than ever, and when what few scraps of plaster remained on the settin' room had fell victims to the bilin' flood. ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... opposite of that aimed at; so words, it is true, serve to make thought intelligible—but only up to a certain point. If words are heaped up beyond it, the thought becomes more and more obscure again. To find where the point lies is the problem of style, and the business of the critical faculty; for a word too much always defeats its purpose. This is what Voltaire means when he says that the adjective is the enemy of the substantive. But, as we have seen, many people try to conceal their poverty of thought under a ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Balcarras's Memoirs. But the fullest account of these proceedings is furnished by some manuscript notes which are in the library of the Faculty of Advocates. Balcarras's dates are not quite exact. He probably trusted to his memory for them. I have corrected ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with a heart capable of feeling and knowing the immense beauty and value of the gift which God hath bestowed upon me. Sure, love vincit omnia; is immeasurably above all ambition, more precious than wealth, more noble than name. He knows not life who knows not that: he hath not felt the highest faculty of the soul who hath not enjoyed it. In the name of my wife I write the completion of hope, and the summit of happiness. To have such a love is the one blessing, in comparison of which all earthly joy is of no value; and to think of her, is ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unreasonably fond of Eleanor, though she recognized her faults, unconsciously exerted a great deal of influence over her. How she finally managed at the instigation of her upper-class friend, Dorothy King, and with the help of Miss Ferris, a very lovable member of the faculty, to extricate Eleanor Watson from an extremely unpleasant position, and finally to make her willing and even eager to finish her course at Harding, is told at length in "Betty Wales, Freshman." There are also recorded many of the good times that she and her house-mates and a few other friends ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... of machine work are also reflected in certain economies of measurement. The faculty of self-registering, which belongs potentially to all machinery, and which is more utilised every day, performs several services which may be summed up by saying that they enable us to know exactly what is going on. When to self-registration is applied the faculty of ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... my indispensable duty to lay at your Majesty's feet the reasons which induced me to believe that my residence in this kingdom can be no longer useful to that service, to which I will beg your permission to say I have dedicated every hour and every faculty since my arrival. And as those reasons cannot be deposited in the office with safety to the interests of both kingdoms, and as, for many reasons, it might not be judged eligible that they should fall into the hands of every description of gentlemen who aspire to high office, I have ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... d'Artagnan looked or listened with avidity. Unfortunately the light had been removed into another chamber; but the eyes of the young man were accustomed to the night. Besides, the eyes of the Gascons have, as it is asserted, like those of cats, the faculty ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a faculty of self-pity, but my pride promptly refuses the slightest offer of sympathy ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... I am the son of my mother so completely—even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed them—that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which, unfortunately in my case, has never been cultivated; a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... real fear and delight. She was, so to speak, shy before the multitude of the stars, and in this she had possessed herself of the only force which can prevent enjoyment being as black and barren as routine. The faculty of being shy is the first and the most delicate of the powers of enjoyment. The fear of the Lord is ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... who had it, and could tell, so she said, when anything was about to happen to any of her family, though she couldn't predict events concerning persons who were not 'blood relations,' as she termed them. Don't be frightened, Dick, but I do think that I must really possess the same faculty!" ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... acquaintance, I will not now say, friendship; for it has some time been known by those who know him, that he has no friendships; that he is incapable of forming any; he can serve or desert a man, or a cause, with constitutional indifference; and it is this cold hermaphrodite faculty that imposed itself upon the world, and was credited for a while by enemies as by friends, for ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... and affecting pages in all music. One must wonder at the elasticity and richness of the harmonic texture—which, while it is incurably "irregular," is never crude or inchoate; at the distinction of the melodic line; at the rhythmical variety; at the masterly and individual orchestration. No faculty of trained perception is required justly to value the excellences of Debussy's score. There is great beauty, great eloquence, in this music. It has sincerity, dignity, and reserve, yet it is both deeply impassioned and enamoringly tender; and ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... was of the slightest, her social advantages were great. Pleasure-loving Dr. Burney had a delightful faculty of attracting witty and musical friends to enliven his home. Fanny's great unnoticed gift was power of observation. The shy girl who avoided notice herself, found her social pleasure in watching and listening to clever people. Perhaps a Gallic ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... week-day lectures if possible. In company with Horace Davis, who enjoyed his acquaintance, I called on him at the Occidental Hotel. He was the most approachable of men—as simple and kindly in his manner as could be imagined, and putting one at ease with that happy faculty which only a true ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... then over the mountains afoot to the blue-grass regions of Kentucky— the dark and bloody ground. Please remember, patient reader, that I write entirely from memory. I have no data or diary or anything to go by, and memory is a peculiar faculty. I find that I cannot remember towns and battles, and remember only the little things. I remember how gladly the citizens of Kentucky received us. I thought they had the prettiest girls that God ever made. They could ...
— "Co. Aytch" - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment - or, A Side Show of the Big Show • Sam R. Watkins
... sketch his purpose beforehand in words is regarded as a wonder, and every artist and writer possesses that faculty. But gestation, fruition, the laborious rearing of the offspring, putting it to bed every night full fed with milk, embracing it anew every morning with the inexhaustible affection of a mother's heart, licking it clean, dressing it a hundred times ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... what this marker meant; but Lalage, who even then had a remarkable faculty for getting at the naked truth of things, did not even pretend ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... marvellous revolution might he not effect! Mr. Wells himself has outlined such a revolution in one of his most thoughtful romances, In the Days of the Comet. From the fact that it does not occur, may we not fairly suspect that the Invisible King is a creation of the same mythopoeic faculty which engendered the wonder-working comet with its aura ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... but which should be attended to nevertheless. It is at this point that the will must step in and take command. If it has not the strength to do this, it is in so far a weak will, and steps should be taken to develop it. We are to "keep the faculty of effort alive in us by a little gratuitous exercise every day." We are to be systematically heroic in the little points of everyday life and experience. We are not to shrink from tasks because they are difficult or unpleasant. Then, when ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... toward form, mind in its struggle for the true. The former is guided by physical force, and the extinction of the aberrant. The latter, in its highest exhibition in a conscious intelligence, can alone guide itself by the representation of law, by the sense of Duty. Such an intelligence has both the faculty to see and the power to choose and appropriate to its own behoof, and thus to build itself up out of those truths which are "from everlasting ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... want of a profession, he had resolved to devote himself to a career which in England has been seldom entered upon by persons who can live on their own means. Without being a poet, Glyndon had also manifested a graceful faculty for verse, which had contributed to win his entry into society above his birth. Spoiled and flattered from his youth upward, his natural talents were in some measure relaxed by indolence and that worldly and selfish habit of thought which frivolous companionship ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his years, to add his full share to the gaiety of the company. By reason of his reading and his excellent memory, he soon became the best story-teller among his companions; and even the slight training gained from his studies greatly broadened and strengthened the strong reasoning faculty with which he had been gifted by nature. His wit might be mischievous, but it was never malicious, and his nonsense was never intended to wound or to hurt the feelings. It is told of him that he added to ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... handmaid of happiness. It enriches life. Pleasant but not silly humor and wit are therefore altogether desirable in a paper. Few days in anybody's life are devoid of incidents that tickle the fancy. Material for good humorous stories is abundant everywhere. The faculty of recognizing it when it is seen, and the ability to present it effectively, however, need a little training. To make a beginning in these directions is the object of the exercises ...
— Practical English Composition: Book II. - For the Second Year of the High School • Edwin L. Miller
... 10, R.V.). The discernment already mentioned was intended for spiritual discrimination. They were to be enabled to distinguish, to prove, and thereby to approve. As Lightfoot points out, "love imparts a sensitiveness of touch, a keen edge to the discriminating faculty in things moral and spiritual." In things spiritual at least love is not blind, but keen-sighted. It is endowed with a spiritual discernment which is able to distinguish not only between good and bad, but between good ...
— The Prayers of St. Paul • W. H. Griffith Thomas
... Everything is bi-lateral in the domain of thought. Ideas are binary. Janus is a fable signifying criticism and the symbol of Genius. The Almighty alone is triform. What raises Moliere and Corneille above the rest of us but the faculty of saying one thing with an Alceste or an Octave, and another with a Philinte or a Cinna? Rousseau wrote a letter against dueling in the Nouvelle Heloise, and another in favor of it. Which of the two represented his own ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... shepherds' dogs in the wilds of Egypt as not having this faculty; and Columbus found the dogs which he had previously carried to America, almost to have lost ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... years, I am told. His talent for details amounts to positive genius. And with this goes the ability to originate and build up and keep ever growing his vast business operations. And this man is but one of a very large class in our day of specialized organization. This faculty of controlling both the whole, and each detail, is a bit of the image of God in these men. Only man is ever less than God. The best organization slips sometimes, somewhere. But God never fails. Each of us is personal to Him. He can think ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... a greater extent than any one else, the faculty enjoyed by the great in power or position, of compromising and dividing those beneath him. Manicamp darted a look full of reproaches at the musketeer. D'Artagnan understood the look at once, and, not wishing to remain beneath the weight of such an accusation, advanced a step forward, and said; ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... prelates, theologians, learned university men, even simple priests and monks often, save a very few who, with the noble Thomas More, thought that "twenty years of an easy life could not without folly be compared with an eternity of bliss." The reasoning faculty of the mind, nourished on "speculations," had replaced faith, and, every thing of the supernatural order being obliterated, nothing was left but worldly wisdom and material aspirations ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... intangible shadow of pomp and luxury, while the substance was actual penury. But her inborn fertility of invention, her abundant resources, her tact in accommodating herself to circumstances, and her inexhaustible energy, had endowed her with the faculty of making the best of her contradictory position, and the most of the ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... shopkeeper. His name—but I could never learn whether it was his real one, or a nickname that had grown out of his habits and success in life—was Gathergold. Being shrewd and active, and endowed by Providence with that inscrutable faculty which develops itself in what the world calls luck, he became an exceedingly rich merchant, and owner of a whole fleet of bulky-bottomed ships. All the countries of the globe appeared to join hands ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is curious. The whole world and all its marvelous distractions seem to have resolved themselves into the curt sentence, "It rains." And somehow the great financier's faculty for the glib manipulation of platitudes which has earned him a reputation as a powerful economist seems for the moment to have abandoned him. His eyes remind one of a boy standing on tiptoe and staring over a fence at ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... That this faculty is one of the most important in War-time for every Cavalry soldier can hardly be open to doubt. From the same point of view I must enter a protest against the absurd misuse of maps in Peace-time. Of course, the men, and ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... this, and you will be surprised how every page of it will give you increased light. You will see that God holds you absolutely responsible for every iota of capacity and influence He has given you, that He expects you to improve every moment of your time, every faculty of your being, every particle of your influence, and every penny of your money for Him. When you once get this light, it will be a marvelous guide in all the other particulars and ramifications of your life. Study your plans. How men in earthly warfare study plans of stratagem, and adopt all ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... jackal which barked with the same tone as any common dog.[36] An interesting account has been given by Mr. G. Clarke[37] of some dogs run wild on Juan de Nova, in the Indian Ocean; "they had entirely lost the faculty of barking; they had no inclination for the company of other dogs, nor did they acquire their voice," during a captivity of several months. On the island they "congregate in vast packs, and catch sea-birds with as much address as foxes could display." The ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... was forthwith written down, so as to impress it on our memories, and none of us have yet forgotten it. It was singular, moreover, how the imitative faculty gained strength among us. We children acquired the habit of speaking of all our garden-plants by such outlandish names as father then taught us,—not seriously, of course, but as a capital piece of fun. We knew no more of relations and affinities than he, and so ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... a girl, but she knows what she is talking about. She understands, because she is a girl, perhaps. Women have that faculty born in them. Banners and flags, and bands playing patriotic airs, and the feeling that the world is watching, have an inspiring effect on the most timid of men. Who told you that a soldier was never afraid, young sir? Whoever it was did not know what he was talking about. Yes, I have ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... was a man who needed to be seen through tight places until the end, as we had occasion to know by the urgent note he sent us on a Saturday night, more than once, from the Cafe Royal, his favourite haunt in his later years, where a variety of unavoidable accidents, with a curious faculty for repeating themselves, would keep him prisoner until his friends came ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... at an early age and his work was acceptable from the first. His parents removed to New Jersey while he was a boy and he was graduated from the State Normal School and became a member of the faculty while still in his teens. He was afterward principal of the Trenton High School, a trustee and then superintendent of schools. By that time his services as a writer had become so pronounced that he gave his entire attention ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... knew his family name) was a man of letters, and had had a very valuable and expensive library sent over for his use. Moreover, he was highly gifted with the faculty of communicating his knowledge to others in a pleasant and agreeable manner. He was an enthusiastic lover of art and poetry; he could read and even speak several modern languages, and was passionately ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... artist of mediocre creative talent but great aims and amazing belief in himself. He had a fine critical faculty which was shown in his appreciation of the Elgin marbles, in opposition to the most respected authorities of his day. Mainly through his insistence they were secured for the nation which thus owes him a boundless debt ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... to be obtained at the Faculty Registry, or Vicar-General's Office, or Diocesan Registry Office of the Archbishops or Bishops, either in the country, or at Doctors' Commons, or by applying to a proctor. A licence from Doctors' Commons, unlike others, however, is available throughout ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... of the faculty whom thou knowest this hint.—There could but one inconvenience arise from it. The APOTHECARIES would find their medicines cost them something: but the demand for quantities would answer that: since the honest NURSE would be the patient's taster; perpetually requiring repetitions ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... such like, must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things, either retire into nurseries, and work for children, minors, and semifatuous persons of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel fabric into the dust cart, and betake them, with such faculty as they have, to understand and record what is true, of which surely there is and forever will be a whole infinitude unknown to us, of infinite importance to us? Poetry will more and more come to be understood as nothing but higher knowledge, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... he really had great ability he had not the good fortune of an opportunity to show it; and he lives in history rather as a man from whom much was expected than as a man who achieved (p. 158) much. One faculty, however, not of the best, but serviceable, he had in a rare degree: he thoroughly understood all the artifices of politics; he knew how to interest and organize partisans, to obtain newspaper support, and ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... Even at this early stage I could see that Gretchen had the faculty of making persons forget what they were seeking, and by the mere sound of her voice. And it was I who wound ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... and faculty, is found in divers substances, or parts of simple Medicaments, Gallen shewes in the first Booke of his simple Medicines, and the seventeenth Chapter, bringing the example of Milke; in which, three substances are found, and separated, that ...
— Chocolate: or, An Indian Drinke • Antonio Colmenero de Ledesma
... the lives and adventures of a goat, "Billy Whiskers," his wife, Nannie, and their descendants. The family have a strain of the adventurous spirit which leads them into many serious and laughable mishaps. Mrs. Montgomery has the happy faculty of writing stories about animals which always amuse and please the children. Each book has over fifty black and white illustrations and six full page pictures in colors by ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... wider range than the ear and fathoms the heavens and sweeps the earth and sea, whilst the ear hears distinctly but within a very narrow limit, hardly a stone's throw. When the eye, then, loses its marvellous faculty and sees no longer the light of day and the countenances of friends, let the ear do what it can to make up for the loss by every cheering word of sympathy and hope. In God's Providence there is ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... counting-house, and wrote. I looked over his shoulder, admiring his clear, firm hand-writing; the precision, concentrativeness, and quickness, with which he first seemed to arrange and then execute his ideas. He possessed to the full that "business" faculty, so frequently despised, but which, out of very ordinary material, often makes a clever man; and without which the cleverest man alive can never be ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... that Tom McMahon has no clear recollection of Field, who was in college only about six months and was not a fraternity man. There are so many coming and going! Nor that the faculty should be mindful of the lawless, irresponsible boy, and not of the genius that developed on its own lines and was never conventionalized but always remained a sinner however brilliant, and a flayer of good men unblessed with a saving sense of humor. If there is any kind thought for me ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... are equal to those I have suffered, eternity will be of short duration there, for no created energy can support them for one single month, or week. I have been buffeted as never living creature was. My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility. I was even hung by the locks over a yawning chasm, to which I could perceive no bottom, and then—not till then, did I repeat the tremendous prayer!—I was ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... out of the darkness of her heart, Lancelot's image rose before her stronger than all, tenderer than all; and as she remembered his magical faculty of anticipating all her thoughts, embodying for her all her vague surmises, he seemed to beckon her towards him.—She shuddered and turned away. And now she first became conscious how he had haunted her thoughts in the last few months, not as a soul to ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... used with it unless absolutely necessary. A flat piece of cork or rubber should be placed inside the ink-bottle when this pen is used, otherwise it is liable to be smashed by striking the bottom of the bottle. The faculty possessed by the Japanese brush of retaining its point renders it also available for use as a pen, and ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... being doing, or done, than the time when, but indeed the ideas are undistinguishable."—Booth's Introd., p. 69. "Nobody would doubt of this being a sufficient proof."—Campbell's Rhet., p. 66. "Against the doctrine here maintained, of conscience being, as well as reason, a natural faculty."—Beattie's M. Sci., i, 263. "It is one cause of the Greek and English languages being much more easy to learn, than the Latin."—Bucke's Classical Gram., p. 25. "I have not been able to make out a solitary instance of such being the fact."—Liberator, x, 40. ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... words were a dose almost too bitter to be swallowed. A flood of tears now gushed from the eyes of Jones, and every faculty of speech and motion seemed to have deserted him. It was some time before he was able to obey Allworthy's peremptory commands of departing; which he at length did, having first kissed his hands with a passion difficult ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... enterprise without capital, these hardy pioneers returned to the East and endeavoured to organize a trading company from amongst their French compatriots. But the enthusiasm of the men who had seen could not awaken response in the men who had not seen. The faculty of faith was not very highly developed in these French habitants by the St. Lawrence. But the zeal of Radisson and Groseilliers was unquenchable. They tried Boston in vain, and then betook themselves to France, where they were not any more successful, except that they got a letter of introduction ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... Presbyterianism; her answers to the questions given her when arraigned before the Sessions for having left the Church; her conversation on Orthodoxy with some Hicksites who called on her, and her arguments on silent worship. They all show remarkable reasoning power, great lucidity of thought, and great faculty of expression for so young ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... his liveliness of mind, his experience, his good sense, his patience as a listener, his comparative youth even—his power of adapting himself to these stiff and crusty characters, a power learned among other things in his political life, where he had acquired something of the faculty (good or bad as might be) of making himself all things to all men. But though he amused himself with them all, there was in truth but one man among them in whom he really felt much interest; and that one, we need hardly say, was Hammond. It was not often that he found the old gentleman in a ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in at the window and teaches nice little boys and girls to float through the air. I was surprised that anyone should be so singularly ignorant of child-nature as to hold that children really believe these things. Children have a wonderful and special faculty of "make-believe," which is not the same as "belief." All the time when a child is indulging in "make-believe" (a sort of willing self-illusion or waking dream) its real, though tender, reasoning-power is merely "suspended," ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... forced to poetize the truth, the question remains an open one, Which is the nearest to truth, a pessimist or an optimist? Truth is a virtue more palpable and less shadowy than we think; It is not easy to speak the unvarnished, uncorrupted truth (so the lawyers tell us). The faculty of observation differs, and the faculty of language is variable. Some people have no intellectual apprehension of the truth, although they morally believe in it. People who abstractly revere the truth have never been able ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... poetical faculty and scholarly taste is seen, also, in his translations; and would not a translation of Dante's great poem be the crowning work ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... over birds and beasts. If you desire to be their masters, you must, first of all, love the dumb creatures. Where love is, all things are possible. Bull-finches, in particular, have a strongly developed faculty for attaching themselves. And the simple logic is easy to follow out. In the training already described, music and pleasure—that is, the food and sunlight, which constitute Bully's pleasure—are inseparably ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... life is distributed; but among reasonable animals one intelligent soul is distributed: just as there is one earth of all things which are of an earthly nature, and we see by one light, and breathe one air, all of us that have the faculty of vision and all that ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... often both hate and malign those unhappy men who are insensible to God's mercies? And I fear this unchristian spirit swells darkly, with all its venom, in the marble of our hearts, not because our brother is insensible to these mercies, but because he is insensible to our faculty of persuasion, turning a deaf ear unto our claim upon his obedience, or a blind or sleepy eye upon the fountain of light, whereof we deem ourselves the sacred reservoirs. There is one more question at which ye will tremble when ye ask it in the recesses of your souls; ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... again to Holyhead ere the sun of the longest day has set. And as surely as the couplet about the bridge argues great foresight in the man that wrote it, so surely does the englyn prove that its author must have been possessed of the faculty of second sight, as nobody without it could, in the middle of the seventeenth century, when the powers of steam were unknown, have written anything in which travelling by steam is so distinctly ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... bobbed to the surface of Mrs. Gouverneur's thoughts as she talked with Millard. It was that her niece's future might somehow hang on her decision. She was not a matchmaker, but she had a diplomatic faculty for persuading things to come out as she wished. Mr. Millard would be a most eligible husband for any woman whose expectations in life were not unreasonably great. Her practical mind went a step farther and she saw that in the event of anything ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... faculty of the eye, upon which Mr. De Quincey dwells so strongly, I have myself experienced. Indeed, it has been the principal cause of suffering which has connected itself with my habit of opium eating. It developed itself at first in a recurrence of the childish faculty of painting upon the darkness ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... say, strikes two: if the sensorium were perfectly elastic and after receiving the first blow reverted exactly to its previous state, retaining absolutely no trace of that momentary oscillation and no altered habit, then it is certain that a sense for number or a faculty of counting could never arise. The second stroke would be responded to with the same reaction which had met the first. There would be no summation of effects, no complication. However numerous the successive impressions might come to be, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... it has no worse effect, must occasion their being more susceptible of the impressions of cold than if they waited the gradual advances of their natural warmth in the open air. I leave it to the decision of the gentlemen of the faculty, whether this too hasty approach to the fire may not subject them to a disorder I have observed among them, called the elephantiasis, or swelling ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... of his recovery his mind had reacted more quickly than his emotions. And by that strange faculty by which an idea often becomes stronger in memory than in its original production he found himself in the grip of a passion infinitely more terrible than his earlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, of Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... thou hast the faculty opposite to that of a witch, and canst lay a tempest. I should as soon have imagined one man could have stopt a cannon-ball in its full force as ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... population after me with a pattering of geta like the sound of surf moving shingle. Yet, except for that particular sound, there was silence. No word was spoken. Whether this was because the whole mental faculty was so strained by the intensity of the desire to see that speech became impossible, I am not able to decide. But there was no roughness in all that curiosity; there was never anything approaching rudeness, except in the matter of ascending ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... Willemsens could only rise at noon. The sunshine, reflected by the surface of the Loire, and stored up by the rocks, raised the temperature of the air till it was almost as warm and soft as the atmosphere of the Bay of Naples, for which reason the faculty recommend the place of abode. At mid-day she came out to sit under the shade of green leaves with the two boys, who never wandered from her now. Lessons had come to an end. Mother and children wished to live the life of heart and ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... was very effective, but it might well have seemed at first to do more credit to her satiric powers than to her faculty of observation. This was the light in which it presented itself to Bernard; but, little by little, as she amplified the text, he grew to think well of it, and at last he was quite ready to place it, as a triumph of sagacity, on a level with that other discovery which she had made the evening ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... accident in the life of primitive peoples varying in intensity and extent, not as a vague conception of things due to the erroneous interpretation of words and phrases, nor again as the fanciful creation of ignorant minds; but it will appear to be a special faculty of the human mind, inspired by emotions which accompany and animate its products. Since this innate faculty of myth is indigenous and common to all men, it will not only be the portion of all peoples, but of each individual in every age, in every race, whatever ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... speaking of verbal charms, Lord Bacon commented on the fact that amongst the heathen nations, either barbarous words, without meaning, were used, or "words of similitude," which were intended to feed the imagination. Also religious texts, which strengthen that faculty. Mystical expressions were favorites, as were also Hebrew sentences, as belonging to the holy tongue. No examples of magical formulas are found in the Bible, but Rabbinical literature contains a large number of them, ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... the senior inspector of the service, and his special faculty was the unravelling of tangled accounts and the detection of defaulting managers and cashiers. Leaving the ordinary inspection of branches to his juniors, Wallace only journeyed from the head office to take charge when grave suspicions ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... were trembling, he remarked, as he tied the knots, but it was with excitement, and an excitement which did not flurry. His mind worked rapidly, but quite coolly, quite deliberately. He came to a perfectly definite conclusion as to what he must do. Every faculty which he possessed was extraordinarily clear, and at the same time extraordinarily still. He had his knife in his hand, he faced about suddenly and ran. There were two men waiting. Feversham ran at the man who ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... indefatigable traveller, and wrote accounts, finely illustrated, of his journeys in Italy, Greece, and Corsica. His best known works are, however, his Book of Nonsense (1840) (full of wit and good sense), More Nonsense Rhymes (1871), and Laughable Lyrics (1876). L. had also a remarkable faculty for depicting birds. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... every sense of the word! The idea that the province of literature, even of fiction, is simply to amuse, is exploded in the light of advancing civilization. Every writer has a higher mission, and accordingly as he discharges the duty which his faculty lays upon him, is he true or false to the true end of his existence, a success or a failure in the world of intellect and morality. The mission of all literature is to make mankind both wiser and better, and the writer who fails to appreciate and act upon this truth is worse than ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... school opened, the Faculty met the first day and distributed the positions to the eligibles. On going down to the Hall to take my first meal, to my surprise I found I had been awarded the position of waiter. To hold a position, or even remain on the Campus, one must matriculate within three days after school starts, if ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... stupidities and inconsistencies, the chiaroscuro of the voice itself and what could be expected from the mind somewhat mismated with it. He knew where she was sound and where she was mended. With him she could share the depressing knowledge of what a wretchedly faulty thing any productive faculty is. ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... evening life of a summer pool, but she had no smile for them to-day. The swallows slid and circled across the water; their silence was no longer intimate, but alien. She looked across at Undern. There were roses everywhere, but the house had so strong a faculty for imposing its personality that it gave to the red roses and the masses of traveller's joy that frothed over it a deep sadness, as if they had blown and dropped long since and were but memoried flowers. The shadows of swallows came and ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... that?" said Hetty, hurrying on so swiftly towards the Square that even Pierre's brisk little legs could hardly keep up with her. Pierre's inventive faculty came to a halt. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... Whateley considers the savage much beneath the materialist, instead of superior to him. The latter possesses, although he frequently abuses it, the faculty of self-control and forethought, which is entirely wanting in the former. (Lectures, No. 6.) Dunoyer, De la Liberte du Travaeil, liv. IV, ch. I, 8, an apology for the moral wholesomeness of civilization, since promotive ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... our moralizing and religious literature figures as a sharply defined and easily recognizable "faculty," like "will" or "reason." But this classification, though useful, is misleading by its simplicity. If we observe by introspection what goes on in our minds when we "will" or "reason" or "listen to conscience," we shall find all sorts of emotions, ideas, impulses, surging back ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... non-committal air, that these little diversions would not have disturbed her equanimity, as she solaced herself with the reflection that, "after a storm comes a calm," but for the fact that this belligerent couple had an unhappy faculty of making up their differences at the expense of a third party, and it became her unhappy fate, as the last new comer, to stand in the place Johnny had formerly been devoted to, as the unfortunate third. Happily, however, for her nerves, her ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... I always had a faculty for prying around—might have been a famous explorer of Egyptian tombs if I hadn't been taken in and done for ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... that of Col. Townshend, who possessed the remarkable faculty of stopping at will not only his respiration, but also the beating of his heart. He performed the experiment one day in the presence of Surgeon Gosch, who cared for him in his old age, two physicians, and his apothecary, Mr. Shrine. In their presence, says Gosch, the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... What an irrational central power which allows such tremendous energies to run to waste! There are diplomatists in Bohemia quite capable of overturning Russia's designs, if they but felt the power of France at their backs. There are writers, administrators, soldiers, and artists in Bohemia; every faculty, every kind of brain is represented there. Bohemia is a microcosm. If the Czar would buy Bohemia for a score of millions and set its population down in Odessa—always supposing that they consented to leave the asphalt of the boulevards—Odessa would be Paris ...
— A Prince of Bohemia • Honore de Balzac
... lay, were in high spirits. The duke, who had handled his fowling piece with more than usual skill, was in the best of humors; the duchess chatted gaily with the ladies, and the head forester fairly beamed with pleasure, for the prince had congratulated him warmly upon his faculty for doing perfectly all he undertook. Frau von Wallmoden, who kept near the duchess, was the object of much attention; she was unquestionably the most beautiful woman there; the others needed for the most part rich toilettes and glittering gems to set off their beauty. ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... picture of my vagrant life, intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever chance had collected a little audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed, the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence was its own reward, though the ...
— Passages From a Relinquised Work (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Physically and mentally I am the son of my mother so completely—even down to peculiar movements of the hands, which made their appearance in me as I reached the age she had when I noticed them—that I can hardly find any trace of my father in myself, except an inborn faculty for drawing, which unfortunately, in my case, has never been cultivated, a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... moving in one compact, marvelous unit of organization, discipline and system? If you have not seen it you cannot imagine what it is like. If you have seen it you cannot tell what it is like. In one case the conceptive faculty fails you; in the other the descriptive. I, who have seen this sight, am not foolish enough to undertake to put it down with pencil on paper. I think I know something of the limitations of the written English language. What I do mean to try to do in this chapter is to record ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... years of service as President of your Agricultural College, I find that my chief gratification comes from having associated daily with a loyal and dependable faculty and with so many clean, ambitious and sympathetic young ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... such things as it imagines to be present to it. If the mind, while imagining non-existent things as present to it, is at the same time conscious that they do not really exist, this power of imagination must be set down to the efficacy of its nature, and not to a fault, especially if this faculty of imagination depend solely on its own nature—that is (I. Def. vii.), if this faculty ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... delivered.' Ye have here the same warning, look to it, watch well ye that despise it, lest the wrath of God, which the men of Israel by their speedy obedience escaped, descend upon your heads. Ye may say that ye are banished men. 'Tis true: but thereby are ye not stripped of all faculty of rendering service; moreover, your assistance is asked for one who will restore ye to your homes. Ye may say that ye have been robbed of all your goods; yet many of you have still something remaining, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... this faculty," observed Anderson, "but I have always thought those pretending to it were ...
— A Legend of Montrose • Sir Walter Scott
... the spiders, they spin all out of their own bowels. But give me a philosopher who, like the bee, hath a middle faculty, gathering from abroad, but digesting that which is gathered by its ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... he not the Washington of France? Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a bye-word, a reproach, and an enormity? Because he wanted faith! He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed. He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... that Mr. Wood had not any perception of color, or delight in it. The perception of color is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of St. Mark's, is the perfection of that color-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. For it is on its value as a piece of perfect and unchangeable coloring, that the claims of this edifice to our respect ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... (why is there not such a word?) for the force with which they convey the true by the novel or unexpected, by the introduction of touches which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the subject. This faculty, too, springs from her subjectiveness, which leads her to paint a scene less by its ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... instinct of religion—"religiosity," as it has been called—is inborn to man; like the faculty of speech, it belongs to man, and to man only, of all living beings. So much so, that modern science is coming to acknowledge these two faculties as the distinctive characteristics which mark man as a being apart from and above the rest ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... exceeds the synthetic power of all but the best trained minds. Both in scope and in articulation musical faculty varies prodigiously. There is no fixed limit to the power of sustaining a given conscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor is there any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changed circumstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphony ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... enough to wish him to appear to carry a thing off. He would do that on any occasion—not from impudence but simply from the habit of success; and Isabel felt it out of her husband's power to frustrate this faculty. A complex operation, as she sat there, went on in her mind. On one side she listened to their visitor; said what was proper to him; read, more or less, between the lines of what he said himself; and wondered how he would ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... crying at the same moment; and we can hardly read a page of Burns without finding this natural juxtaposition of smiles and tears. It is noteworthy also that all strong emotions, when expressed naturally, lend themselves to poetry; and Burns, more than any other writer, has an astonishing faculty of describing his own emotions with vividness and simplicity, so that they appeal instantly to our own. One cannot read, "I love my Jean," for instance, without being in love with some idealized woman; or "To Mary in Heaven," without sharing the personal ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Major said, he would go by the old University and leave word with the faculty for the school-master when he should come there to matriculate; and so, at a turnstile that led into a mighty green yard in the middle of which stood a huge gray mass of stone, the carriage stopped, and the Major got out and walked through the campus and up ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... my lords, am I affected with the merit of the wonderful skill which the distillers are said to have attained: it is, in my opinion, no faculty of great use to mankind, to prepare palatable poison; nor shall I ever contribute my interest for the reprieve of a murderer, because he has, by long practice, obtained ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 11. - Parlimentary Debates II. • Samuel Johnson
... as they dote upon an interesting monstrosity—the worse portion. Women admire courage, because it is the quality they lack—I mean animal courage, the mere faculty of looking into a pistol-muzzle calmly; and their admiration is so great that they are carried away by it. They admire in the same way a gay wild fellow; they do not dislike even a 'poor fellow—ah! very dissipated!' ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... great mass of materials, consisting largely of histories and works of general literature in many languages, belonging to the fourteen hundred years with which he dealt. But he had also the constructive power which selects, arranges, and proportions, the faculty of clear and systematic exposition, and the interpretative historical vision which perceives and makes clear the broad tendencies in the apparent chaos of mere events. Much new information has necessarily been discovered since Gibbon wrote, but he laid his foundation so deep and broad that ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... utter the various sounds of tongue, what time The rest may be supposed powerless To do the same? And, if the rest had not Already one with other used words, Whence was implanted in the teacher, then, Fore-knowledge of their use, and whence was given To him alone primordial faculty To know and see in mind what 'twas he willed? Besides, one only man could scarce subdue An overmastered multitude to choose To get by heart his names of things. A task Not easy 'tis in any wise to ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... only difference between those possessed of any such remarkable special power and the general run of people being, that the first are born with such an unusual aptitude for their particular specialty that they are able to dispense with all or nearly all the preliminary exercise of their faculty, while the latter must exercise it for a considerable time before they can get it to work smoothly and easily; but in either case when once the knowledge is intense ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... went all our gay visions of deliverance and joy. Deliberately as she went by, we might possibly have found means of boarding her, had not our sudden disappointment and the appalling nature of the discovery which accompanied it laid entirely prostrate every active faculty of mind and body. We had seen and felt, but we could neither think nor act, until, alas! too late. How much our intellects had been weakened by this incident may be estimated by the fact, that when ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... concealment of her Name, and that she was not even buried in woollen,—a thing then very strictly insisted upon, in order to encourage the staple manufactures of Lancashire and the North,—and that, either by a Faculty from the Arches Court, or a winking and conniving of Authority, she was placed in her coffin in the same garb in which she had lain in state. Of such sorry mocks and sneers as to the velvet of her funeral coffer being nearer Purple than Crimson in its hue, and of my mourning ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... while his labours were rewarded by his election to the Academy of Sciences; a scientific mission to Portugal in 1808 next engaged him, and a year later he was nominated to the chair of Zoology in the Faculty of Sciences at Paris; the main object of his scientific writing was to establish, in opposition to the theories of his friend Cuvier, his conception of a grand unity of plan pervading the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... true, as many writers affirm, that Cyrus the king, and Simonides the lyric poet, and Hippias of Elis, the most acute of the Sophists, excelled as they did in memory because they had obtained that faculty through drinking a particular medicine, we must also believe that Julian in his early manhood had drunk the whole cask of memory, if such a thing could ever be found. And these are the nocturnal signs of ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... devil and his angels, and other orders of evil, which the Apostle classed among the opposing powers. But whether any of these orders, who act under the government of the devil and obey his wicked commands, will be able in a future world to be converted to righteousness because of their possessing the faculty of freedom of will, or whether persistent and inveterate wickedness may be changed by habit into a kind of nature, you, reader, may decide; yet so that neither in those things which are seen and temporal nor in those which are unseen ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... paths, bordered by flowering and sweet-smelling trees, and most of all the deserted Jesuit Missions, half buried by the vigorous vegetation, and peopled but by a few white-clad Indians, rise up so clearly that, without the smallest faculty for dealing with that which I have undertaken, I am forced to write. Flowers, scents, the herds of horses, the ostriches, and the whole charm of that New World which those who saw it even a quarter of a century ago saw little altered from the remotest ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought may be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have the faculty of comprehending the connections existing between different things without formal deduction; and as they have the faculty of seizing upon each formula separately, without combining them, or without the power of insight, ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... was more active and restless than most boys, ever longing, yet with no definite object, I believe I should always have remained in the place of my birth, except for family exigencies, for I had no ambitions, no special talent nor practical faculty. When I reflect on the futility of literature without genius, or the miserly rewards of scholarship, or the disastrous conclusion in a majority of business enterprises, I confess the life of a New England farmer is to be preferred. It was so ordered that opportunities, ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... killing and destruction, but a phase of noble and creative living, a phase of building, of discovery, of beauty and research? He remembered, as one remembers the dead, dreams he had once dreamt of the great cities, the splendid freedoms, of a coming age, of marvellous enlargements of human faculty, of a coming science that would be light and of art ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... the end of the bar near the door, his liquor in his hand, lounging in his careless attitude of abstraction. But there was not a lax fiber in his body; every faculty was alert, every nerve set for any sudden development. The scene before him was disgusting, rather than diverting, in its squalid imitation of the rough-and-ready times which had passed before many of these men were old enough to carry the weight of a gun. It was just a ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... grasp the supersensible in an inner experience which Fichte called intellectual, Schelling artistic, Schleiermacher religious. The bankruptcy of the intelligence was overcome in their systems by the discovery of a faculty that revealed to them the living, dynamic nature of the universe. They were all more or less influenced by the romantic currents of the times, seeking with Herder and Jacobi an approach to the heart of things other than through the categories of logic. Like Lessing and Goethe, they were also attracted ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... comforts by which lowly-born children are surrounded. I was happiest when I was too young to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and, as it were to provide for the emptiness of much of my after life, destiny willed that my memory should be the strongest and most comforting faculty of ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... might attain to the literary dignity of being the lioness of a season, asked to dinner parties "because I am so clever;" perhaps my writing faculty might become a useful auxiliary to some other less precarious dependence; but to write to eat—to live, in short—that seems to me to earn hard money after a very hard fashion. The stage is a profession that people who have a talent for it make lucrative, and which honorable ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... dismayed their supporters and astonished the world by a sudden surrender to the clamour of the anti-vaccinationists. In the space of a single evening, with a marvellous versatility, they threw to the agitators the ascertained results of generations of the medical faculty, the report of a Royal Commission, what are understood to be their own convictions, and the President of the Local Government Board. After one ineffectual fight the House of Lords answered to the whip, and, under the guise of a "graceful ...
— Doctor Therne • H. Rider Haggard
... May, 1738, and Savage did not set out for Wales till July, 1739. However well Johnson could defend the credibility of second sight [see post, Feb. 1766], he did not pretend that he himself was possessed of that faculty. BOSWELL. I am not sure that Hawkins is altogether wrong in his account. Boswell does not state of his own knowledge that Johnson was not acquainted with Savage when he wrote London. The death of Queen ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... imitation, but they are greater perhaps in their powers of adaptation. They have so far shown a peculiar faculty for fitting to Japanese requirements and conditions the machinery, science, industry, &c., necessary to their proper development. Japan is without doubt now keenly alive, marshalling all her industrial ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... was never born a Spanish woman but she was made to dance; and he might have added that in the South, at all events, most men share the enviable faculty. The dance is one of the most characteristic features of Andalusia, and as an amusement rivals in popularity even the bull-fight. The Sevillans dance on every possible occasion, and nothing pleases them more than the dexterity of professionals. Before a company has been assembled ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... farm buildings I have seen certainly seem perfect, and have, I am informed, been constructed at about the same price as corrugated iron. Those fond of tracing the genius of a nation in its constructive faculty will probably be amused at finding that the latest work of structural genius in Kerry is a development of that mud-hut order of architecture which has existed here from pre-historic times. But concrete well employed is a very different thing from the dirt-pie or mud-hut ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... unscientific. It requires rare gifts to make a good reporter of judicial opinions. He must have the art of clear and concise statement; the power to select what is material and drop the rest; and the faculty of close analysis of abstract reasoning.[Footnote: Four of the reporters of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts have been appointed justices of that court, largely in consequence of their good work in reporting. A good reporter always has the making of a good judge.] Many of our ...
— The American Judiciary • Simeon E. Baldwin, LLD
... this most excellent Canopy the Ayre, look you, this braue ore-hanging, this Maiesticall Roofe, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeares no other thing to mee, then a foule and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in Reason? how infinite in faculty? in forme and mouing how expresse and admirable? in Action, how like an Angel? in apprehension, how like a God? the beauty of the world, the Parragon of Animals; and yet to me, what is this Quintessence of Dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... retained, from the proceeds, to procure the meanest food, the most ragged of clothes. Denied all power of legislation, and of considering and providing for his own necessities, as a citizen, the Irish peasant had lost the citizen's faculty, had become paralysed. He succumbed, almost without a struggle, to the fate brought him by famine, bred of evil days. He died on the mountain glens, along the sea coast, in the fields, in his cabin, after shutting the door. He died of starvation, though sometimes food ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... Les Excentriques (not unnaturally but wrongly called "Contes Excentriques" by some), handling what profess to be true stories, he shows a most excellent narrative faculty. Whether they are true or not (they rather resemble, and were perhaps inspired by, some things of Gautier and Gerard) matters little—they are quite good enough to be false. They are, necessarily, not quite equal, and there may be for some tastes, not for all, too much of the ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... well-established business was too slow for my outreaching desires. I must drive onward at a higher speed, and reach the goal of wealth by a quicker way. So my daily routine was disturbed by impatient aspirations. Instead of entering, in a calm self-possession of every faculty, into the day's appropriate work, and finding, in its right performance, the tranquil state that ever comes as the reward of right-doing in the right place, I spent the larger part of this day in the perpetration of a plan for increasing my gains ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... sense bound by convention. His economics, as has been said, was often unorthodox, and even in his mathematical text-books he occasionally shocked the hide-bound. I well remember an interesting discussion among members of the Yale mathematical faculty just after the appearance of Newcomb's text-book of geometry, in which he was unsparingly condemned by some because he assumed in certain elementary demonstrations that geometrical figures could be removed from the paper, turned over and laid down again,—the ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... arranged on an EXCELLENT SYSTEM, calculated to give an intelligent grasp of the subject, and not the mere faculty of mechanical copying.... Mr. Wells shows how to make complete working drawings, discussing fully each step ...
— A Textbook of Assaying: For the Use of Those Connected with Mines. • Cornelius Beringer and John Jacob Beringer
... magnitude of ev'ry lye, Cast up to what it does amount, And place the bigg'st to your account? 100 That all those stories that are laid Too truly to you, and those made, Are now still charg'd upon your score, And lesser authors nam'd no more. Alas! that faculty betrays 105 Those soonest it designs to raise; And all your vain renown will spoil, As guns o'ercharg'd the more recoil. Though he that has but impudence, To all things has a fair pretence; 110 And put among his wants but shame, To all the ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... of dissolution, till it shall please that Almighty Being who called it into existence, to restore it to life again. For if the mental principle were, in its own nature, immaterial and immortal, all its peculiar faculties would be so too; whereas we see that every faculty of the mind, without exception, is liable to be impaired, and even to become wholly extinct, before death. Since, therefore, all the faculties of the mind, separately taken, appear to be mortal, the substance or principle, in which ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... The medical faculty now recognise the nutritive properties of nuts, as also their wholesomeness and freedom from all toxic elements, and at all sanatoria for the treatment of rheumatic and gouty affections a nut and fruit diet is the established regime. We need not, however, go to ...
— Reform Cookery Book (4th edition) - Up-To-Date Health Cookery for the Twentieth Century. • Mrs. Mill
... that field. The mediums are people, mostly women, with a peculiar gift; whether we believe in the survival of personality, or whether we call it telepathy, does not alter the fact that they have a rare and special sensitiveness, a new faculty which science must investigate. They come, poor people mostly—for the well-to-do will seldom give their time to exacting and wearisome experiments. They come, wearing frayed and thin clothing, shivering with cold, obviously undernourished; ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... timbre of a muted piccolo, and their employment in a mixed orchestra is well worth the consideration of our younger and more enterprising composers. Another animal which shares with the hedgehog the defensive faculty of rolling itself up in a ball is the "pill millipede," a myriopod with seventeen pairs of legs, but fortunately exempt from the necessity of wearing trousers, which at present prices would impose an exorbitant demand on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, November 24, 1920 • Various
... her impalpable touch. Whatever the exact nature of these creative intuitions, there was between his art and his dreams a lurking connection, out of which, as we believed, finally grew his strange faculty for seeing beyond the scene, an intuition for certain events associated with what we called ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various |
