"Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he called out, clutching hold of the corner of the blanket that enveloped one of my limp legs, which was hanging down almost as inanimate over the side of the bunk, and shaking this latter, too, as vigorously as he did the blanket. "Rouse out, it's gone eight bells and the port watch are already on deck, with Mr Mackay swearing away at a fine rate because you're not ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... as to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... eight-horse team, men who stood now with their hands high, horses for riders who were no longer to need them. Three hundred of those horses from the lines behind the dismounted skirmishers—far more valuable than any inanimate treasure to men who had lost mounts—one hundred ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... the good which is communicative, and depress the good which is private and particular, as the holy faith, well declaring that it was the same God that gave the Christian law to men, who gave those laws of nature to inanimate creatures that we spake of before; for we read that the elected saints of God have wished themselves anathematised, and razed out of the book of life, in an ecstasy of charity, and infinite feeling ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... gaily-dressed natives pass hither and thither, engrossed in their work or play; and the little brown bodies of the naked children fleck the yellow sands. Seen across the dancing waves, and with the appearance of motion which, in this steaming land, the heat-haze gives to even inanimate objects, this scene is indescribably pretty, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... and grotesque images. Their virtues were derived either from the material, from the shape, or from the magic rites performed at the time of their preparation. According to a popular belief, which prevailed throughout the East in the earlier centuries of the Christian era, all objects, whether inanimate stones and metals, or brutes and plants, possessed an indwelling spirit or soul, which was the cause of the efficiency of all amulets.[5:1] They were therefore akin to fetishes, in the present acceptation of the term; for a fetish, as defined in the classification ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... higher claim, and had he been willing to subordinate and adjust his own claim to it. The father considered his son disrespectful and hard-hearted, yet we know St. Francis to have been the most tender and loving of men, responsive to all possible ties, even to those of inanimate nature. We know that by his affections he freed the frozen life of his time. The elements of tragedy lay in the narrowness of the father's mind; in his lack of comprehension and his lack of sympathy with ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... interest of "The Blue Bird" depend on the way in which the author, while adapting his language and his legends to the intelligence of youthful readers, manages to show them the wonders and romance of Nature. He enlists among his characters a whole series of inanimate objects, such as Bread, Sugar, Milk, Light, Water, Fire and Trees, besides the Cat, the Dog and other animals, investing them all with individuality,—making for instance, with characteristic bias, the Dog the faithful friend of ...
— The Blue Bird for Children - The Wonderful Adventures of Tyltyl and Mytyl in Search of Happiness • Georgette Leblanc
... about Paul. He was addicted to laying the faults of even inanimate objects to the charge of other people; and as for himself personally, he was never in the wrong! Now he felt that he must have somebody on whom to vent his vexation—and hunger; I was used to being that scapegoat, and it was seldom that I paid much attention to ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... inspiration of the love of virtue. He followed Winckelmann in believing that the expression of physical beauty was the supreme object of painting. This beauty exists only as an ideal, which finds its highest expression in man. Animals possess it to a slighter extent, vegetable and inanimate nature not at all. Those mistaken enough to occupy themselves with depicting the latter are imitating beauties deprived of all ideal. They work only with eye and hand; genius has little if any share in their productions. Lessing found the physical ideal to reside chiefly ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... other bird, will cost four or five pounds, and specimens that are larger may be worth many times that amount. Figures of men, horses, bears, dogs, and various animals, including dragons, are to be seen, as well as letters of the alphabet, triangles, or other inanimate objects, some trees being cleverly made to look like jugs, bottles, and bowls. Occasionally, a singular change has been made in a tree; thus, what was a boy with a rake, by a little alteration becomes a ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... radar. This poor inanimate piece of electronic equipment has taken a beating when UFO proof is being offered. "Radar is not subject to the frailties of the human mind," is the outcry of every saucer fan, "and ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... In the windows of a shop in Broadway, this strange, and to my mind revolting, article may be seen, shaped like a mummy, fitting hermetically tight, and with a plate of glass to reveal the features of the inanimate inmate. I have certainly read of the disconsolate lover who, on the death of her who ungratefully refused to reciprocate his affection, disinterred her body by stealth, supplied himself with scanty provision, and embarking in a small boat, launched forth upon the wide waters, to watch her gradual ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... blue," she said, with a tenderness great enough to compass inanimate things. "He always set ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... only constitutes the nature of God and the moral ideal of man, but it is also the purpose and essence of all created being, both animate and inanimate. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... when a stiff wind was abroad. She enjoyed hearing it roaring overhead, bending and twisting the tops of the pointed trees. The forest then seemed to be alive, and not so inanimate as on a cold frosty morning. It was more companionable in such a mood, and it seemed to her like a wonderful organ with all the stops out under the control of some mighty unseen master. It was a pleasure to her ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... she still retained a view of the stranger, from whose countenance she felt it to be impossible to withdraw her eyes. Isabella was too much engrossed by her own feelings to discover the trembling figure of the witness to her actions, and she pressed the inanimate image to her lips, with an enthusiasm that denoted the most intense passion. The expression of the countenance of the fair stranger was so changeable, and the transitions were so rapid, that Frances had ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... powerful bay horse, the gates at the end opened and a young man sped through them on a bicycle. He was of slight frame, with fine dark eyes and delicate nostrils. When he recognized Lady Brandon he waved his cap, and when they met he sprang from his inanimate steed, at which the ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... other hand, if in the blackest midnight I should come to her, she would not need to ask who the comer was. It is by the mind, not the eye, that these people know one another. It is really only in their relations to soulless and inanimate things that they ...
— To Whom This May Come - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... out of the room, leaving Annie to scowl ominously at the new nurse, and vent her spleen by boxing her doll, because the inanimate little lady would not keep her blue-bead eyes open. Beulah loved children, and Johnny forcibly reminded her of earlier days, when she had carried Lilly about in her arms. For some time after the departure ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... charms to soothe the savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend the knotted oak; I've read that things inanimate have mov'd, And, as with living souls, have been inform'd, By magic numbers and persuasive sound. 1237 CONGREVE: Mourning Bride, Act ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... i. 283.) he now, with axes and torches is advancing on the very sanctuary of Justice. Sacrilegious; yet what help? The man is a soldier; looks merely at his orders; impassive, moves forward like an inanimate engine. ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... papers quoted him—his doings, not his sayings. People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things. ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... he was viewing the slaughter and to avoid having the statue always covered up. For this act Claudius was well laughed at when people reflected how he sated himself with the sights that he did not think proper for even the inanimate bronze to behold. It might be noted particularly that he used to delight greatly even at lunch time in watching those who were incidentally cut down in the middle of the spectacle. Yet a lion that had been trained to eat men and on this account greatly pleased the ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... it lifted he saw, as in a pageant, war in mid-career. Sound, too, had organized. He could have beaten time to the gigantic rhythm. It rose and sank; it was made up of groaning, shouting, breathing of men, gasping, and the sounds that horses make, with louder and louder the thunder of the inanimate, the congregated sound of the allies man had devised,—the saltpetre he had digged, the powder he had made, the rifles he had manufactured, the cannon he had moulded, the solid shot, grape, canister, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... month Stefan brooded. He hung about the house, dabbled at a little work, and returned, all without signs of life or interest. He was kind to Mary, more considerate than he used to be, but she would have given all his inanimate, painstaking politeness for an hour of his old, gay thoughtlessness. They had reached the stage of marriage in which, all being explained and understood, there seems nothing to hope for. Alone together they were silent, for there was nothing to say. Each ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... more remarkable in this story than there is in scores of our nursery or household tales, in which not only animals but also inanimate objects are gifted with speech, and in which the love of the marvellous rises ...
— Storyology - Essays in Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, and Plant-Lore • Benjamin Taylor
... good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not the first thing suggested ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... Nature inanimate employs sweet sounds, But animated nature sweeter still To soothe and satisfy the human ear. Ten thousand warblers cheer the day, and one The livelong night: nor these alone whose notes Nice-fingered ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... increased every day. I think that we began to be influenced by this peculiar trait in his character. It is certain that the inanimate objects by which you are surrounded have a direct action on the brain. It must be that a man who shuts himself up between four walls must lose the faculty of associating ideas and words. How many persons condemned to the horrors of solitary confinement ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... mistaking the meaning of those lines; love breathed from every letter, and, with a hasty look round to make sure she was alone, the happy girl pressed the inanimate paper, satin, printer's ink, and colours to her lips as though in answer to the message ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... of the world, according to the common signification—that is, in so far as it signifies what is called the universe—I say that, being infinite, it has no dimension or measure, is immobile, inanimate, and without form, notwithstanding it is the place of infinite moving worlds and is infinite space, in which are so many large animals that are called stars. If you ask according to the signification held by the true philosophers—that is, in so far as it signifies every globe, every star, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... depicts the pastoral life of the Patriarchs, the marvellous history of the Hebrew nation, the beautiful scenery in which they lived and moved, the stately ceremonial of their liturgy, and the promise of a Messiah. Its chief strength and charm is that it personifies inanimate objects, as in the sixty-fourth Psalm, ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the fact, that Art is the application of Science to a practical end. It is proposed, therefore, under the comprehensive title of Popular Science and Art, to include portions of our knowledge of animate and inanimate nature. The object will be to assist the general reader to regard with an intelligent eye the varied phenomena of nature, to gratify the laudable desire of understanding what he sees, and of preparing him in some measure to enter more fully upon the study of a given subject. In this way, it is hoped ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... dolphin that was attracted by Arion's song and carried him safely across the sea, are quite as significant as if they were true stories, for they show that the Greeks were so deeply moved by music that they could readily imagine it to have a similar effect on animals, and even on inanimate objects. Almost three thousand years ago, Homer represented Achilles as "comforting his heart with the sound of the lyre," after losing his sweet Briseis; "stimulating his courage and singing the deeds of the heroes." And, as Emil Naumann fancies, there is a moral underlying ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... to put it in training. All day long he was pulling faces. As an artist will sketch everything he comes across, so Mike would endeavour to imitate any characteristic expression or attitude, animate or inanimate, in the world around him. Dogs, little boys, and grotesque old men were his special delight, and of all his elders he had, it goes without saying, a private gallery of ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... sympathy with the poor and the simple is infinite. He is full of pity and tenderness and enfolds in his heart and in his poetry, saint and sinner, man and beast, all that which is animate and inanimate. He is passionately religious with a profound and humble faith, but it has nothing in common with the sumptuous and decorative neo-catholicism of men like Huysmans or Paul Claudel. Rather one must seek his origins in the child-like faith of Saint Francis of ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... first look a father casts upon his babe; the infant, which to the whole world seems a mis-shapen, an unpleasant thing to look upon, to him is a being of most perfect beauty—the hope—the prop—the stay of his future life. Upon that weak, helpless, inanimate creature, his heart leans—the heart of the strongest man leans upon it. The world holds out no promise to tempt him like the well-doing of his child. It is a wonderful mystery," continued the Buccaneer, reverently uncovering his head, as men do when they are about ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... find in flies and swallows, who seem dead to all outward appearances, breathless and inanimate, and yet they live by that heat which is stored up in the heart and inward arteries. At the approach of summer, however, the internal heat, being restored to the outer parts, they are then brought to life again, out ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... gain them both from a space composition which shall combine unity with a tendency to movement. And this is given by the diagonal and V-shaped type. This type merely allows free play to the natural tendency of the "active" picture; but it constrains the neutral, inanimate landscape. The shape itself imparts motion to the picture: the sweep of line, the concentration of the vista, the unifying power of the inverted triangle between two masses, act, as it were, externally to the suggestion ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... thou art that thinkest love and a church do not well harmonize—so strangely, I say, full to overflowing of its own vitality, does it radiate life, that it would even of its own superabundance quicken into blessed consciousness the inanimate objects around it, thinking what they would feel had they a consciousness correspondent to their form, were their faculties moved from within themselves instead of from the will and operation ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... almost the universal errour of historians to suppose it politically, as it is physically true, that every effect has a proportionate cause. In the inanimate action of matter upon matter, the motion produced can be but equal to the force of the moving power; but the operations of life, whether private or publick, admit no such laws. The caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation. It is not always ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was good enough, and that he was good enough himself. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... by year. She had come here in an exploring mood sometimes when she was quite a child, but she never remembered the room having been put to any use; and as she had grown older it had come to have a haunted air, and she had touched the inanimate things with a sense of awe, wondering what her mother's life had been like in that room—trying to conjure up the living image of a lovely face, which was familiar to her from more than one picture ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... close of day. Her manner instantly changed; she became eager and alert. Pausing only a second to make sure of her attack, she bit the snake sharply near the neck, then, withdrawing her head and limbs into the shelter of her spines, rolled over, an inanimate ball. The viper, mad with pain, thrust back its head from its sinuous coils, rose, and struck with open jaws at its assailant. Its fangs closed strongly, but failed to get a grip, and the smooth underside of its throat glanced past the hedgehog's slanting prickles with such force that the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... that had crossed his mind when he had looked on his brother's inanimate form had not been wholly forgotten since; he felt something like self-accusation whenever he saw, in some gray summer dawn, as he had seen now, the boy's bright face, haggard and pale with the premature miseries of the gamester, ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... over the strange harmony of Nature with the temperament of man, every phase of his passionate existence seeming to have its type in things inanimate, when a loud cheer from the land aroused me, and the words, "Charley! Cousin Charley!" came wafted over the water to where I lay. For some time I could but distinguish the faint outline of some figures on the shore; but as I came nearer, I recognized ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... I describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates, either among the Greeks or barbarians? It is horrible to speak of it and incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... said relative to the wind-pressure exerted on inanimate objects, the same applied, with even more point, to our persons; so that progression in a hurricane became a fine art. The first difficulty to be encountered was a smooth, slippery surface offering no grip for the feet. Stepping out of the ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... should—on the whole. Pulse is poor. That's the worst sign." She picked up the hand lying outside the coverlet and put her finger-tips to the wrist, doing it with the easy nonchalant carelessness with which she might have seized an inanimate object, yet knowing exactly what she was about. "H'm! Fifty-six! That's pretty low. If we could get it above sixty—but still!" Dropping the hand with the same indifference, yet continuing to know what she was about, Miss Gallifer ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. 'All vice is nothing more than error and mistake' (i. 31). {205} 'We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... what my father would call 'the aggravation of inanimate things'! Those grapes knew that you wanted them, that I wanted to get them for you, and see how they act? But I'll have them yet. Don't fear. That old fellow I camped-out with this last summer told me it was a coward who ever gave up 'discouraged.' I'll have ...
— Dorothy's House Party • Evelyn Raymond
... the beasts which were so eager to devour him. All things about him seemed to conspire for his death: the wind, lightning, thunder, rain and storm, as well as the beasts and falling trees; for in his mind he did not differentiate animate from inanimate objects. Slowly, through his groping mind there evolved the thought, due to past experience, that he could not contend with these things by physical force, but must subdue them with magic; his magic consisted of the beating of crude ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... disguised in the Norman armour which they had found in the armoury of the castle,— their strong, tall, and bulky forms, and motionless postures, causing them to look rather like trophies of some past age, than living and existing soldiers. Surrounded by these huge and inanimate figures, in a little vaulted room which almost excluded daylight, Flammock received the Welsh envoy, who was led in blindfolded betwixt two Flemings, yet not so carefully watched but that they permitted ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... general division into "animate" and "inanimate"—the good man gave the human race only one soul—followed a system that looked like a pyramid. On the top was God with the angels and spirits and other accessories, while the oysters and polyps and mussels were crawling about down near the base, or lying still—just ...
— Walter Pieterse - A Story of Holland • Multatuli
... familiar language amongst us to call corn Ceres, and wine Bacchus, yet who can think any one so mad as to take that to be really a god that he feeds upon?"[141] And Plutarch condemns the whole practice of giving the names of gods and goddesses to inanimate objects, as absurd, impious, and atheistical: "they who give the names of gods to senseless matter and inanimate things, and such as are destroyed by men in the using, beget most wicked and atheistical opinions in the minds of men, since it can not be conceived how these things should be gods, for ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... the most rare and superb varieties, jasmines, honeysuckles, clematis, spice woods, and a great variety of other choice plants, were also in lavish abundance. There were locust trees of enormous size, and everything that was inanimate filled us with surprise and delight. But, within the mansion, we were met with the accustomed bitterness and want of civility. Among the slaves on the premises was a white-haired negro, who was one hundred and eight ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... attendants were there now, and the kind Dean with Lucas was trying to induce Aldonza to relax the grasp with which she embraced the body, whence a few moments before the brave and constant spirit had departed. Her black hair hanging over like a veil, she held the inanimate head to her bosom, sobbing and shrieking with the violence of her Eastern nature. The priest who had been sent for to take care of the corpse, and bear it to the mortuary of the Minster, wanted to move her by force; but the Dean insisted ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... refreshment, I reflect (I perceive that I shall have very frequent opportunities for reflection) that I was perhaps only too anxious to preserve the harmony of heaven. My sense of decorum—may it not have been excessive? From below, as I imagine, from the stations occupied—I will not say by the inanimate or half-animate creation, such as insects, or men, or minerals—but by the demi-gods, I take it that the dignity and orbic beauty of our court appeared sublimely immaculate. In the inner circle, alas! no one knows better than I do that there were—well, dissensions. I will go ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... urchins who ride them to water; the cows, and those who milk them. And then, country-folks are nature's freeholders; they enjoy a full portion of the earth, the air, the sky, with the thousand charms an ever-merciful Creator has lavished on them. Every inanimate object—this hill, that wood, the brook, the bridge, C.'s farm-house, and D.'s barn—to the very highway, as far as eye can reach, all form pleasing parts of a country home. In a city, on the contrary, we live surrounded by strangers. Home is entirely restricted to our own ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... worked hard for nearly two years for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. But now that I had finished, breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Look at God's ways of doing with all His creatures. The animate and the inanimate creation are appealed to, the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field, the one in reference to food and the other in reference to clothing, which are the two great wants already spoken of by Christ in the previous verses. I am not ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... so pitifully mean in the inverted Ambition of that Man who can hope for Annihilation, and please himself to think that his whole Fabrick shall one Day crumble into Dust, and mix with the Mass of inanimate Beings, that it equally deserves our Admiration and Pity. The Mystery of such Mens Unbelief is not hard to be penetrated; and indeed amounts to nothing more than a sordid Hope that they shall not be immortal, because they dare ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... used in the formation of figurative names; for example, kaun-engro, an ear-fellow, or creature with ears, serving to denote a hare; ruk-engro, or ruko-mengro, a tree-fellow, denoting a squirrel; it is also occasionally used in names for inanimate objects, as pov-engro, an earth-thing or ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... eyes with my hands I eagerly scanned the horizon in the direction indicated, and there, to my astonishment, saw a long thin black line. At first I could not distinguish whether it was a file of men or some inanimate object, but the keen eyes of the savages before and behind me soon detected its presence, and dozens of voices were in accord that it was a line of armed men, and that they were moving in ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... forth from her and locked the door upon her, as before; whereupon she took the book and sat perusing it awhile. Presently, she set it aside and taking the lute, tightened its strings; and smote thereon, after a wondrous fashion, such as would have moved inanimate things to dance, and fell to singing marvellous melodies ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the universe, whether animate or inanimate, of created things, will at the end of the world, and after the expiration of the Yuga, be again confounded. And, at the commencement of other Yugas, all things will be renovated, and, like the various fruits of the earth, succeed each other in the due order of their seasons. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... to the origin of the worship of inanimate objects, or of the powers of Nature, this passage might fairly be cited as an example of the manner in which those objects, or those powers, can impress the mind with that awe which is the foundation ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... there entered a tall, thin, grave man, with a sunburned complexion, who at a single glance took in everything in the room, animate and inanimate. The chevalier recognized the ambassador of their Catholic majesties, the ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the other a power of jurisdiction. The sacramental power is one that is conferred by some kind of consecration. Now all the consecrations of the Church are immovable so long as the consecrated thing remains: as appears even in inanimate things, since an altar, once consecrated, is not consecrated again unless it has been broken up. Consequently such a power as this remains, as to its essence, in the man who has received it by consecration, as long as he lives, even if he fall into schism or heresy: and this is proved ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... had passed that way twice a day for years on end—always in consciousness of that aloof spirit informing the inanimate, and in such resentment thereof as properly rewarded a studied insolence—never before to-day had Sarah Manvers found the genius of the neighbourhood so unmitigatedly intolerable. It was with downright relief that presently she turned ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... had delayed her; she was driven desperate by that and malice of inanimate thing: every 'bus and tram was against her, whisking out of sight just as she wanted them, or blocked by slow crawling carts and lorries. There was a tight, hard pain in her heart, like toothache, round which her whole ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... on returning there after the wedding she worships this. Women are often tattooed with representations of their totem animal, and men swear by it as their most sacred oath. A similar respect is paid to the inanimate objects after which certain septs are named. Thus members of the Gawad or cowdung sept will not burn cowdung cakes for fuel; and those of the Mircha sept do not use chillies. One sept is named after the sun, and when an eclipse occurs these perform the same formal ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The Midsummer Holiday group has two pictures of sweet homeliness—'The Mill ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... were poets or fabulists, and could invest inanimate objects with all the qualities and feelings of animate ones; if, with all the magic of old AEsop, we could make pots and kettles talk, and endue barn-door fowls with the spirit of philosophy, we should be tempted to say that the great gates of Beaufort House, together with the stone Cupids on the ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... however, have a variety corresponding to that of the subjects on which they are occupied. A sagacity applied to external and inanimate nature, forms one species of capacity; that which is turned to society and human affairs, another. Reputation for parts in any scene is equivocal, till we know by what kind of exertion that reputation is gained. No more can be said, in commending men of the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... the storm, both of animate and inanimate nature, began to abate, and the weary overworked soldiers were dropping off to sleep when a tremendous ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... it from its nail, and, raising it over his head, smashed frame and glass, cursing all saints, all priests, and churchly people. Havoc followed him as he raged about the place wreaking his fury upon inanimate objects. When he had well-nigh wrecked the contents of the room, and when his first paroxysm had spent its violence, he hurled himself into a chair, writhing in agony. He bit his wrists, he pounded his fists, he kicked; finally he sprawled full length upon the floor, clawing ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... itself with my very childhood, fifty years back. The fancy of those who wrote the songs which I was obliged to hear in infancy was a very inanimate and sleepy fancy. I could enumerate a dozen songs at least which all described sleeping shepherds and shepherdesses, and, in one instance, where they both went to sleep: this is not fair certainly; it is not ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... it; it tires. A man who plays with it must be on his guard every second. To spend a lifetime on it is ridiculous—a whole life of intelligent effort, against perpetual, brutal, inanimate resistance—one endless uninterrupted fight—a ceaseless human manoeuvre against senseless menace; and then the counter attack of the lifeless monster, the bellowing advance, the shock—and no battle won—nothing final, nothing settled, no! ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... indomitable eyes, it is hard, at least for a young thing of nineteen, all aflush and aflurry with her new party gown, to realize that that old mother is infinitely more romantic than herself. She has sat there so long, perhaps, as to have come to seem part of the inanimate furniture of home rather than a living being. Well! the young thing goes to her party, and dances with some callow youth who pays her clumsy compliments, and Margaret remains at home with the old mother in ...
— Different Girls • Various
... for the slightest interference with them to have escaped me. What could that sound have been—some accidental shiver of the glass, stirred by a breath of wind, one of those mysterious movements of inanimate objects which are so apt to occur in the dead hours of the night, and which seem always more or less ghostly to a nervous watcher? Could it have been only accidental? or had Mrs. Darrell been prowling stealthily in and ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... them as principles of art. You wonder if art itself may not be merely a matter of right placing - the adjustment of a thing to its environment. You are certain that this is so as each coign and niche offers you its particular insight. Strange vagaries float through your mind - one's duty to the inanimate things of one's possession; the house too large for the personality of the owner; the right setting for certain idiosyncrasies; character building as a constructive process; the ideal as the limit of an infinite series - each pointing the way, as you think, to ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... and he is once more surrounded by dew-gemmed hedges and silent slumbering trees. Broad meadows, or pasture land, with drowsy cattle, or low bleating sheep, lie on either side. But what to Turpin, at that moment, is nature, animate or inanimate? He thinks only of his mare—his future fame. None are by to see him ride; no stimulating plaudits ring in his ears; no thousand hands are clapping; no thousand voices huzzaing; no handkerchiefs are waved; no necks strained; ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... mood he thought that the entire island, together with all things inanimate, had joined in this mortal protest. When he passed houses they seemed to become depopulated, their inhabitants concealing themselves in order not to greet him; the dogs rushed into the road, barking furiously, as if they ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... but only a marriage from a natural origin; therefore there is no union of minds, but only a union of bodies from a lascivious disposition in the flesh; and this lust is from a universal law impressed upon and thus implanted in everything animate and inanimate from creation. The law is that everything in which there is force wills to produce its like and to multiply its kind to infinity and to eternity. As the posterity of Jacob, who were called the sons of Israel, were merely natural men, and thus their marriages were not spiritual but carnal, ...
— Spiritual Life and the Word of God • Emanuel Swedenborg
... body was wet, and seemed as if it had just been plunged into the water. She appeared to be severely wounded in the face; and her garments, which were raised up, in spite of the cold and rainy weather, left the upper part of her knees almost entirely exposed. At the sight of this half-naked and inanimate body, all the spectators were affected. People said that the first duty to pay to a dying woman was, to preserve her from the cold, to cover her. A physician examined the body; he declared that all remedies were useless; that Madame Peytel was ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Chicadees and the little speckled Woodpeckers, that tarry with us in midwinter, and make the still cold days lively and cheerful by their merry voices, are, in animated nature, what flowers would be in inanimate nature, if they were found blooming under the snow. Nature does not permit, at any season, an entire dearth of those sources of enjoyment that spring from observation of the external world; and as there are evergreen mosses and ferns that supply in winter the places ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... those which had passed him by. He was a boy—a fine-looking, skillfully modeled youth—as beautiful a thing, doubtless, as God ever created in His sense of form; better than his sisters, better than the four-foots, or the fishes, or the birds, and he meant so much more than the inanimate things, in so far as we can see. He had the body given to him and he wanted to keep it, but there were the mysterious demons of the darkness, the wind and the flames; there were the monsters from the shadows, and from under the waters; there were the machinations of his enemies, ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... lines and lights on her hands, and on the checkered table-cloth. There were two rough benches, and a square table; the coffeecups stood on a metal tray; the lid of the pot was odd, did not match the set: all these inanimate things, which, a moment ago, Maurice had seen without seeing them, now stood out before his eyes, as if each of them had acquired an independent life, and no longer ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... remainder of the canyon, considering all the circumstances, was for us impracticable and unnecessary, we prepared to leave for Kanab. We unpacked the good old boats rather reluctantly. They had come to possess a personality as such inanimate objects will, having been our faithful companions and our reliance for many a hundred difficult miles, and it seemed like desertion to abandon them so carelessly to destruction. We ought to have had a funeral pyre. The flags of the boats, which Mrs. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... cannot for a moment be doubted. Recent discoveries are every day revealing more and more that her strange magnetic influence has a power almost beyond belief in its effect upon the growth of vegetables, and even inanimate things. ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... matter. Air is invisible, and practically imperceptible to our senses—when stationary. But set into motion, a current of air will close a door with a bang—will have the effect of definitely moving a heavy mass of inanimate matter, in the manner indicated. It may be that in somewhat the same way mind affects brain. Mind may reside in a sort of etheric vehicle, and be more or less stable or stationary, save at the times when volition or intense, active conscious ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... some extraordinary or subtle appearance. The gods may in visions or dreams be met with in their own proper embodiments; or, as is more common, they may be regarded as present for practical purposes: in some inanimate object, as in the case of the fetish; in some animal species, as in the case of the totem; in some place, as in the case of the shrine; or even in some human being, as in the case of the inspired prophet and miracle worker. In more refined and highly ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... infatuated with the economical uses of things, we do not know that they are thoughts. The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them a power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes and a tongue into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the independence of the thought on the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol. As the eyes of Lyncaeus were said to see through the earth, so the ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature—that is to say, to make it divine by making it human, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... for example, of pain—in this sense our life is commensurate, or nearly commensurate, to the entire period, from the quickening of the child in the womb, to the minute at which sense deserts the dying man, and his body becomes an inanimate mass. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... from Axelson's throat as he raised his head and tried to speak, but the death-rattle was already in his throat. A slight struggle, and the massive form upon the couch was nothing but inanimate clay. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... of doom, the poor fellow turned ashen pale. He sprang to his feet, but the chair bound to his legs tripped him up and he fell sprawling on the floor. He apparently regarded the chair as some sort of German infernal machine clutching him, and he lay there wrestling with his inanimate antagonist as though it were a demon. As soon as the victim understood the joke he joined in the burst of merriment that ran round the room; but it was of short duration. The gloom got us again, despite all that de Burgher could do, and finally he succumbed to the prevailing atmosphere ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... discriminate between living things and, let us say, the rocks of the earth. The most primitive intelligence, then, must have made a tacit classification of the natural objects about it into the grand divisions of animate and inanimate nature. Doubtless the nascent scientist may have imagined life animating many bodies that we should call inanimate—such as the sun, wandering planets, the winds, and lightning; and, on the other hand, he may quite likely have relegated such objects as trees to the ranks ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... is true about the Central Power of the Universe, this is true: it is power. And it pours forth in Radiant Energy. All "inanimate nature," so called, expresses this Power, each form after its kind; and all animate nature, crowned with consciousness, not only expresses it, but feels ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... organized efforts of the young imagination, of which boys and girls of unusual inventiveness are capable, are imitated on a smaller scale by all normal children. They endow inanimate things with life, and play and suffer with them as with their real playmates. The little girl not only talks with her dolls, but weeps with and for them when disaster overtakes them. The boy faces foes of his own making in the woods, or at lonely places in the road, who are ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... of inanimate matter where you expect warmth is startling enough; but a colder temperature than that of the body being rather the rule than the exception in common substances, it hardly conveys such a shock to the system as finding warmth where utter ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... scorching desert as the scene of their amusements. Some were rolling on the ground amid a cloud of dust; others, with a hoarse rumbling bellow, were butting their large heads together, while many stood motionless, as if quite inanimate. Except their monstrous growth of tangled grizzly mane, they had no hair; for their old coat had fallen off in the spring, and their new one had not as yet appeared. Sometimes an old bull would step forward, and gaze at me with a grim and stupid countenance; then he would turn and butt his next neighbor; ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... characters and all dispositions? would subvert rather than promote the true purpose of the Divine counsels; which is, not to produce obedience by a force little short of mechanical constraint, (which obedience would be regularity, not virtue, and would hardly perhaps differ from that which inanimate bodies pay to the laws impressed upon their nature), but to treat moral agents agreeably to what they are; which is done, when light and motives are of such kinds, and are imparted in such measures, that the influence of them depends upon the recipients themselves? "It is not meet to ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... describe them so perfectly. Miss Mary also told her the names of the birds whose notes they heard as they walked about the grounds, and May in return described with a minuteness which surprised her blind friend a number of objects both animate and inanimate which she thought would interest her, while she asked a variety of questions which, though exhibiting her ignorance, showed a large amount of intelligence and desire to obtain information. The child was evidently natural and thoroughly unaffected, without either ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... did he not from the beginning entertain a suspicion that the open-hearted and straight-forward Neoptolemus will not be able to maintain to the end the character which, so much against his will, he has assumed. Not without reason after this deception does Philoctetes turn away from mankind to those inanimate companions to which the instinctive craving for society had attached him. He calls on the island and its volcanoes to witness this fresh wrong; he believes that his beloved bow feels pain in being taken from him; and at length he takes a melancholy leave ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... beginning, must culminate in a state of things in which the means of expense will exceed the demand for expense, in which the human race will have some surplus capital. The incessant manual labour which the ancients relegated to slaves will in course of time be more and more largely performed by inanimate machinery. Unskilled labour will for the most part disappear. Skilled labour will consist in the guiding of implements contrived with versatile cunning for the relief of human nerve and muscle. Ultimately there ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... subtle ether which filled up the space between the sun and the earth, and by its intermediate agency was the proximate cause of the phenomena of gravitation. "It is inconceivable," said Newton, in one of his letters to Dr. Bentley,(235) "that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact.... That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act on another, at ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... have a movement from east to west. Now the created rational nature alone is immediately subordinate to God, since other creatures do not attain to the universal, but only to something particular, while they partake of the Divine goodness either in being only, as inanimate things, or also in living, and in knowing singulars, as plants and animals; whereas the rational nature, in as much as it apprehends the universal notion of good and being, is immediately related to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... nature with his own mercurial temperament. The Spaniard, or perhaps the old Mexican, seemed to predominate in Fernando, as far as could be guessed in one so weak and helpless. He seemed very quiet and inanimate, seldom wanting or seeking diversion, but content to lie still, with half-closed eyes; his manner was reserved, and with something of courteous dignity, especially when Lady Price came to visit him; and the Yankeeisms that sometimes dropped ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were now of little moment in my regard," he says, in "The Custom-House." "I cared not at this period for books; they were apart from me.... A gift, a faculty, if it had not departed, was suspended and inanimate within me." ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... believe in ghosts, became aware as he sat now by the fire that the old house was feeling for him to make him creep, feeling for him with its old disjointed fingers and all the artfulness of inanimate things. ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole |
