"Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the simplicity of the ascetic, which is of the spirit, but the simplicity of the madman that grinds down all the contrivances of civilization to a featureless monotony. The prophet wants to save the souls of his people; Germany wants to rule the inanimate corpse of the world. But you can get the same language to cover both. And so you have the partnership of St Francis and Messalina. Dick, did you ever hear of a thing called ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... and would not be filled with that grudging hostility which our cramped and narrow existence forces upon average human nature. A world full of happiness is not beyond human power to create; the obstacles imposed by inanimate nature are not insuperable. The real obstacles lie in the heart of man, and the cure for these is a firm hope, informed ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... poetry to be 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 ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... men, 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 ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... of inanimate and senseless things, begun by discord in ourselves, which works unreasonable torture. Our return was an abominable journal which I will not recount, and going with it was a mortifying facility ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... MILITAIRE," [OEuvres de Frederic, vii. 73-90, 91-109.]—altogether pleasant reading, should there still be curiosity upon it. There is something of flowingly eloquent in Friedrich's account of this Battle waged against the inanimate Chaos; something of exultant and triumphant, not noticeable of him in regard to his other Victories. On the Leuthens, Rossbachs, he is always cold as water, and nobody could gather that he had the least pleasure in recording them. Not so here. And indeed here he is as beautiful as anywhere; and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the perversity of the inanimate can lead I saw in a criminal case in which a big isolated hay-stack was set on fire. A traveler was going across the country and sought shelter against oncoming bad weather. The very last minute before a heavy shower he ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... lick or attempt to taste it, possibly, as Compayre suggests,[198] from a memory of the action of the lips protruded to seize the maternal nipple. The affectionate child, as Mantegazza remarks,[199] not only applies inanimate objects to its lips or tongue, but of its own impulse licks the people it likes. Stanley Hall, in the light of a large amount of information he obtained on this point, found that "some children insist on licking the cheeks, necks, and hands of those they wish to caress," ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live: Ours is her wedding-garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless, ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud— Enveloping the Earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... the licentious libertine, was an event that cried for blood; and blood he had, for he murdered the seducer, and that with an insatiable rapacity of revenge that was terrible. He literally battered the head of his victim out of all shape, and left him a dead and worthless mass of inanimate matter. The crime, though desperate, was openly committed, and there were sufficient witnesses at his trial to make it a short one. On that morning, neither arrest, nor friar, nor chaplain, nor jailer, nor sheriff could wring from him one single expression of regret or repentance for ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... Patagonia and Panama in one sweeping glance along a sand hill. Cape Cod was as full of romance of remote regions as was Concord. He, too, notes the mirage. "Objects on the beach," he says, "whether men or inanimate things, look not only exceedingly grotesque, but much larger and more wonderful than they actually are. Later, when approaching the seashore several degrees south of this, I saw before me, seemingly half a mile distant, what appeared like bold and ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... over thee? The Mighty and Just One has already judged thee, and perhaps above thou hast received pardon for thy crimes, which could not be pardoned here below; and now that thy feverish existence has closed, and thy once active form become inanimate dust, thy very memory all but forgotten, I will say a few words about thee, a few words soon also to be forgotten. Thou wast the most extraordinary robber that ever lived within the belt of Britain; Scotland rang with thy exploits, and England, too, north of the Humber; strange deeds also didst ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... highly 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 quite ...
— Fairy Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... the trees the outline of the old bungalow was faintly visible, and thither their earnest contemplation was directed. For both of them it was something more than a ruin, something more than a relic out of the tragic past. It had become, above all for the Colonel, a part of their lives, a piece of inanimate destiny to which they felt themselves tied by all the bonds of possession. It was theirs, and they in turn were possessed by the influence it exercised over their lives. Their dear ones had died within its walls, and some intuition, feeling blindly through the ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... smack neared the shore on her voyage home, Hepburn looked wistfully out for the faint gray outline of Monkshaven Priory against the sky, and the well-known cliffs; as if the masses of inanimate stone could tell him ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... did it, and pa said it was gambling, and we ought not to do it, but he also wanted to know how we managed to win, and when we told pa about it pa said it was no sin to beat a slot machine, 'cause it was an inanimate thing, just a machine, and anybody who could beat a nickel in the slot machine at his own game ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... assassination of the hapless Empress, the beautiful villa was bought by the German Emperor. He at once ordered Heine's statue to be removed—whither no one knows. Royal (as well as popular) spite has before this been vented on dead or inanimate things—one need only ask Englishmen to remember what happened to the body of Oliver Cromwell. The Kaiser's action, by the way, did not pass unchallenged. Not only in Germany but in several other countries indignant voices were raised at the time, protesting ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... negative merit or demerit, whether it be a thing without a will or an unwilling human being. If we are not free, have no choice in the matter, must consent, we differ in nothing from all brutish and inanimate nature that follows necessarily, fatally, the bent of its instinctive inclinations and obeys the laws of its being. Under these conditions, there can be no morality or responsibility before God; our deeds are alike blameless and valueless in ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... sexual object is generally a part of the body but little adapted for sexual purposes, such as the foot, or hair, or an inanimate object which is in demonstrable relation with the sexual person, and preferably with the sexuality of the same (fragments of clothing, white underwear). This substitution is not unjustly compared with the fetich in which the savage sees the embodiment ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... been read in this way, if thought advisable it can be played informally and simply, with no attempt at costuming or theatric effects. It will often add to the interest of the play to have some of the children represent certain of the inanimate objects of the scene, as the forest, the town gate, a door, etc. Occasionally, for the "open day," or as a special exercise, a favorite play may be given by the children with the simplest kind of costuming and stage-setting. These can well ...
— Children's Classics in Dramatic Form - Book Two • Augusta Stevenson
... of Balliol and of Trinity, past the Ashmolean. From those pedestals which intersperse the railing of the Sheldonian, the high grim busts of the Roman Emperors stared down at the fair stranger in the equipage. Zuleika returned their stare with but a casual glance. The inanimate ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... themselves, not the terms of their manifestations. For them thinking is seeing over again, it is going through the sensations that the real object would have produced. Everything which goes on within them is in the form of pictures, or rather, inanimate scenes in which life is partially reproduced. . . . Since the child has, as yet, no capacity for abstraction, he finds a stimulating power in words and a suggestive inspiration which holds him enchanted. They awaken vividly colored images, pictures far more brilliant than would be called ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... shivering branches made converse in the music of the wild, Jenny and I being the only seat-holders in that grand opera. Soon another caravan of belated folks drove up; but it was only a load of hay that had been over-tipped. Others came, but they were only bushes or some inanimate object. There was little life out on ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... Disease. The far-reaching effect which light has upon some inanimate objects, such as photographic films and clothes, leads us to inquire into the relation which exists between light and living things. We know from daily observation that plants must have light in ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... Doctor, "why, all things, whether in heaven, or upon the earth, or in the waters under the earth, whether small or great, visible or invisible, animate or inanimate; whether the eye can see, or the ear can hear, or the nose can smell, or the fingers touch; finally, whatever exists or is imaginable in the nature of things, past, present, or to come, all ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... includes our social circle, our parents, children, and friends, and contains the living and the dead; the past and the present generations of our race. By a very natural process, the scene of our affections soon becomes identified with them, and a portion of our regard is transferred from animate to inanimate objects. The streams on which we sported, the mountains on which we clambered, the fields in which we wandered, the school where we were instructed, the church where we worshipped, the very bell whose pensive melancholy music recalled ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the hall at her back there came a whispering sound as the breeze moved like a ghostly footstep through an alcove window. With that strange power of reflecting the variable moods of humanity which one sometimes finds in inanimate objects, the face of the old house had borrowed from the face of its mistress the look of cheerful fortitude with which her generation had survived the agony of defeat and the humiliation of reconstruction. After nineteen years, the Academy still bore the scars of war ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... Van Helmont we meet with the Archaeus everywhere presiding, controlling and regulating the animate and inanimate bodies, working this time through agents, local ferments. The Rosicrucians had their direct inspiration from his writings, and such mystics as the English Rosicrucian ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... principle, the liberty of the blacks, but, in fact, slavery still existed. Two hundred thousand slaves served as human cattle to some thousands of colonists. They were bought and sold, and cut and maimed, as if they were inanimate objects. They were kept by speculation out of the civil law, and out of the religious law. Property, family, marriage, all was forbidden to them. Care was taken to degrade them below men, to preserve the right of treating them as brutes. If some unions furtive, or ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... stalk and leaf, stone and vine—yes, and that which surprised me at the beginning—that gleam of red in the wash of water upon the greys. It was the suggestion of warmth and life brought to the cold, inanimate hues of sand and gravel, that gave us the sense of beauty in a ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... he managed to keep his eyes on the dim outlines of the object as he stealthily approached And he stepped as noiselessly as possible, notwithstanding he meditated an encounter with nothing more than an inanimate object. But his imagination was always on the alert, and as he often feared dangers that arose undefinable and indescribable in his mind, it was not without some trepidation that he had separated himself from the horses and groped his way toward the ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... humanity is still confused with the fantastic, indeterminate life of the animal and vegetable world. In Greek thought the "lordship of the soul" is recognised; that lordship gives authority and divinity to human eyes and hands and feet; inanimate nature is thrown into the background. But there Greek thought finds its happy limit; it has not yet become too inward; the mind has not begun to boast of its independence of the flesh; the spirit has not yet absorbed everything with its emotions, nor reflected ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... the wildest terror and in helpless agony, while Philibert rushed without hesitation into the water, swam out to the spot, and dived with the agility of a beaver. He presently reappeared, bearing the inanimate body of her brother to the shore. Help was soon obtained, and, after long efforts to restore Le Gardeur to consciousness,—efforts which seemed to last an age to the despairing girl,—they at last succeeded, and Le Gardeur was restored to the arms of his family. Amelie, in a delirium ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... exceedingly cold weather. The billet of wood that shall blaze merrily, on a mild day, moulders and simmers, and seems indisposed to give out any heat at all, with the thermometer at zero. In a word, all inanimate substances that contain the elements of caloric appear to sympathize with the prevailing state of the atmosphere, and to contribute to render that which is already too cold for comfort, even colder. So it was now; notwithstanding ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... directed them all one by one to put an end to the life of their mother. They, however, were quite confounded and lost heart. And they could not utter a single word. Then he in ire cursed them. And on being cursed they lost their sense and suddenly became like inanimate objects, and comparable in conduct to beasts and birds. And then Rama, the slayer of hostile heroes, came to the hermitage, last of all. Him the mighty-armed Jamadagni, of great austerities, addressed, saying, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... steady without twinkling. The hardy, therefore, fix their look that they may see the longer; but the timorous see only glances—their eyes always twinkle at the first sight of the object. That which generally is seen by them are the species of living creatures, and of inanimate things, which be in motion, such as ships, and habits upon persons. They never see the species of any person who is already dead. What they foresee fails not to exist in the mode, and in that place where it ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... invectives? If Krishna in his infancy slew a vulture, what is there remarkable in that, or in that other feat of his, O Bhishma, viz., in his slaughter of Aswa and Vrishava, both of whom were unskilled in battle? If this one threw drown by a kick an inanimate piece of wood, viz., a car, what is there, O Bhishma, wonderful in that? O Bhishma, what is there remarkable in this one's having supported for a week the Govardhan mount which is like an anthill? "While sporting on the top of a mountain this one ate a large ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... river and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is in too much of a hurry to ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... make Thine utterance odorous. That from thy soul, As from an unseen presence of divinest light, Dartest into the spirit subtle rays That quicken life to blessing, as the breath Of being stirreth the inanimate, Making existence joy, and love, and power. O woods! and rustling forests! Ye that send Soft murmurs ever to the ends of heaven, And from your breast, as from a poet's soul, Issue all sweetest melodies of birds And leafy eloquence. ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... Park, intent on leaving a world that had become intolerable. Packed in all around her in the inadequate dressing-room, the other girls were chattering, squealing, scrambling into their clothes, as unaware of her tense motionless figure, as if it had been a mere inanimate lump. She couldn't have been more alone if she had been sitting out on the ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Cydnus swell'd above the banks, or for/The press of boats, or pride] [This is an agreeable ridicule on poetical exaggeration, which gives human passions to inanimate things: and particularly, upon what he himself writes in the foregoing play on ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... furious struggles, was effected in less space than we have taken to describe it. Then, leaving him in the hands of two of their number, who proceeded to bind him securely, the others rushed after Nathan, who, though encumbered by his burden, again inanimate, her arms clasped around his neck, as they had been round that of her kinsman, made the most desperate exertions to bear her off, seeming to regard her weight no more than if the burden had been a cushion of thistle-down. He ran for a moment with astonishing activity, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... such a sacrilege; for that only God, of whom you speak, is doubtless He who is acknowledged by the whole world, and concerning whom, as some of the ancients have said, the ignorant agree with the learned. Now, will you say that Mars, whose strength is represented by an inanimate man, is a portion of that God? That is to say, the dead statue controls Mars, and Mars is a subordinate god representing the infinite God, and is, therefore, a part of that God. Augustin adds, Not the Pantheon and all the ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... the three bodies [described above], which are impermanent, inanimate (jada), essentially painful and subject to ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... superstitions of the Santee Sioux to treat disease from the standpoint of some animal or inanimate thing. That person who, according to their belief, had been commissioned to become a medicine man or a war chief, must not disobey the bear or other creature or thing which gave him his commission. If he ever ventured to do so, the offender must pay for his insubordination with his ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... "good house-keeper," as they say in New England. And in the second place, he knew the value to the aesthetic and moral sense of personality in living rooms, of an orderly, tasteful arrangement of inanimate objects, carpets, pictures, furniture, which, through weeks of comparative changelessness, takes on the human aspect of a friend and silently welcomes you when you return at night, saying comfortably, "I am here, as you left me; I ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... is enchantment!" he said. But no,—it was one of those miracles that have not yet become commonplace. The poetic life that his perceptions were now able to enjoy, in inanimate nature, would be such a perpetual gratification to his taste,—such an incentive to explorations and discoveries! He could not felicitate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... true Catholic faith St Anthony won upon the fishes. Orpheus and Amphion went a little farther, and by the charms of music enchanted things merely inanimate. Wonderful, both! but neither history nor fable have ever yet ventured to record an instance of any one, who, by force of argument and reason, hath ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... inanimate objects usually substitute prepositional phrases to denote possession: [The hardness of the rock, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... each eye, and if any motion still persists, he breathes gin and peppermint over the face, till all sign of life is extinct. Then he talks the game over in detail with the barber at the next chair, each leaning across an inanimate thing extended under steaming towels that was once ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... veil. On a nearer view it seemed to consist of two folds of crape, which entirely concealed his features except the mouth and chin, but probably did not intercept his sight further than to give a darkened aspect to all living and inanimate things. With this gloomy shade before him good Mr. Hooper walked onward at a slow and quiet pace, stooping somewhat and looking on the ground, as is customary with abstracted men, yet nodding kindly ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue its laborious course around its axis, one half of its inhabitants ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... laid the very same blow on a strong man, to whom it was a slight infliction? Clearly this would evade, not satisfy justice. To carry out the principle, the blow might be laid as well on a giant, an elephant, or on an inanimate thing. So, to lay our punishment on the infinite strength of Christ, who (they say) bore in six hours what it would have taken thousands of millions of men all eternity to bear, would be a similar evasion.—I farther asked, if we were to fall in with Pagans, who tortured ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... sublimity, forming, both to sight and in idea, orderly variety, the waving line, neither straight nor crooked. The waving line is the symbol, or memento, as I may say, of grace, wherever it is seen in whatever form, animate or inanimate; and may be justly styled the ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of - our Ideas of Beauty, etc. • Frances Reynolds
... forward. Great was his amazement to recognize, in this dark object, the negro, Cato! He lay upon his face, as lax and motionless as a piece of inanimate matter. ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... very soul of the bridegroom which goes forth to the bride: inanimate things are longing with him: all the sweetness of the imaginative loves [221] of the Middle Age, with a superadded spirituality of touch all its ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... when he deals with nature, is generally even more marvellous than the richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal passions or animal enjoyment, but human discursive intellect and moral sense, to inanimate objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more of a man than the poet is—as indeed they very often ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... new, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are mainly passed. We are supposed to have associations with the old things which render them precious, but do not the associations rather render them painful? If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it is of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives! Take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to the reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of years? Such a meeting ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... into two classes, which do not correspond either with the Aryan genders or with the distinctions of animate and inanimate which prevail in the Algonkin tongues. These classes have been styled noble and common. To the noble belong male human beings and deities. The other class comprises women and all other objects. It seems probable, however, ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... guests had arrived. His mother presented him, using proudly her formula for such meetings, "Our son." Somehow it always made him feel like an inanimate object of virtue—as if she had said "our Rembrandt," ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... sphere for art as much nobler than that of sculptor or painter as the destinies of human life and society are higher than those of any inanimate object, even though carved by Phidias or painted by Raphael. It is, above all, an art that should touch by its inspiration the gallantry of the whole student class. The very breath of it is the shaping ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... stretched on the rock, inanimate, and no longer conscious of what passed around them. Ayrton alone, by a supreme effort, from time to time raised his head, and cast a despairing ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's picture. There is more of imagination in it—that power which draws all things to one,—which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects, and their accessories, take one color and serve to one effect. Everything in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. Every part is full of "strange images of death." It is perfectly ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... any other place would do as well. But in the organic world we strike another order—an order where the relation and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak of human existence as a "matter of chance" in the sense, let us say, that the forms and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... the room which had been the scene of so many singular happenings. The detective and I seated ourselves, but the Scotsman, holding the Chinaman by the neck as though he had been some inanimate bundle, stood just within the doorway, one of the most gigantic specimens of manhood I had ever ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... poet, though they have not the same power of expression. The sparrow upon the wire, the cat in the doorway, the dray horse tugging his weary load, feel the long, keen breaths of winter. It strikes to the heart of all life, animate and inanimate. If it were not for the artificial fires of merriment, the rush of profit-seeking trade, and pleasure-selling amusements; if the various merchants failed to make the customary display within and without their establishments; if our streets were not ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... gifted beings who possess the secret of bringing order out of chaos; for them the total depravity of inanimate objects has no terrors; inanimate objects become docile to their will. Such a one was Mary Magdalen. In two days she had transformed a sooty cavern into a clean and orderly kitchen. For she was a singing and a scourful woman, and her Sign was the ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... interference with the subject of the drama: being deemed so indispensable a part of the performance, that the scene itself was hardly more so: consequently, there was no secret supposed to be more violated by speaking before them, than before the inanimate scene itself. But what was at least excusable, on this footing, in the antients, would be an unpardonable ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... feel better, she went to Bessie, who pale and inanimate, seemed to be gently fading away, and only now and then raised her little finger to play ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... (Weber, 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
... smile And rest profound of lonely sun-lit plains, Nor cheerful morning song of birds in spring, Nor moonlight soft, that rests on hills and fields, Beneath the limpid sky, will move my heart; When every beauty, both of Nature, and Of Art, to me will be inanimate And mute; each tender feeling, lofty thought, Unknown and strange; my only comfort, then, Poor beggar, must I find in studies more Severe; to them, thenceforward, must devote The wretched remnant of unhappy life: The bitter truth must I investigate, The destinies mysterious, alike Of mortal and ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... in dreams, swoons, death, may return or be brought back, and the body revive. Spirits which do not return or are not brought back may cause mischief, either alone, or by entry into another human or animal body or even an inanimate object, and should therefore be propitiated. ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... propriety, dispense with the blood, and its symbol the wine, or with the Spirit, as with the water, if God has appointed it with the other two as a witness between him and us. You notice that the Spirit is named with the two inanimate things, the blood and the water. Take care, I say to my friends, lest, in setting aside the water, you shut out that divine Spirit, who, knowing how to deal with our nature, chooses the blood and the water to be used by us in connection with our most spiritual religious exercises ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... believe that man has a sympathy with even inanimate Nature, deduced from a common origin; a chain of co-existence and affinity connecting the outward forms of natural objects with his own fearful and wonderful machinery; something, in short, manifested in his love of flowing waters, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... admitted that these seemingly animistic doctrines may have originated in another way, and be due to later developments. The power of the gods to create living things naturally makes possible the belief that they had also power to endow with a soul, and therefore with life and intelligence, any seemingly inanimate object. Such was probably the nature of Babylonian animism, if it may be so called. The legend of Tiawthu (Tiawath) may with great probability be regarded as the remains of a primitive animism which was the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... all—he is grandfather of all living things. I think, however that the stone is merely the symbol of the everlasting, all pervading, invisible Ta-ku Wa-kan—the essence of all life,—pervading all nature, animate and inanimate. The Rev. S. R. Riggs who, for forty years, has been a student of Dakota customs, superstitions etc., says, "Tahkoo Wahkan," p. 55 et seq. "The religious faith of the Dakota is not in his gods as such. It is in an intangible, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... I don't think they have any such intention on this particular afternoon. Here he is, at last. The white trousers, blue coat, and yellow waistcoat—and more especially that cock of the hat—indicate, as surely as inanimate objects can, that Chalk Farm and not the parish church, is their destination. The girl colours up, and puts out her hand with a very awkward affectation of indifference. He gives it a gallant squeeze, and ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... mostly inanimate figures is not the only surprise given us by the personages of Count Fathom. It is a surprise to find few of them strikingly whimsical; it is a surprise to find them in some cases far more distinctly conceived than any of the people in Roderick ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... lengthened as I sped along, the tired yellow sun slipped down behind the hills like a penny-into-the-slot machine, and the early April twilight touched all inanimate objects with its own drab lack of coloring. I had no fear of losing my way in the darkness—I had too much locality sense for that—but the possibilities of my being ambushed appeared too many to be pleasant. A hurrying man, who is also heavily-laden, cannot pick his footsteps with the meticulous ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... inanimate objects elected to take the guardianship of individuals—they sometimes become protectors of the national interests. There is a large, fiat rock, about ten miles from Plymouth, Massachusetts, which continues to receive tribute from ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... and still it seemed that the remarkable figure was standing there fingering the books, pondering, deciding. Her emotions thrilled through her, uplifted her, and she had a sensation of being deliciously intimate with all things animate and inanimate. She touched the desk by her side, and it seemed to her that life tingled through her fingers into the wood. She smiled at the old man, and his eyes twitched, and he gave her a little happy sidelong nod. She wanted to tell him that the world was a very wonderful place, ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... community with inorganic aggregates. Some of these, as crystals, grow in a visible manner; and all of them on the hypothesis of evolution, have arisen by integration at some time or other. Nevertheless, compared with things we call inanimate, living bodies and societies so conspicuously exhibit augmentation of mass, that we may fairly regard this as characterizing them both. Many organisms grow throughout their lives; and the rest grow throughout considerable parts of their lives. Social growth usually continues ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... 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 ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... If you did smash the piano, it wouldn't make me any less a musician. And"—lightly—"I really can't have you being jealous of an inanimate ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... incredible to most men, but, by Gad, I swear to you, it lifted me off my feet, and I've never known anything like it. The mind of that great fellow got hold of me, included me. He made the inanimate world—sea, stars, wind, woods, and mountains—seem all alive. The entire blessed universe was conscious—and he came straight out of it to get me. I understood things about myself I've never understood before—and ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... my Lord, to suggest on this branch of my subject, that it requires the utmost delicacy to personify inanimate objects so justly, as to render them adapted in every circumstance to the occasion on which they are introduced. Your Lordship however will permit me to observe, that as the happiest effect is produced upon the ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable nekapabla. Incapacity nekapableco. Incarnate korpigi. Incarnation ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... difficulty, it seems, about laws—natural laws: we are not to suppose that they will ever he violated. But there is another law above all these; all at least of the inanimate world, i.e., that the forces of brute matter are subject to the will, or whatever is analogous to will, in any living creatures. The law of gravitation is one of the most universally operative; but every bird rising upon its wings, every dog in its ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... rude in his efforts to break away. At last he flung her off, and she fell, her forehead striking on the sharp corner of a stone, which started the blood trickling down her fair white brow. The woman swooned. Sight of blood touched the heart of George Waters, and, stooping, he raised the inanimate form in his arms, as tenderly as if she had been an infant, and bore her to a public house ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... good Christians, oblige ye To believe man and beast have spoken in effigy, Why should we not credit the public discourses, In a dialogue between two inanimate horses? The horses I mean of Wool-Church and Charing, Who told many truths worth any man's hearing, Since Viner and Osborn did buy and provide 'em For the two mighty monarchs who now do bestride 'em. The stately brass stallion, ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... water. There were at hand plenty of those strong, specially prepared soaps and other disinfectants constantly used by the women of their kind who still cling to cleanliness and health. With these they attacked him, not as if he were a human being, but as if he were some inanimate object that must be scoured before it ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... nevertheless have been brought into use more to express some remotion from God, rather than to express anything that exists positively in Him. Hence they assert that when we say that God lives, we mean that God is not like an inanimate thing; and the same in like manner applies to other names; and this was taught by Rabbi Moses. Others say that these names applied to God signify His relationship towards creatures: thus in the words, "God is good," we mean, God is the cause of goodness in ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... firmly persuaded that various particular persons are what they term betuah (sacred, impassive, invulnerable, not liable to accident), and this quality they sometimes extend to things inanimate, as ships and boats. Such an opinion, which we should suppose every man might have an opportunity of bringing to the test of truth, affords a humiliating proof of the weakness and credulity of human nature, and the fallibility ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... what I have called the protoplasm of primitive religion, and one closely allied both to magic and fetishism. For our present purposes we may define it as a mysterious influence believed to exist in objects both animate and inanimate, which makes them dangerous, infectious, unclean, or holy, which two last qualities are often almost identical in primitive thought, as Robertson Smith originally taught us.[25] What exactly the savage or semi-civilised ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... throat; he is upon the point of retracing his steps, when his eye rests upon the features of his father. The daring boldness of the expression, which the artist had but too well portrayed, fires him with fresh courage; every nerve thrills with new life, and kissing the inanimate canvas, as if it were indeed his dear mother and sister, he tore himself away from home. Walking rapidly down the deserted street, without venturing a look back, he passes many an endeared object; the old white church, ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... accorded with the simplicity of the earliest ages, and the manners of the first men. The rules of Pythagoras were followed there. Like the Egyptians, who held wool unclean, they buried no Initiate in woolen garments. They abstained from bloody sacrifices; and lived on fruits or vegetables or inanimate things. They imitated the life of the contemplative Sects of the Orient; thus approximating to the tranquility of the first men, who lived exempt from trouble and crimes in the bosom of a profound peace. One of the most precious advantages ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... seconds I had the seemingly inanimate maiden safely deposited in the inside of the barouche and myself sitting by her side. The driver cracked his whip, and whilst I, happy but exhausted, was mopping my streaming forehead the chaise rattled gaily ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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 from ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... the tidings to shepherds in the plains of Bethlehem; "and suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying—Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men." [15:3] Inanimate nature called attention to the advent of the illustrious babe, for a wonderful star made known to wise men from the east the incarnation of the King of Israel; and when they came to Jerusalem "the star, which ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... mind. The clouds slowly crept over one another, sometimes melting in one, sometimes dispersing each other; they mingled their forms and colors, dissolving or reappearing with new contours, majestic and mournful. This slow moving of inanimate masses had something fatal about it. It seemed as though yonder at the confines of the sea, there was an innumerable quantity of them always crawling indifferently over the sky, with the wicked and stupid intention of never allowing it to illumine the sleeping sea with ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... so covered with snow that it resembled a hummock, which ordinarily would have been passed without notice. The horses and the inanimate form within were like blocks of wood. The slight figure was lifted tenderly from its resting place and brought to ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... "He fell inanimate in the gallery. It was the same with Grossetti. Andreoli alone remained conscious. After long efforts, he ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... one highest, ultimate principle of all existence,—the Tae-keih, or Grand Extreme. This is absolutely immaterial, and the basis of the order of the universe. From this ultimate principle, operating from all eternity, come all animate and inanimate nature. It operates in a twofold way, by expansion and contraction, or by ceaseless active and passive pulsations. The active expansive pulsation is called Yang, the passive intensive pulsation is Yin, and the two may be called the Positive and Negative ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... minutes later he stood beside Harry Squires in the cellar below the kitchen. There was a smell of gunpowder on the close, still air. They looked down upon the black, inanimate form of the ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... she admitted. "We often played at getting married, and we had very large but inanimate families, and we quarrelled like real married people, and I used to cry and take my playthings home, and he used to stand outside our fence and make faces at me till I hated him ferociously. But all that was when we were very ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... for the Czar, and for my native land," and he had by a desperate effort gone. He did not see his old mother, who had fallen back almost inanimate on a bench. But when the Postmaster hastened to assist her, the aged woman raised herself. Suddenly the thought occurred to her: She denied by her own son! It was impossible! As for being herself deceived, it was equally impossible. It was certainly her son whom she had just seen; and if ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... recollection of what had been achieved, and what yet should be. If in her cooler moments she might not approve of their spirit in all things, still there was much to admire in their forgetfulness of themselves and the present, in their anticipated triumphs over all inanimate matter at some future time which none of them should live to see. She was rather startled when Mr. Thornton spoke to her, ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... westward extension of cotton[7:3] culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: "It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... and stanch the blood; but he did not hear, or heed,—he was lost in grief. M. de Bois also appealed to him, but in vain; then Gaston attempted to use force to recall him to reason, and, seizing both of Maurice's arms, essayed to unclasp them from their hold of the inanimate form, saying ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... the character of life, and is transformed into inanimate units. Man is something different from the sum of the services he may be made to render, and from the sum of enjoyments which may be procured for him. We must not run the risk of lowering him to the level of a living tool; and from the moment ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... not to be turned aside. The Yankee gun, its 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
... man?" said Arthur, whose seat on the gallery permitted him to hear, but not to see, all that was going on in the room. "Why don't you add, he speculates, he whittles, he chews tobacco, he is six feet two in his stockings, he knows the market value of every article and object, animate and inanimate, on the face of the earth, and is a living illustration of the truth of the proverb, that the cents being cared for, no apprehension need be entertained as to the safety ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... Where is he? Show him to us. If you cannot show him to us as flesh and blood, show him as flesh and sap; show him as a living cell; show him as protoplasm. Lower than this we should not fairly go; it is not in the bond or nexus of our ideas that something utterly inanimate and inorganic should scheme, design, contrive, and elaborate structures which can make mistakes: it may elaborate low unerring things, like crystals, but it cannot elaborate those which have the power ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... shook with the force of a shell that lodged in the work. The Pathfinder narrowly escaped the passage of this formidable missile as it entered; but when it exploded, Mabel could not suppress a shriek, for she supposed all over her head, whether animate or inanimate, destroyed. To increase her horror, her father shouted in a ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... suffering. Our Lord could not sin, therefore He reached our sympathies by His Death and Sorrows. Of course, if this life here were all, and this world were the only one, and we were animals with less beauty than many of the inanimate things in nature, and as much intelligence at best as the bees and birds and ants—then the Pagan way might be quite admirable. But this isn't the case, and ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... then Shall be a precious visitant; and then, And only then, be worthy of her name; For then her heart shall kindle, her dull eye, Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang Chained to its object in brute slavery; But taught with patient interest to watch The process of things, and serve the cause Of order and distinctness, not for this Shall it forget that its most ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... impatient and desperate. There is often a perverseness in inanimate things which is beyond endurance. He had started with the highest hopes a few minutes before, confident of finding the Indian canoe without trouble, and now he was baffled and held back when on the ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... well at first, but at length oblivion came. He waked to feel Bouche tugging at his blankets. It was noon. Late Carscallen and Cloud-in-the-Sky were still sleeping—inanimate bundles among the dogs. In an hour they were on their way again, and towards sunset they had reached the foot of Manitou Mountain. Abruptly from the plain rose this mighty mound, blue and white upon a black base. A few straggling pines grew near its foot, defying latitude, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... intended for the same use as statues in other religions. They are not adored nor worshiped in any sense of the word. They are looked upon as inanimate representations of a deity, and tributes of honor and respect are paid not to them, but to the spirits that they represent. I have seen rice actually put to the lips of these images and bead necklaces hung about their necks; but ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... voice, the half-inanimate form seemed suddenly inspired with life and vigor, and, bounding to her feet with a shriek of rage, she dealt him a blow with her open hand on the side of his head, which made him see more stars than can usually be discerned on the clearest ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... rare things to common ones; desirable things to those which you can easily do without; things complete to things which are only begun; wholes to parts; things proceeding on reason to things void of reason; voluntary to necessary things; animate to inanimate things; things natural to things not natural; things skilfully produced by art to things with which art has ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... recluse of the Tour-Roland heard a sound of wheels, of horses and irons in the Place de Greve. She was somewhat aroused by it, knotted her hair upon her ears in order to deafen herself, and resumed her contemplation, on her knees, of the inanimate object which she had adored for fifteen years. This little shoe was the universe to her, as we have already said. Her thought was shut up in it, and was destined never more to quit it except at death. The sombre cave of the Tour-Roland alone knew how many ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... was black, as if charred, and so was likewise the adjoining wood for half an inch from the cavity. The tree, at the part where the latter existed, was 19 inches in diameter; the length of the trunk was 18 feet. When the Batrachia above mentioned were discovered, they appeared inanimate, but the influence of a warm sun to which they were subjected soon imparted to them a moderate degree of vigor. In a few hours from the time they were liberated they were tolerably active, and able to move from place to place ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... the earlier process. It is radical, always identical with itself, but transitory. It goes out from ourselves toward other things. It consists in attributing life to everything, in supposing in everything that shows signs of life—and even in inanimate objects—desires, passions, and acts of will analogous to ours, acting like ourselves in view of definite ends. This state of mind is incomprehensible to an adult civilized man; but it must be admitted, since there are facts without number that ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... "heart" and "breath," which eventually led to a differentiation between their supposed functions.[69] As the heart and the blood were obviously present in the dead body they could no longer be regarded as the "life". The breath was clearly the "element" the lack of which rendered the body inanimate. It was therefore regarded as necessary to set the heart working. The heart then came to be looked upon as the seat of knowledge, the organ that feels and wills during waking life. All the pulsating motions of the body seem to have been regarded, ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... subtle directions. Nor had it taken him long to locate the most vulnerable point in Buck's armor. He had realized something of the possibilities at the first coming of Joan. He had seen then the effect of the beautiful inanimate body upon the man's susceptibilities. It had been instantaneous. Then had come that scene at the farm, and Buck's further insult over the gold which he had hated to see pass into the girl's possession. It was then that the first glimmer ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Forth rolled the music of the forest of enchantments, moving its green and whispering tree tops before the rude Siegfried, the innocent child of Nature, eager to know the language of the soul and of inanimate things. The master-bird sang, his voice rising above the murmur of the foliage. Mary ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... that only so much of 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 Garden' and 'On a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... left to herself, Pollyanna had always found plenty to interest her within the four walls of the house; for, if inanimate things failed, there were yet Mary, Jennie, Bridget, and Perkins. To-day, however, Mary had a headache, Jennie was trimming a new hat, Bridget was making apple pies, and Perkins was nowhere to be found. ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... appearances Alwyn was DEAD—any physician would have certified the fact, though how he had come by his death there was no evidence to show. And in that condition, ... stirless, breathless ... white as marble, cold and inanimate as stone, Heliobas left him. Not in indifference, but in sure knowledge—knowledge far beyond all mere medical science—that the senseless clay would in due time again arise to life and motion; that the casket was but temporarily bereft of its jewel,—and that the jewel itself, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... causality of which must be regulated by empirical laws. As such, he must possess an empirical character, like all other natural phenomena. We remark this empirical character in his actions, which reveal the presence of certain powers and faculties. If we consider inanimate or merely animal nature, we can discover no reason for ascribing to ourselves any other than a faculty which is determined in a purely sensuous manner. But man, to whom nature reveals herself only through sense, cognizes himself ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... 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 ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... diadem-and-sceptre bearing—many people for reasons of heredity discovering such graces only in those whose vestibules are lined with ancestral mail, forgetting that a bear may be taught to dance. While this air of hers lasted, even the inanimate objects in the street appeared to know that she was there; but from a way she had of carelessly overthrowing her dignity by versatile moods, one could not calculate upon its presence to a certainty when she was round corners or in ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... for long in the breast of youth. Hope began to chase it away, and inanimate though the body was, the brain grew more active, offering suggestion after suggestion as ...
— To Win or to Die - A Tale of the Klondike Gold Craze • George Manville Fenn
... meant by "the spirit of God," is that life-giving breath or power of God which operates (continuously operates) to impart life to inanimate nature.[6] From the connection in which it here stands it means this, as in other connections it means the power which operates (continuously operates) to produce whatever is noble and good (God-like) in man. There is no implication in the text ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... her inanimate form from the carriage, bore it to the side of the brook, laid it gently upon the bank and dashed a handful of the cold water into her white face. She gasped, opened her eyes, and, sitting up, looked about her with an ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... inanimate nature we find two grand divisions of matter, fluid and solid. These two divisions may be subdivided into, the former gaseous and liquid, the latter amorphous and crystalline; but whether one or the other of these ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... the while, though unable to move, in an agony of self-consciousness; and at last, when Rowland in fiendish triumph pronounces the curse complete, to the extreme horror of both, by an effort of tortured mind over apparently inanimate matter, rolls her glazed eyes, and gives an involuntary groan: having thus to all appearance confirmed the curse, she lies more marble-white, more corpse-like, more entranced than ever. Then, after long ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... pretty morbid fellow," Rajcik said carelessly. "But at least I'm not blaming inanimate objects, the way Watkins is. Or permitting myself the luxury of shock, like you." He studied Somers' face. "This is your first real ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley
... the white mornings that split the sky as a boy splits up white firwood, we may feel for one instant the presence of an impetuous purity; but his innocence was too close to the unconsciousness of inanimate things not to melt back at a mere touch into the mild hedges and ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton |
