"Passivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over England, but there is no effort to exploit the situation to the mutual advantage of English and German. Alone Sir Reginald MacKenna, the chairman of the London City and Midland Bank, in a remarkable speech to the shareholders and directors indicated our astonishing passivity. The war has brought Germany low, and the lower she goes the more dangerous she is to the rest of us. But no one will face it. If we did resolve to face it we should find many Germans ready to co-operate and give help in exchange for help. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... crying; she was only gasping—in raucous, exhausted, nervous sobs. They came shorter and harder as she pitted her impotence against this unyielding passivity. She knew it was impotence, and yet she couldn't desist; and she couldn't desist because she grew more and more frenzied. It was the kind of frenzy in which she would have dashed herself wildly, vainly against the force that blocked her with its pitiless resistance, only that the whole ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... blue eyes were lit up with a little flame of curious desire. He saw too how good-looking he was. Gerald was attractive, his blood seemed fluid and electric. His blue eyes burned with a keen, yet cold light, there was a certain beauty, a beautiful passivity in all his body, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... passivity of the Italian public during these anxious moments was due in good part, no doubt, to its thorough confidence in the men who were directing the state, specifically in the Prime Minister Salandra and his Minister of Foreign Affairs Baron Sonnino, who were the Government. They were honest,—that ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... warm and rosy in a happy dream, looking very solemnly at a picture she was making in the darkness over his left shoulder. She had liked the story, although the thought of men fighting over a woman made her feel sick, as any conspicuous example of the passivity common in her sex always did. But the rest she had thought lovely. It was a beautiful idea of the Marquis's to turn the bed into an altar. Probably he had often gone into his wife's room to kiss her good-night. She saw a narrow iron bedstead such as she ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... content is not uncommon, and worry, as we Westerners understand it, is almost unknown. Hence we need to find the happy mean between the material activity of our own civilization, and the mental passivity of that of the Orientals. Therein will be found the calm serenity of an active mind, the reasonable acceptance of things as they are because we know they are good, the restfulness that comes from the assurance that "all ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... without matter, or, in other words, it is the pure conception of being. Matter is the necessary condition of the existence of a thing; form is the essence of each thing, that in virtue of which substance is possible, and without which it is inconceivable. On the one side is passivity, possibility of existence, capacity of action; on the other side is activity, actuality, thought. The unity of these two in the realm of determined being constitutes every individual substance. The relation of matter and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... sign. He had turned him from his presumptuous attempt to be Providence to his Nelly. The General never had been, never could be, passive. He was made for the activities of life. Yet his religious ideal was passivity—to be in the hands of God expecting, accepting, His Will for all things. It was an ideal he had never attained to, and it ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... had outstripped the ardent pursuit of Edwin with a speed swifter than the winds. In fine, he had conducted his lovely prize in safety to his enchanted castle, and had introduced her within those walls, where every thing human and supernatural obeyed his nod, in a state of unresisting passivity. ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of passivity as opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal efficacy comes to birth. Perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptive psychology has been the analysis by various recent writers of ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... common saying among the old Filipinos that the Spaniards (white men) were fire (activity), while they themselves were water (passivity).—Tr. ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... saw that Leopold would stay his hand until England chose to act, meanwhile alleging her neutrality as an excuse for doing nothing.[13] Thus, the resolve of Catharine to give nothing but fair words being already surmised, the emigres found to their annoyance that Pitt's passivity clogged their efforts—the chief reason why they shrilly upbraided him for his insular egotism. Certainly his attitude was far from romantic; but surely, after the sharp lesson which he had received from the House of Commons in the spring of 1791 during the dispute ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... first days of my fever. I was not, I suppose, in actual fact, seriously ill, and yet I abandoned myself to my fate, allowing myself to slip without the slightest attempt at resistance, along the easiest way, towards death or idiocy or paralysis, towards anything that meant the indifferent passivity of inaction. I had bad, confused dreams. The silence irritated me. I fancied to myself that the sea ought to make some sound, that it was holding itself deliberately quiescent in preparation for some event. I remember that Marfa and the doctor prevented me from rising to look from my window ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... not wish to come, looking so sadly and lonely in that white room, whilst he, on the other side of that door, had not the courage to burst through those others and go to her, broke suddenly the hard dry passivity that had held him during so ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... heap pretty big," said Charlie to Moran, as he went out. "You savvy sail um boat all light; wanta you fo' captain. But," he added, suddenly dropping his bland passivity as though he wore a mask, and for an instant allowing the wicked malevolent Cantonese to come to the surface, "China boy no likee funnee business, savvy?" Then with a smile ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... ideas and sentiments into typographical fossils? Why have we forgotten the theory of human life as a divine vegetation? Why not make our hearts the focus of the lights which we strive to catch in books? Why should the wealthy passivity of the Oriental genius be so little known among us? Why conceive of success only as an outward fruit plucked by conscious struggle? Banish books, banish reading, and how much time and strength would be improvised in which to benefit ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... accomplishment of the procreative act, with the pleasurable relief it affords to himself, as the whole code of love. We have to treat with contempt the woman who abjectly accepts the act, and her own passivity therein, as the whole duty of love. We have to understand that the art of love has nothing to do with vice, and the acquirement of erotic personality nothing to do with sensuality. But we have also to ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... the person should cultivate concentration, and the use of the will in the direction of projecting mental states; in the case of the desired development of the receiving power, the person should develop receptiveness and passivity, and a certain recognition of an actual telepathic impulse which is impossible to describe in words but which comes to every investigator, and which when once experienced is always ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... confinement. All at once he loses his illusion of freedom of will. Activity, the thing that in the eyes of the European endows life with its sublimest charm, cannot in the twinkling of an eye turn into absolute passivity. Nevertheless, despite these novel, distressing experiences, despite throbbing pulses, over-stimulated senses, and nerves tautened to the snapping point, the situation is by ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... daily stunned her into hopeless apathy and abject indifference. Having lost the power of vexing, and beyond being really vexed by a being she so utterly despised as her husband, there was nothing left but pure passivity and inanition, into which she was ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... went through her. His passivity was not to be borne. In some curious fashion it hurt her. She felt as though she were beating and bruising ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... first tentative steps toward the creation of a real civilization, the task of freeing the spirit of mankind from the bondage of ignorance, prejudice and mental passivity which is more fettering now than ever in the history of humanity, will be facilitated a thousand-fold. The great central problem, and one which must be taken first is the abolition of the shame and fear of sex. We must teach men the overwhelming power of this radiant force. ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... cerements (they trail the dust) that ought to be dead wailing for entrance to things, tombed in those walls, that are dead. There is no life at all in these streets. There is nothing active or positive. There is just passivity and negation. There is just nothingness. They are not habitations, which connote life; they are repositories, which connote desuetude. They are the repositories of creatures, not that have done with life, for the sheer fact of living acknowledges service to life, but ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... git no square treatment here?" one of the gamblers whined; but his eyes, blazing with rage, belied the plaintive passivity of his tone. "We been running no skin. Wy d'ye say we gotter give up our own money? You gotter prove it was a skin. ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... young wife sits by an open window full of sunlight, and the curtains likewise are drenched in the pure white light. How tranquil she is, how passive in her beautiful animal life! No complex passion stirs in that flesh; instinct drowses in her just as in an animal. With what animal passivity she looks up in her husband's face! Look at that peaceful face, that high forehead, how clearly conceived and how complete is the rendering! How slight the means, how extraordinary the result! The sunlight floods ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... Ryder possessed in a high degree that strict passivity of mental vision which calls into being the elusive yet fixed element the mystic Blake so ardently refers to and makes a principle of, that element outside the mind's jurisdiction. His work is of the essence of poetry; it is alien to the realm of esthetics ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... at once the power and pattern of the new life. That ideal is Christ in whom the perfect life is disclosed, and through whom the power for its realisation is communicated. Life is a force, and character a growth arising in and expanding from a hidden seed. Hence in Christian Ethics apathy and passivity, and even asceticism and quietism, which occupy an important place in the moral systems of Buddha and Neo-Platonism, in mediaeval Catholicism and the teaching of Tolstoy, play only a subsidiary part, and are but preparatory stages towards the realisation of a fuller life. On the contrary all ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of her life quite willingly, she experienced an indefinable relief at the postponement of her meeting with Heddegan. But her manner after making discovery of the hindrance was quiet and subdued, even to passivity itself; as was instanced by her having, at the moment of receiving information that the steamer had sailed, replied 'Oh', so coolly to the porter with her luggage, that he was almost disappointed ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... by means of the confidence in its own especial productive possibility, which manifests itself as an inclination, as a strong impulse, to occupy itself with the special object which constitutes its content. Pedagogics has no difficulty in dealing with mechanical natures, because their passivity is only too ready to follow prescribed patterns. It is more difficult to manage talent, because it lies between mediocrity and genius, and is therefore uncertain, and not only unequal to itself, but also is ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young man sat greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight which beat in upon his brown face and neck and strong back. There was a look of relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders, which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared them. He wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with loose ends. His trousers were wide and belted at the waist, and his short sack coat hung open. His heavy shoes ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... those deep eye-hollows of his bent upon me, and listened with a passivity which did not end when I ceased to speak. I had said all that my wife had permitted me to say in her charge to me, and the incident ought to have been closed, as far as we were concerned. But Tedham's not speaking threw me off ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... weighed and measured, must be aimed at by both teacher and child, and that the value of these as symbols of what is inward and intrinsic must be wholly ignored. Not that the inward results of education would in any case be seriously considered. When education is based on the passivity of the child, nothing matters to him or to his teacher except the accuracy with which he can reproduce what he has been taught,—can repeat what he has been told, or do by himself what he has been told how to do. What connection there may be between these achievements and his mental state ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... purposes, the practice can never be too well guarded. If, as some suppose, they have to be entirely passive and lose themselves in the object before them, they should remember that, by thus encouraging passivity, they, in fact, allow the development of mediumistic faculties in themselves. As was repeatedly stated—the Adept and the Medium are the two Poles: while the former is intensely active and thus able to control the elemental forces, the latter is intensely ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... and the accidents of time, is successful and has the high spirits of success, but is no more now than it has been for twenty years a party of homogeneous confidence in domestic reform, while on the world outside the British islands it looks with passivity, perhaps timidity, certainly with no intention of ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... freedom, soon learn the difference of the sexes and the delights of sexual congress; women, hedged in by conventionalities and deterred by their innate passivity, remain, for the most part, in ignorance of sexual knowledge until their marriage. For this reason it happens that very many more women than men experience religious emotion. Young married men and women, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Apprenticeship, we have not much work to do; but, boarded and lodged gratis, are set down mostly to look about us over the workshop, and see others work, till we have understood the tools a little, and can handle this and that. If good Passivity alone, and not good Passivity and good Activity together, were the thing wanted, then was my early position favourable beyond the most. In all that respects openness of Sense, affectionate Temper, ingenuous Curiosity, and the ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... that terrible scowl of battle or the distortion of agonized death on them—mangled and crushed forms—all the wreck of a fought battle, terrible in its suggestive pathos. It sank away into the minor of water voices, soft, monotonous, agonizing in its utter passivity, a brilliant arpeggio flashed up the keys like a shower of gold, and Miss Berkeley rose with white face and trembling breath, and Nelly was alone in the room, sobbing nervously in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... incarnations, and in some sense Buddha is worshiped. But it must be remembered that even in Jainism Buddha is only a memory. He has entered into Nirvana, and has passed out of conscious existence. Now that he has attained that state of passivity, he has no eye to pity and no arm to save. And yet in this Jain temple images of Buddha are worshiped, and these images are numbered by ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... asked once again of the aged concierge in the Rue d'Aumale. This time she got an answer. It was the fifth or top floor. Musa said nothing, permitting himself to be taken about like a parcel, though with a more graceful passivity. There was no lift, but at each floor a cushioned seat for travellers to use and a palm in a coloured pot in a niche for travellers to gaze upon as they rested. The quality of the palms, however, deteriorated floor by floor, and on the fourth and fifth floors the niches ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... gelatinous forms which are some of them so transparent and colourless as to be with difficulty distinguished from the water they float in, is not more like its medium in chemical, mechanical, optical, thermal, and other properties, than it is in the passivity with which it submits to all the actions brought to bear on it; while the mammal does not more widely differ from inanimate things in these properties than it does in the activity with which it meets surrounding changes by compensating changes in itself. Between these two extremes, we see ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... different from happiness: an alert enjoyment of rest, an intense and satisfying sense of centrality. As a dog when it basks in the sun with one eye open and winking: or a rabbit quite still and wide-eyed, with a faintly-twitching nose. Not passivity, but alert enjoyment of being central, life-central in one's own ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... much for you," he said, drawing her head to his breast. She lay there as if in a trance, with eyes closed, her face lily-white against him. They remained in this position for some minutes till he became alarmed at her passivity. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... atoms in the mass. Thus far she had reversed the laws of the spheres, and the greater had followed the less. When she had first begun to hold a permanent place in his thoughts he had invested her with something of that atmosphere of peace and cool passivity which hedges in the women of her faith. It had been like a thin, clear glass, revealing her loveliness, but cutting off the magnetic currents. A young man is not long satisfied with the mystery his thoughts have woven around the woman who is their ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... Madrid were not acting with the passivity desired by their philosophizing monarch. At first they had welcomed Murat as delivering them from the detested yoke of Godoy; but the conduct of the French in their capital, and the detention of Ferdinand ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... His alacrity of temper was co-equal with his steadiness of purpose; and the cheerfulness of an active mind, sanguine temperament, and great nervous energy did not abandon him, even in the state of forced passivity so intolerable to such habitude; for hilarious words and, once or twice, the old ringing laugh startled the fond watchers of his declining hours. The events of his life are but a few expressive outlines; his works embody his most real experience; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... mere passivity. It is more than simply a revelation of Divine suffering, of the eternal patience of the love of GOD. It is the expression of GOD in action: a deed of Divine self- sacrifice: a voluntary taking upon Himself by man's Eternal Lover of the burden of man's misery and sin. There is a profound truth in ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... spectatorship was the child's main support, the long habit, from the first, of seeing herself in discussion and finding in the fury of it—she had had a glimpse of the game of football—a sort of compensation for the doom of a peculiar passivity. It gave her often an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass. Such she felt to be the application of her nose while she waited for ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... man is not of such. He is capable not of being influenced merely, but of influencing—and first of all of influencing himself; of taking a share in his own making; of determining actively, not by mere passivity, what he shall be and become; for he never ceases to pay at least a little heed, however poor and intermittent, to the voice of his conscience, and to-day he pays more heed than he ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... soft, all-encompassing. As if by magic the mainland is blotted out. The sea is dark and death-like, the air clammy, turgid, and steamy. Heavy vapour settles upon the hills of the Island, descending slowly and with the passivity of fate, until there is but a thin stratum of clear air between the gloomy ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... Sextus, no growth in breadth of philosophical outlook, only improvement in methods. Philosophical activity can never have doubt as its aim, as that would form, as we have shown, a psychological contradiction. The true essence of Pyrrhonism was passivity, but passivity can never lead to progress. Much of the polemical work of Pyrrhonism prepared the way for scientific progress by providing a vast store of scientific data, but progress was to the Pyrrhonists impossible. They ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... slight uneasiness that still pursued him was more due to his habitual conscientiousness of his own intention than to any fear that she would not fully respond to it. Indeed, with his conservative ideas of proper feminine self-restraint, Louise's calm passivity and undemonstrative attitude were a proof of her superiority; had she blushed overmuch, cried, or thrown herself into his arms, he would have doubted the wisdom of so easy a selection. It was true he had known her scarcely three weeks; if he chose to be content ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... was a gentle manly deference; his begging showed no trace of servility, but he was always polite. He accepted failure with good grace, and did not resent scorn, abuse, or even violence from intended victims. He was rarely combative. Fighting was not his special gift; he met misfortune with patient passivity Resistance he found a mistake. But for all this a certain sense of superiority was, never wanting in Nickie the Kid; the shabbiest clothes, a deplorable hat, fragmentary boots, shirtlessness, the most distressing situations all failed to wholly eliminate a touch of impudent dignity, ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... God. Other so-called services of God are a means to this, or else an illusion. This parallel of religion and morals is to be set over against other passages, easily to be cited, in which Schleiermacher speaks of passivity and contemplation as the means of the realisation of the unity of man and God, as if the elimination of self meant a sort of Nirvana. Schleiermacher was a pantheist and mystic. No philosopher save Kant ever influenced him half so much as did Spinoza. There is ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... range of their senses, lulled by warmth and food and cigar-smoke into a kind of rapt self-contemplation. But up here, in the gloom, lighted only on this occasion by a single shaded candle, in a complete interior silence, three persons had sat round a table for more than an hour, striving by passivity and a kind of indescribable concentration to ignore all that was presented by the senses, and to await some movement from that which ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... nature was worth a quarrel. People liked the principle contained in the sentence: "We can afford to exercise the self-restraint of a really great nation which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it." But they also wondered whether the passivity of the Government did not in part proceed from the fact that the President could not make up his mind what he wanted to do. They looked upon his handling of the Mexican situation as clear evidence of a lack of policy. Nevertheless the country ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... proves. In so far as man is not a rational being and does not live in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions and dreamful ideas roll by without mutual representation or adjustment, in so far as his body takes the lead and even his galvanised action is a form of passivity, we may truly say that his life is not intellectual and not dependent on the application of general concepts to experience; for he ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... she shrouded her in these, Madame von Marwitz, still gazing, as if at visions, in the fire, lifted her arms and bent her head with almost the passivity of a dead thing. Once or twice she murmured broken phrases: "My ewe-lamb;—taken;—I am very weary. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu,—and is ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... are represented symbolically in the Kabalah as male and female. So also are Justice and Mercy. Strength is the intellectual Energy or Activity; Establishment or Stability is the intellectual Capacity to produce, a passivity. They are the POWER of generation and the CAPACITY of production. By WISDOM, it is said, God creates, and by UNDERSTANDING establishes. These are the two Columns of the Temple, contraries like the Man and Woman, like Reason and Faith, Omnipotence and Liberty, Infinite ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... general psychology, and has acquired peculiar significance in the domains of aesthetics, ethics, and theology; and the same root idea is preserved throughout—that of immediacy of insight. The characteristic of passivity on which certain mystics would insist is subsidiary—even if it is to be allowed at all. Its claims will ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... before her, in that Sunday quiet, a terrible procession of the things that she would forget. She knew that she would not be patient under correction, especially under the correction of her Aunt Anne. Already she felt in her a rebellion at her aunt's aloofness and passivity. After all, why should she treat every one as though she were God? Maggie felt that there was in her aunt's attitude something sentimental and affected. She hated sentiment and affectation in any one. She was afraid, too, that Anne bullied ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... o'clock was he able to seem to listen to their appeals, and this was only because Chand Singh, apparently emboldened by the passivity of his foe, deliberately advanced four guns to a spot little beyond the reach of their musketry, and began to try the range. Charteris detected at once the bait which was to draw him from his position and give the Granthis their ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... time some charm was imparted by his instructing me to adopt a superincumbent face-to-face embrace. The beginning of his puberty was enormously attractive to me; had he been less cold-blooded I could have responded passionately to his endearments; but he always insisted on rigorous passivity on my part, and he explained nothing. One day, by a small gratuity, he induced me to offer him my mouth, though I still had no comprehension of the result I was helping to attain. Once the orgasm occurred, and the effect was extremely nauseous; after that he was more ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... idea, they have practically excluded all foreign manufactured articles by prohibitive tariffs."[40] "Is our country slow to realise the danger" asks Dr. Bose "that threatens her by the capture of her market and the total destruction of her industries? Does she not realise that it is helpless passivity that directly provokes aggression?... There is, therefore, no time to be lost and the utmost effort is demanded of the Government and the people for the ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... maddened by the passivity of her regard, he lashed out at her once more, blindly cutting her with abuse that stung, even though it was entirely undeserved. A certain crude coarseness crept into his phrases, perhaps something long repressed had found vent. The cold, inert ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... another woman over her, but nearly all women do it in one sort or another, from love of a voluntary submission, or from a fear of their own ignorance, if they are younger and more inexperienced than their lieges. Neither the one passion nor the other seems to reduce them to a like passivity as regards their husbands. They must apparently have a fetish of their own sex. Colville could see that Imogene obeyed Mrs. Bowen not only as a protegee but ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... substance may be greatly doubted. But it is to be remembered withal, that always on the back of these compulsory adventures there followed English bishops, priests and preachers; whereby to the open-minded, conviction, to all degrees of it, was attainable, while silence and passivity became the duty or ...
— Early Kings of Norway • Thomas Carlyle
... the pain seemed old and dulled from habit. It was the terrible strength with which the Evil Spirit had possessed her, seizing her channels of speech even while she was still there, hurling her from her seat without waiting for the passivity of sleep. No, her sense of misfortune was not altogether, or even mainly, connected with that last day of hers. Unlike Mildred, she had up till now been without any consciousness of things that had occurred during her quiescence, ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... as I speak or write, a twinge of the gout suddenly introduces itself into the succession of my experiences: then I am conscious of no such inner connexion between the new experience and that which went before it. Then I am as distinctly conscious of passivity—of not causing the succession of events which take place in my mind—as I am in the other case of actively causing it. If the consciousness of exercising activity is a delusion, why does not that delusion occur in the one case as much as in the ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... either total or approximative, of these principles are many and familiar. They may be seen in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the alternate activity and passivity of the lungs; in the feet of the pedestrian, one pausing while the other proceeds; in the waving wings of birds; in the undulation of the sea; in the creation and propagation of sound, and the propagation, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... she sat pale and listless over the fire in her sitting-room, he reappeared. He spoke to her gently, but she gave him no answer. She looked at him with blank, languid eyes, and said not a word. He was almost frightened at her passivity. He thought that he had perhaps over-strained matters: that he had sent her out of her mind. But he did not lose hope. Kitty, with weakened powers of body and mind, would still be to him the woman that ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... a matter of course; that's the way it always has been, and always will be; some are born to suffer, others not. You can't have mountains without valleys. The war seemed perfectly idiotic to him, but he would not have lifted a finger to prevent it. He had in his way the fatalist passivity of the people, which hides itself, on Gallic soil, behind a veil of ironic carelessness. The "no use in getting in a sweat about it," of the trenches. Then there is also that false pride of the French, who fear nothing so much as ridicule, and would risk death twenty times over for something they ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... avoid the absurdity of an endless regress, argue from the {kinoumena} and the {kinounta} of the physical World to a {proton kinoun} which is a pure {energeia, akineton, aneu hyles}, and hence foreign to all the passivity and contingency of matter;[18] concludes from motion in the world that there must be a First Mover;[19] and asserts the actuality of the eternal as opposed to potentiality; but these arguments ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... beings in the grip of an inelastic system and forcibly holding them fixed, we have ignored the laws of life and growth. We have forced living souls into a permanent passivity, making them incapable of moulding circumstance to their own intrinsic design, and of mastering their own destiny. Borrowing our ideal of life from a dark period of our degeneracy, we have covered up our sensitiveness ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... flame he had kindled in the bosom of the girl he left behind. Carrie was possessed of that sympathetic, impressionable nature which, ever in the most developed form, has been the glory of the drama. She was created with that passivity of soul which is always the mirror of the active world. She possessed an innate taste for imitation and no small ability. Even without practice, she could sometimes restore dramatic situations she ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... Woman's passivity under the burden of her disastrous task was almost altogether that of ignorant resignation. She knew virtually nothing about her reproductive nature and less about the consequences of her excessive child-bearing. ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... sun had heated the road, was on his way to the Four Corners. There was not much that he could do, after all, in his pitiful errand; at least, for the mother. One more insult for her to accept, to be borne in stupid passivity. But for the daughter who had to live, it would be a different question; and by the time he had reached Middleton, he had not made up his mind how the tale was to ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... listlessness with which he responded to her caresses, the gloomy fire that was smouldering in his eyes. The exotic dance had made him recall her past and in order to regain her sway over him, subjecting him in sweet passivity, she sprang up from the divan, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... indifference or passivity of her companion restrained her from any further expression. The train stopped, and she descended to the platform of a small country station, alive ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... possible of the past into the present. If the relaxation were complete, there would no longer be either memory or will—which amounts to saying that, in fact, we never do fall into this absolute passivity, any more than we can make ourselves absolutely free. But, in the limit, we get a glimpse of an existence made of a present which recommences unceasingly—devoid of real duration, nothing but the instantaneous which dies and is born again endlessly. Is the existence of ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... by his long rest, and with his habitual impatience of mere passivity, he was eager to begin the new day and subdue sadness by his strong will and strong arm. The white mist lay in the valley; it was going to be a bright warm day, and he would start to work again when he ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... forth from beyond the darkness. [Footnote: Crinvantu vicve amritasya putra a ye divya dhamani tasthuh vedahametam purusham mahantam aditya varnam tamasah parastat.] Do we not find the overwhelming delight of a direct and positive experience where there is not the least trace of vagueness or passivity? ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... passivity now seemed to inundate her. She made no attempt to struggle; she nursed no sense of open resentment against her captors. The battery of her vital forces was depleted and depolarized. She experienced only a faintly poignant sense of disappointment, ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... is fairly paralleled by what takes place at the ordinary spiritualistic seance. Those attending are advised that the chief condition of a communication with the inhabitants of the other world is a passive state of mind. This passivity cannot exclude expectancy, since it is only assumed in order that something may occur. If nothing occurs, if no communications are received, it is because the requisite conditions have not been fulfilled, and the sceptic is met with much semi-scientific jargon as to conditions being ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... says The Cloud of Unknowing, not a desperate anxious struggle for more light. True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything to gain. Though the way may be long, the material of your mind intractable, to the eager lover of Reality ultimate success is assured. The strong tide of Transcendent ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... unseeing, unhearing, and he breathed faintly, with the soft regularity of an infant. The struggle was finished, and he had emerged from it with the right to breathe. His hair had been brushed, and his beard combed. It was uncanny, this tidiness, this calm, this passivity. The memory of the night grew fantastic and remote. Surely the old man must spring up frantically in a moment, to beat off his enemy! Surely his agonised cry for Clara must be ringing through the room! But nothing of him stirred. Air came ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... these cases the activity of one of the gametes, and the passivity of the other, is regarded as evidence of incipient sex. In Strogonium there is cell-division in the parent-cell prior to conjugation; and as two segments are cut off in the case of the active gamete, and only one in the case of the passive gamete, there is a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... omitted, and others repeated several times under different heads. It is like a division of animals into men, quadrupeds, horses, asses, and ponies. That, for instance, could not be a very comprehensive view of the nature of Relation which could exclude action, passivity, and local situation from that category. The same observation applies to the categories Quando (or position in time), and Ubi (or position in space); while the distinction between the latter and Situs is merely verbal. The incongruity of erecting into a summum ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... her child to the farm, but there was this lull between them, an intense calm and passivity like a torpor upon them, so that there was no active change took place. He was almost unaware of the child, yet by his native good humour he gained her confidence, even her affection, setting her on a horse to ride, giving her corn ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... critical eye. Unhindered as they were by the traditional shapes, by wings or other protuberances, they had been able to design a machine of striking beauty. The ship was to retain its natural metallic sheen, the only protection being a coat of "passivity paint"—a liquid chemical that could be brushed or sprayed on iron, chromium, nickel or cobalt alloys, rendering them passive to practically all chemical agents. The new "paint" left the iron or steel as brilliantly glossy as ever, but overcast with a beautiful iridescence, ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... directions given by all great teachers of prayer and contemplation; and these two acts, rightly performed, fuse one with the other, they are two aspects of the single act of communion with God. Look at their insistence on a stilling and recollecting of the mind, on surrender, a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful: on the need of meek yielding to a greater inflowing power, and its regenerating suggestions. Then compare this with the method by which health-giving suggestions are ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... gospel of individual energy. And all this complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any suggestion that the acquiescence of the "clay" means passivity. ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... They temper each element of character, as well as every vital act. They infuse the organism with a resisting power which renders it proof against the influence of miasma and malaria, and overcomes that passivity and impressionability so favorable to disease. Firmness expresses a physiological cohesiveness which strongly binds together the fibers of the tissues, and renders the organization compact and powerful. He, who can skillfully employ these energies, is already master ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... so long and so entirely accustomed to the reception of homage that it cost her no more reflection than an imperial princess bestows on the taxes that produce her tiara, turned slowly from the apparent apathy thus induced on her modes of thought, passivity lost in a gulf of anxious speculation, while she watched the theatre of events with a glow, like wine in lamplight, that burned behind her dusky eyes till they had the steady penetration of some wild creature's. She may ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... while he stuffed my pockets, but rebelled when he tried to poke the prickly, scratchy things inside my shirt. I had not yet attained that sublime indifference to physical comfort, that Nirvana of passivity, that Muir had found. ...
— Alaska Days with John Muir • Samual Hall Young
... emotional and practical difference to one whether one accept the universe in the drab discolored way of stoic resignation to necessity, or with the passionate happiness of Christian saints. The difference is as great as that between passivity and activity, as that between the defensive and the aggressive mood. Gradual as are the steps by which an individual may grow from one state into the other, many as are the intermediate stages which different ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... movements, the whole arm and hand, shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingers, are shaken until the joints are completely relaxed and a warm, tingling sensation passes through the entire arm. It is then dropped at the side in perfect passivity. The result is twofold—a feeling of repose and controlling power, and an absence of that nervous tendency to "fidget," or handle something, glove buttons, or watch chain, without which a morning ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... morning, at a fixed hour, he issued from his house in one of the small alleys, staff in hand, and with a curious kind of horn or whistle. This he blew as he walked along, from time to time, without turning his head, in that strange trance of passivity which distinguishes the Valencian peasant. Out from dark corners, narrow passages, mud hovels on all sides, came tearing along little pigs, big pigs, dark, light, fat, thin pigs,—pigs of every description,—and joined the procession ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... advances, receiving them with blank passivity, or repelling them with irony, according to the several needs of their self-respect, and talking to one another across her. One of them asked her when her hair had begun to turn, and they each told her how thin she was, but promised her that Hatboro' air would bring her up. At the same time ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... 'lubotchniya'-books. The new craze for 'Nat Pinkerton and Sherlock Holmes' stories is something quite different. It foreshadows a complete change in the psychosis of the Russian reader, the decay of the literature of passivity, and the rise of a new literature of action and physical revolt. The literature of passivity reached its height with the (sic) Chekhov. The best representative of the transition from Chekhov to the new literature of self-assertion is Maxim Gorki's friend, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... putrefaction, the impure is separated from the pure; and if the pure elements are then once more joined together by the action of natural heat, a much nobler and higher form of life is produced.... If the hidden central fire, which during life was in a state of passivity, obtain the mastery, it attracts to itself all the pure elements, which are thus separated from the impure, and form the nucleus of a far purer form of ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... it possible that Miss Julia Neilson really imagined herself to be capable of rendering this scene as it should be rendered? It is a scene that requires no brains, no subtle emotional quality, none of the more intellectual merits of acting. It requires simply a great passivity to feeling, the mere skill of letting horrors sweep over the face and the body like drenching waves. The actress need not know how she does it; she may do it without an effort, or she may obtain her spontaneity by an elaborate calculation. But to do it ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... greyhound. It was more as if they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually benumbed their busy inquisitive natures. And this strange passivity, this almost human lassitude, seemed to me sadder than the misery of starved and beaten animals. I should have liked to rouse them for a minute, to coax them into a game or a scamper; but the longer I looked into their fixed and weary eyes the more ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton |
