"Receptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come to a saving knowledge of Christ are content to rest satisfied with it. No effort is made to instruct others in a belief which has helped them. The church believes in a teaching ministry, but has not yet come to fully believe in a teaching laity. The laity for the most part assumes a receptive attitude. Our Bible-schools might be doubled in numbers and effectiveness if Christian men and women, well qualified for the task, could be induced to respond to the strong demand for more teachers. There is no reason why Bible instruction ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... calling to be released. It was useless to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry. It must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an echoer and imitator of men, as one whose every thought becomes coloured with others' views. Like a sponge I was readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be applied and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by inward feelings. This ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... we visited the Borghese; and I was able to explain to Flora why the circular "Madonna and Angels" was not by Botticelli. And, indeed, there was hardly a picture in Rome I was unable to reattribute to its rightful owner. In the apt Flora I found a receptive pupil. She even grew suspicious about the great Velasquez at the Doria, in which she fancied, with all the enthusiasm of youth, that she detected the handling of Mazo. I soon found that it was better ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... the families of the two brothers was unusual, but not impossible in our country. One of the brothers was ambitious, of steady habits, and possessed of a receptive mind; the other was idle, impatient of restraint, with a disinclination to protracted effort ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... colonization. The classic example of the confinement of a people within its political boundaries is the long isolation of Japan from 1624 to 1854. The pent-up forces there accumulated, in a population which had doubled itself in the interval and which by hard schooling was made receptive to every improved economic method, manifest themselves in the insistent demand for more land which has permeated all the recent policy of Japan. But the history of Japan is exceptional. The rule is that the growing people slowly but continually overflow their political ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... about the Church of England returned; and in this condition of mind he found himself outside a small Roman Catholic church dedicated to St. Joseph, where hopeful of gaining the Divine guidance within he passed through the door. It may be that he was in a less receptive mood than he thought, for what impressed him most was the Anglican atmosphere of this Italian outpost. The stale perfume of incense on stone could not eclipse that authentic perfume of respectability which has been acquired by so many Roman Catholic churches in England. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... made an uncompromising speech. That is by far better than to make a hero out of a McClellan. But the misdeeds of the Administration easily confused such impressionable receptive ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... affairs, he contrived to pay his debts; however obliged to friends and patrons for occasional aid, he never abated his self-respect or became the hanger-on of any man; and he showed throughout his life an eager, receptive, and ever-expanding mind. The seed sown by his father with so much pains and care in his early training fell on fruitful soil, and in the range of his information, as well as in his critical and reasoning powers, ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... Aunt Jerusha. "Do not project an unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little Methy into a receptive mood. He is having ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... not want to speak of France, and wondered why. But Marvin, eager to talk of his favourite study, seized the suggestion in all innocence. He had gone to Paris as he had wandered through life, with the mind of a child, eager, receptive, open to impression. Such minds pass by much that is of value, but to one or two conclusions they bring a perceptive comprehension which is photographic in ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more and more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in his tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic, less receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personal gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become both obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew too intricate for one human ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... A receptive state of mind is supposed to be one of the peculiar merits of children. Indeed, they are so sympathetic with any view that the last presentation that they happen to hear in regard to a disputed matter is likely to be the one ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... doctor. "He'd do all those things and more, if he couldn't make you see him or hear him in any other way. As to mediums,—why doesn't a telegram travel through the air as well as on a wire? Your friends could come back to you in the old way if you could but put yourself in a receptive condition. But you can't. So you must depend ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... he felt that he and she, and those dear puppets of his own creations, were denizens together of some fairy and ethereal world, wandering through the fascinating maze of imaginative life. It was almost an intoxication, this wonderfully stimulating contact with a mind so receptive, so brilliant, so sympathetic. He forgot his garret, Cicely, the drear past, the passionate warnings of Drexley and Rice. As a weaver of stories he was in his first youth. He had peopled but few worlds with those wonderfully precious creations—the children of the brain. They were as dear ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... he found the country north of the Alps in the possession of two races—both Aryan. These two races were as unlike then as they are now. The Gauls west of the Rhine were proper material for the reception of Roman rule; but the Germans beyond the Rhine were not receptive of any rule but their own. The Gallic races became Romanized. Gaul was a part of the Roman Empire and reasoning from the facts, we should have expected the Gaulish nations to develop into ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... written in this monograph a delightful eulogium of books and their manifold influence, and has gained therein two classes of readers,—the scholarly class, to which he belongs, and the receptive class, which he has benefited.—Evening Mail and Express, ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd,[16] and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the most wide-hearted and receptive of people, a people that cannot live if it does not make its own the spiritual values of the other peoples. We can already say that we know the outer world better than they know us.—PROF. F. MEINECKE, ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... early days of the Alleghany traffic; wagoners deriding Clinton's Ditch; angry boatmen anxious to ram the paddle wheels of Fulton's Clermont, which threatened their monopoly. Such opposition has always been an incident of progress; and even in this new country, receptive as it was to new ideas, the Washingtons, the Fitches, the Fultons, the Coopers, and the Whitneys, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, all had to face scepticism and hostility from those ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... the irritation that is produced in the living being by contending with the passive resistance of inert matter. And there is something provoking even in the outward signs that the mind is in a non-receptive state. You remember the eye that is looking beyond you,—the grin that is not at anything funny in what you say,—the occasional inarticulate sounds that are put in at the close of your sentences, as if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... collapse, dropped into a chair on her veranda, her faithful Major by her side. He had come to offer help and sympathy as soon as he heard of her distress, and, finding her in such a softened, dependent, and receptive mood, the Major had remained to try ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... house the woman had gone to the wall. As in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on within the nation, the more impressionable and receptive temperament had had forced on ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... dependence, but another aspect of the vital balance between the indrawing and outgiving of power; and one of the main functions of prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggestible state in which, as Dionysius the Areopagite says, we are "receptive ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... the time had come for ending the interview. He desired that her receptive mind should retain a solemn impression of his majesty and of his power. A charlatan to the last, he now rose to his feet and with outstretched arm pointed upwards to the small glimpse of ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... stone, but different stones and even different layers in the same stone exhibit great variation in absorptive power. The Brazilian agates lend themselves readily to coloration, while the German agates are much less receptive. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Innovators. The public also is of two corresponding kinds - those who accept only what they have learned to regard as good, preferring imitations of it to anything requiring the acquisition of a new viewpoint; and that other kind, receptive to new sensations. The first class is the more numerous, which explains why most of our art, in fact most of all art, is imitative - that is, imitative of ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... in the worst sense of the term, and therefore a purely destructive factor, must unconditionally be resisted and combated. However, at the same time all that can be done must be done to alleviate the distress of the British masses, which is undoubtedly very great, and which makes them exceedingly receptive to the revolutionary doctrines of Socialism. As it would require too much space to deal with the social problem in Great Britain in its entirety, only a few of the most important points can be ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... so lightly, into song he broke. Soil so quick receptive,—not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalizing virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous—prove a poet soul! Indeed? Rock's the song soil rather, surface hard and bare: ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... in viewing mountains from a great distance. While standing at Terrapin Point you are overwhelmed by the spirit of the scene around you, which seems more grand and awesome as the dusk of evening begins to throw a dark veil over the landscape; the sense of hearing is made more receptive by the lessening of the vision and you realize the awful sublimity of Niagara. The islands, like dark phantoms, loom in the dim shadows. Then in the east the moon rises mellowing and softening the beautiful scene, while all about you is the eternal roar of the waters. ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... This receptive faculty, for power it cannot be called, is neither voluntary nor constant. The appearances have no dependence upon choice: they cannot be summoned, detained, or recalled. The impression is sudden, ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... remain as isolated bits of primeval wilderness, hedged about by farms and furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh,—drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation,—melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of Nature undisturbed ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... is by no means complete, it shows that Roosevelt's receptive and sleepless mind fastened on the full circle of questions which interested American life, so far as that is controlled or directed by national legislation. Some of the laws passed were simply readjustments—new statutes on old matters. Other laws were new, embodying the first attempt ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... noble qualities" had not been long at Martinique before he associated himself with a lady of questionable virtue, who was much older than he. This person's dislike to Josephine caused her to pour into his willing ears and receptive mind scandalous stories of his childwife's love intrigues before she left her native island. This gave Alexandre a fine opportunity of writing a letter to her, disclaiming the paternity of Hortense, and accusing ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... greatest mission which the photoplay may have in our community is that of esthetic cultivation. No art reaches a larger audience daily, no esthetic influence finds spectators in a more receptive frame of mind. On the other hand no training demands a more persistent and planful arousing of the mind than the esthetic training, and never is progress more difficult than when the teacher adjusts himself to the mere liking of the pupils. The country today would still be without ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... In their schools there is close co-ordination of primary and intermediate education. Promising boys in the fifth standard are removed when they are 11 or 12 years of age into the higher schools and thus given an opportunity, at the most receptive period of their lives, of acquiring knowledge which they will be able to turn to good account in after life. Over and over again has the National Board attempted to persuade the Treasury to adopt a similar system, but ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... had not been stripped of belief; and his receptive mind, had been ceaselessly occupied registering impressions, to be flung off, later, in prose and verse, that She might share them to the full. A slim volume—published, at her wish, in 1916—had attracted no small attention in the critical ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... special genius, or exceptional and adventitious point. He does not make the impression of the scholar or artist or litterateur, but such as you would imagine the antique heroes to make,—that of a sweet-blooded, receptive, perfectly normal, catholic man, with, further than that, a look about him that is best suggested by the word elemental or cosmical. It was this, doubtless, that led Thoreau to write, after an hour's interview, that he suggested "something a little more ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... rhyme, melody, harmony are all an embodiment in sound, as distinguished from word, of what can be so embodied—the feeling of the poem, which goes before, and prepares the way for the following thought—tunes the heart into a receptive harmony. Then comes the new arrangement of thought and figure whereby the meaning contained is presented as it never was before. We give a sort of paraphrastical synopsis of the poem, which, partly in virtue of its disagreeableness, will enable ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... strength, I chose for the students of Kensington, in a lecture since published, two characteristic examples of early art, of equal skill; but in the one case, skill which was progressive—in the other, skill which was at pause. In the one case, it was work receptive of correction—hungry for correction; and in the other, work which inherently rejected correction. I chose for them a corrigible Eve, and an incorrigible Angel, and I grieve to say[236] that the incorrigible Angel ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... see in her one more, and the most marked, illustration of the divine method. "He hath regarded the low estate of His Handmaiden." "He hath exalted them of low degree." "He hath filled the hungry." The method of God is to work to His results through those who are spiritually receptive. The less of self there is in us the more room there is for God. "The Kingdom of God is within you," that is, the starting-point of God's work in the building of the Kingdom is within the soul of man. He must master the ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... precedents surprising even to those who thought they had themselves exhausted the subject. His temper was too amiable and serene for stinging wit or biting sarcasm, but he had a playful humor which kept the minds of his hearers in that receptive and compliant state which disposed them the more readily to give full and generous consideration to all the strong parts of his argument. It might well indeed be said of Mr. Seward as Mr. Webster said of Samuel Dexter, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the early days of his novel. "As the sun colours flowers, so Art colours life." It seemed to him that this was beginning to come true, and that life was already presenting itself to him in a gayer, brighter dress. He reached the publisher's office, therefore, in an unwontedly receptive mood, and was tremendously impressed by the rudeness of the clerks, who treated authors as mendicants and expressed their opinion of literature by handling books as if ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... Margaret, I was so young, and perhaps too much disposed to meet people on my own ground, that I may not be able to do justice to her. Her nature was so large and receptive, so sympathetic with youth and genius, so aspiring, and withal so womanly in her understanding, that she made her companion think more of himself, and of a common life, than of herself. She was a companion as few others, if indeed ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... land was green, and the sea lay broad and blue, its breast swelling to the evening sun. The air blew sweet over field and cliff, add the music of the incoming tide was heard below the pine-fringed bank. Caius, however, was not in the receptive mind which appreciates outward things. His attention was not thoroughly aroused from himself till the sound of harsh ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... matter moves toward form, through desire for the primal being; for matter requires light from that which is in the essence of will, which compels matter to move toward will and to desire it: and herein will and matter are alike. And because matter is receptive of the form that has flowed down into it by the flux of violence and necessity, matter must necessarily move to receive form; and therefore things are constrained by will and obedience in turn. Hence by the light which it has from will, matter moves toward ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... regards the receptive function. Then there is another function in the intellectual life of a Nation, that of spontaneous flow, that going out of its life by which the world is enriched. When the Nation has lost this power, when it merely receives, ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... is due, however, to our sculptors in Italy that credit should be given them for having resisted the influence of forms, of the mere letter of the classic, to a greater extent than the students of any other nation. Whether or not they have been receptive of the spirit of the antique remains ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... so deeply in love with the incomprehensible Lubov Sergievna, and declare that in his aunt he can only find good QUALITIES? Verily it is a true saying that 'a prophet hath no honour in his own country.' One of two things: either every man has in him more of bad than of good, or every man is more receptive to bad than to good. Lubov Sergievna he has not known for long, whereas his aunt's love he has known since ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... for phantoms of an imaginary world that is not serious at all. To the pure or stoical soul the solitude of the forest is strength, but then the imagination must know the yoke. Rousseau's imagination, in no way of the strongest either as receptive or inventive, was the free accomplice of his sensations. The undisciplined force of animal sensibility gradually rose within him, like a slowly welling flood. The spectacle does not either brighten or fortify the student's mind, yet if there are such states, it is right that those who ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of words from the other seemed to meet a receptive ear. The first speaker nodded energetically. His satisfaction was all too evident. From his appearance he was expecting nothing short ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... little children, we are receptive, become willing to accept the divine Principle and rule of being, as unfolded in divine Science, the interpretation therein will be found to be the Comforter that leadeth ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... and from these virtues or powers the Soul is produced more or less pure; and according to its purity there descends into it the virtue or power of the possible or passive intellect, as it is called, and as it has been spoken of. And if it happen that through the purity of the receptive Soul the intellectual power is indeed separate and absolute, free from all corporeal shadow, the Divine Goodness multiplies in it, as in a thing sufficient to receive that good gift; and then it multiplies in the Soul of ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... would talk about him enthusiastically, the next day, none the less. The journalist's silence was enforced by the topics; but what expression and manner the light allowed them to see was friendly and receptive, as though he listened to brilliant suggestions. He had a nice courtesy, and Miss Hinsdale felt continually that she was cleverer than usual this evening, and no one took his silence to be churlish, though they all innocently ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... is the Willow plate itself?" said the maiden, as she began to arrange her mind towards departure. "As the colours were still in a receptive state this person placed it safely aside for the time. It was somewhat near the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... anyone hated it. He would have been almost ready to burn down Sneyd Castle in order to get rid of the thing. But it happened that on the previous evening, in the conversation with the magistrates' clerk, his receptive brain had been visited by a less expensive scheme than burning ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... thirteen, and emotional, and incredibly receptive and alive. It is impossible to tell what she learned during that Chicago trip, it was so crowded, so wonderful. She went with her mother to the wholesale houses and heard and saw and, unconsciously, remembered. When she became ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... light into the dark corners of the earth, and God, the Spiritual Sun, imparts spiritual light into the passive and receptive soul. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... a passive and receptive rather than an active and aggressive nature, Carrie accepted the situation. Her state seemed satisfactory enough. Once in a while they would go to a theatre together, occasionally in season to the beaches and different points about the city, but they picked ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... a reverent, responsive, receptive silence in my heart, take me out beyond my pleadings into the limitless visions and the fathomless satisfactions of communion with Thyself. Speak to me. ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... for an exordium is to dispose the auditors to be favorable to us in the other parts of the discourse. This, as most authors agree, is accomplished by making them friendly, attentive, and receptive, tho due regard should be paid to these three particulars throughout the whole ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... teachers care most to hear, and in the nineteen years of her service at Wellesley, there were many students eager to tell her what she had been to them. She writes in 1886: "What a privilege to pour into the receptive mind of young American girls the fullness of all that is precious about the German spirit; and how enthusiastically they receive all ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... Monastery. His priestly name is Sergius. He was scarcely out of boyhood when I came here; it was not long, however, before I discovered in him the qualities which drew me to thee during thy prison life at the old convent of Irene—a receptive mind, and a native proneness to love God. I made his way easy. I became his teacher, as I had been thine; and as the years flew by he reminded me more and more of thee, not merely with respect to mental capacity, but purity of soul and aspiration as well. Need I say how natural it was for me to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... Examinations, examinations by teachers who understand this very fine art, in which the student is obliged to restate, apply, and use the principles of his subject, are of the utmost value in keeping the mind active and not simply receptive. They are just as good and as vitally necessary as examination papers which merely demand definitions and lists and bald facts are bad. And then there might be discussions—if the Professor were clever ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... Lizzie Flower first-rate; and she declared that he was the brightest and most receptive pupil she ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... receptive, optimistic. But it nettled her that everybody should be so congratulatory, and nobody surprised. It wasn't what she would call ideal for two impoverished young aristocrats to start life on nothing ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... stucco, he looked further at the Telegraph. He was rather surprised to find more than a column of enticing palaces, each in the finest position in London; London, in fact, seemed to be one unique, glorious position. And it was so welcome, so receptive, so wishful to make a speciality of your comfort, your food, your bath, your sanitation! He remembered the old boarding-houses of the eighties. Now all was changed, for the better. The Telegraph was full of the better, crammed and packed with tight columns of it. The better burst ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... the subject of Roman camps in general, and the girls listened with receptive faces, but minds wandering upon more modern themes. Morvyth was speculating whether it would be possible to purchase chocolates on the way home, Fauvette was planning her next party frock, and Aveline ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... of F-proofs have been taken, the form is carried to the moulding or "battery" room of the electrotyping department, where it leaves its perfect impress in the receptive wax. Thence it will later be returned to the composing room and taken apart and the type distributed, soon to be again set up in new combinations of letters and words. The little types making a page of verse to-day may do duty to-morrow in a page ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... appendicitis, which I found myself able to do with some eloquence, reciting among other details that even though the metal dust might be of an almost microscopic fineness, it could still do a mischief to one's appendix. The press chap appeared wholly receptive to my views, and, after securing details of my plan to smarten Red Gap with a restaurant of real distinction, he asked so civilly for a photographic portrait of myself that I was unable to refuse him. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... he was admitted to the bar. This seems a short preparation; but the whole period of his connection with Chancellor Wythe was a study of the law. The Chancellor was what a certain other chancellor styles "a full man," and Henry Clay was a receptive youth. ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... self-sterile or self-unfruitful. On the other hand all walnut, pecan, and hickory species are self-fertile and cross-fertile, but may be self-unfruitful because of dichogamy, because they may shed their pollen either before or after the stigmas of the pistillate flowers are receptive to it. In all nut species cross-pollination is generally recommended so as to assure a set of nuts. With cross-pollination a better set of nuts is to be expected than with self-pollination, as well as better filling of the kernels. It has ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... psychic power will cheat them of insight and poise; for minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still, can seldom or never be hushed ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... to our practical programme, a kind of University extension work with the important omission of the University. We had to bring home to adult farmers whose general education was singularly poor, though their native intelligence was keen and receptive, a large number of general ideas bearing on the productive and distributive side of their industry. Our chief obstacles arose from the lack of trained economic thought among all classes, and especially among those to whom the majority ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... other poetic, the passion for knowing and understanding. Travel, considered under these heads, gives the observant mind a fund of comparison and information upon agricultural economy, modes of religion, political forms, the growth of trade and the movement of armies, and gives also to the receptive spirit a sense of active and reciprocal contact with the earth which nourishes us and which ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... answered, "Fra Elbertus, I'll do anything that you say." I gave the signal that all the workers should quit their tasks and meet at the Chapel. In five minutes we had an audience of three hundred—men in blouses and overalls, girls in big aprons—a very jolly, kindly, receptive company. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... aggressive, and intolerant in discussion, both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew serene and gentle, and the physical troubles entirely disappeared. I had been in the habit of approaching ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... am lucky, tremendously lucky," he hastened to declare, laughing a little wryly. "Such a journey is a liberal education in itself, knocking the insularity out of a man—if he has any receptive faculty that is—and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I don't the least undervalue my good fortune.—But you talk of remembering. That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear Damaris, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... put down his book—a volume of pious meditations. Events had drawn him into a receptive attitude toward religion. He ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... so that what we look upon only with pleasure for fineness of texture was to them an imitation of the luminous body of the deity shining from behind its dark robes; and ivory afterwards is employed in their best statues for its yet more soft and flesh-like brightness, receptive also of the most delicate color—(therefore to this day the favorite ground of miniature painters). In like manner, the existence of quarries of peach-colored marble within twelve miles of Verona, and of white marble and green serpentine between ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... cooled and made receptive to music by the joyous quarter of an hour in the buffet, we heard Mme. Gautier sing "Le Cid," by Massenet, and the Princess Tekau accompany her effectively on the piano. A solo de piston, a violin, a flute, all played by Tahitians, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Foreign travel, a wider acquaintance with differing types of humanity, and, above all, a newly-won acquaintance with the contemporary literature of other countries, made a deep impression upon Bjornson's vigorously receptive mind. He browsed voraciously upon the works of foreign writers. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Taine, Max-Mueller, formed a portion of his mental pabulum at this time—and the result was a significant ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... old correspondent, bent forward toward him earnestly, glad that he had a young, receptive mind opened out toward him. "I'll tell you. It's simply the Hohenzollern in his mad and unconcealed pride about ruling the universe. He is in every German home like this, driving each individual to work the best, to make the most of himself and ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... the historian, and whose origin is the most insoluble of problems? That which is known of them only shows that could something more be known, a whole series of prehistoric civilizations might be discovered. A people described as are the Pelasgi—a highly intellectual, receptive, active people, chiefly occupied with agriculture, warlike when necessary, though preferring peace; a people who built canals as no one else, subterranean water-works, dams, walls, and Cyclopean ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... an open scroll, that magnificent, wonder-compelling cult of the skies, not the sealed book of other sciences. Since the days of the Chaldean, all men of receptive soul in solitary places, the sailor, the shepherd, the hunter, or the hermit, whether of the wilderness of nature or the isolation of crowds, have read there of the mystery of the infinite, of the order ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... without ever allowing him time to compare them with the facts. No doubt we are meant to regard him as a learned man; but his son gives us to understand distinctly and very early in the book that his crotchets were by no means those of a weak receptive mind, overladen with more knowledge than it could digest, but rather those of an over-active intelligence, far more deeply and constantly concerned with its own processes than with the thoughts of others. Tristram, indeed, dwells ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... honestly believe so. We must ascend to a much earlier period to be able to judge their conduct accurately. It was when the claims of Jesus were first submitted to them that they went astray. He, being such as He was, could only have been welcomed and appreciated by expectant, receptive, holy minds. The ecclesiastical authorities of Judaea in that age were anything but expectant, receptive and holy. They were totally incapable of understanding Him, and saw no beauty that they should desire Him. As ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... FIRST one, for upon it depends whether the reader will dip further into the letter or discard it into the waste basket. IN THAT FIRST SENTENCE THE WRITER HAS HIS CHANCE. If he is really capable, he will not only attract the reader's interest in that first sentence, but put him into a receptive mood for the message that follows. Here are some sample ways of "opening" ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous
... other nations, had a place even in the hearts of these chosen ones. After long experience, Peter's concern was: "Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed thee; what shall we have therefore?"[507] They were as children to be trained and taught; but they were mostly willing pupils, receptive of soul, and imbued with a sincere eagerness to serve. To Jesus they were His little ones, His children, His servants, and His friends, as they merited.[508] They were all of the common people, not rabbis, scholars, nor priestly ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... wonderful that renewed strength, generation, and birth should gather around the incarnation of the vine, and that the cup should become the holiest of symbols. Like the ark, the chest or coffer, the egg, and a thousand other receptive or containing objects, the cup appeared to the ancient Initiated as a womb, or as the earth, taking in and giving forth life. It was in this spirit that NONNUS, in the fifth century, wrote The Dyonisiacs, a vast poem on Bacchus, in forty-eight books; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Mr. De Loutherbourg to put trust in this arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible—the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife declared themselves ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... that to you some day," Bassett said cheerfully. "Some day when you are in a more receptive mood than you are now. The point at this moment seems to me to be, what does Melis know that you don't want me to know? I suppose you don't intend to ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... way, I was often loth to do, owing to the confined air below, and the fresh glorious breezes on deck—the man who slept under me was a young banker, a clerk, going out to the Cape to make his fortune, and a fine capable-looking fellow he was, inclined rather to be receptive than communicative. He frequently bumped me with his head in getting up; I, not unfrequently, put a foot upon his nose, ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... themselves partly back to life and took a receptive attitude. Now out of an immense, a limitless distance, came a something which grew and grew, and approached, and presently was recognizable as a sound —it had rather seemed to be a feeling, before. This sound was a mile away, now—perhaps it was the murmur ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Clayt, who lived on the same line with her, conceived the plan of letting Mrs. Saunders hear something worth while just to keep her busy and happy. So he called up Wimble Horn and talked casually until he heard the little click which meant that Mrs. Saunders had focused her large receptive ear on the conversation. Then he told Horn that he was going to burn the darn stuff up, trade being bad, anyway. Wimble offered to help him, and for three nights they talked mysteriously about the crime, mentioning more plotters, while Mrs. Cal hung on the line ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... he was made to work. It is only work—which is the constant effort to retain equilibrium—that makes life endurable. So we find Haeckel now, at near fourscore years, a model of manly vigor, with all the eager, curious, receptive qualities of youth—a happy man, but one who knows that happiness lies on the way to Heaven, and not in arriving there and sitting down ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... then, to the details. I had been for several months, whether wisely or unwisely doth not appear, a link in one of those human chain rings supposed to be as peculiarly receptive of extra and super and ultra mundane facts as a legislative 'ring' is of the loose change of the lobby; and had sought in vain for personal contact with the world to come, when one afternoon a streak of the 'od' lightning suddenly ran down my right arm, as I sat in my private apartment, and behold ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Will which is willed by those who compose that community, and who in so willing are more than isolated men and women. It is not, indeed, as unrelated atoms that they have lived. They have grown, from the receptive days of childhood up to maturity, in an atmosphere of example and general custom, and their lives have widened out from one little world to other and higher worlds, so that, through occupying successive ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... was an intellectual conquest, not an exchange of ideas. On the north-western frontier there was some reciprocity, but otherwise the part played by India was consistently active and not receptive. The Far East counted for nothing in her internal history, doubtless because China was too distant and the other countries had no special culture of their own. Still it is remarkable that whereas many Hindu missionaries preached Buddhism in China, the idea of making Confucianism known ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... life. It does in truth little more than clear the ground, as we say, or the atmosphere, or the mental tablet, that one may have a fair chance of knowing, or seeing, perhaps: it does but put one into a duly receptive attitude towards such possible truth, discovery, or revelation, as may one day occupy the ground, the tablet,—shed itself on the purified air; it does not provide a proposition, nor a system of propositions, but ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... lips. His nose was straight, high in the nostril and sensitive. He resembled his brother, Daniel, but stood three inches taller, and his brow was fuller and loftier. His expression in repose appeared frank and receptive; but to-day his face wore a look half anxious, half ferocious. He was clad in tweed knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, of different pattern but similar material. His tie was light blue and fastened with a gold ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... Alexander Whyte's. In the course of these three days He addressed the Theosophical Society, the Esperanto Society, and many of the students, including representatives of almost all parts of the East. He also spoke to two or three other large meetings in the bleak but receptive 'northern Athens.' It is pleasant to add that here, as elsewhere, many seekers came and had private interviews with Him. It was a fruitful season, and He then ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... the moment, this seemed as far as I could get, it was but natural that my mind should continue the intuitive process and acknowledge that John Silence, owing to his peculiar faculties, and the girl, owing to her singularly receptive temperament, might each in a different way have divined this latent quality in his soul, and feared ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... tempted to conclude that what womanly women really admire in a man is a certain energy of action, a certain drastic force, brilliance and hardness, which is the very opposite of the nervous sensitiveness and receptive weakness which is the characteristic of most of us men of letters. I am tempted to go so far as to maintain that a profound atavistic instinct in normal women makes them really contemptuous in their hearts of any purely aesthetic or intellectual type. They prefer poets who are ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... he was becoming anxious to do things for himself, which Leila Mortimer, of course, would not permit. It was difficult for him to understand that any effort of his own would probably be disastrous; that progress could come only through his own receptive passivity; that nothing was demanded, nothing required, nothing permitted from him as yet, save a capacity for assimilating such opportunities as sections of the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... modelled Hermiston, i.e., Braxfield, was not in Stevenson's advocate days bequeathed to the Parliament House, but he had seen it in a Raeburn Exhibition he reviewed. He recollected the outward semblance of the man in his receptive memory till he resurrected Braxfield as Hermiston. The half-told tale is in itself a monument which, unfinished though it be, shows us how clever an ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... man to use them. Stir up, direct, and give free scope to Sir Joshua's "that," and try again, and again; and look, oculo intento, acie acerrima. Looking is a voluntary act,—it is the man within coming to the window; seeing is a state,—passive and receptive, and, at the ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... more—where she had often kept Osborn sitting in the old days of her imperiousness and his humility—and to watch the well-dressed people come in and out, pass to and fro, and enact scenes which suggested the gaudiest stories to her receptive mind. Light and warmth, rich colour and abundant life flowed there like tides, and many servants stood about the foyer to obey ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... that float and bob on the current in our remote eddy of life. Nevertheless, I can follow a worthy example, even though the exemplar be only a carnivorous bloom. And, I may confess, on the afternoon of October 1st, I was in a receptive mood for such flies of information as might come to me concerning two large invading vans which had rumbled into our quiet precincts and, after a pause for inquiry, stopped before the Mordaunt Estate's newly repaired ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... hardly a Frenchman of eminence in this period who did not either visit England or learn the English language, many doing both. And one so bright and receptive as Voltaire could not fail to notice many things. He could see how free thought was: he could make a contrast between the respect paid to letters in London, and their degradation under Louis XIV and later; he saw Newton and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... now fully recovered, became quite companionably communicative, relating picturesque, racy stories of India, the Yukon, and other countries he had known. George, in receptive mood, listened in silent appreciation to one of the most fascinating raconteurs he had ever met in his young life. Incidentally he felt relieved as he noted his comrade now tactfully avoiding morbid egotism—dwelling ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... joy unknown to him for years. He had come to it from the reading of his Bible instead of the reading of the morning paper, and from prayer instead of from thoughts of his business or a yawning stroll through his library. His mind was receptive of the best things in the service. He entered into it with the solemn feeling that ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... engaged. The social ordering of Great Britain must be not merely modified but remodelled and rebuilt from the groundwork to the coping-stone. One of the first needs of the nation is the education, physical and spiritual, of the new generation. Patriotic sentiment must be engrafted on the receptive soul of the child, and its range of sympathy widened and deepened. The duty of self-abnegation for the welfare of the community must be inculcated, together with new conceptions of personal dignity and worth. To the domestic sentiment in those cramped and distorted ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... the saddle and spurred away, gone into the darkness under the trees toward the gate. Kendric stood where he was, receptive for any bit of understanding which might be vouchsafed him. He was satisfied with his position in the shadows; glad when Escobar stepped out so that the lamp light from within streamed across his face. Actually the man's ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... delighted with the English people and with English life. His was one of those receptive natures which enjoy whatever is wholesome and sunny. In spite of his bodily pain, he entertained a lively hope of coming out of it in the spring, and did not realize his true condition. He merely said, "I have overworked ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... accomplish anything first put yourself in a concentrating, reposeful, receptive, acquiring frame of mind. In tackling unfamiliar work make haste slowly and deliberately and then you will secure that interior activity, which is never possible when you are in a hurry or under a strain. When you "think hard" or try to hurry ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... receptive power of an hysteric, was sobered now by the determination of Susannah's aspect. She looked almost repentant for a moment, and then said humbly, "If you'll come in and see Emmar—Joseph and Emmar have come home—Emmar ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... Aunt Janet had gone to hospital to carry unimpeachable jelly to the several patients and dubious words of cheer. Jelly they absorbed with much avidity and her words with meek resignation. Mullins, she thought, after his dreadful experience and close touch with death, must be in receptive mood and repentant of his sins. Of just what sins to repent poor Pat might still be unsettled in his mind. It was sufficient that he had them, as all soldiers must have, said Miss Wren, and now that his brain seemed clearing and the fever gone and he was too weak and helpless to resist, ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... receptive child, eager, interested in all the various entertaining aspects of life in a city which, "gleaning all races from all lands," presents more diversified and picturesque varieties of human condition than any other, East ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... girl leaves school she is hardly old enough to enter service, and too often in the year or so that elapses before she 'goes out' much mischief is done. She is then at an age when the mind is peculiarly receptive, and the ways of the young labourers with whom she is thrown into contact are not very refined. Her first essay at 'service' is often as day-nursemaid at some adjacent farmhouse, taking care of the younger children in the day, and returning home to sleep. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... something strangely touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort |
