"Spontaneous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... full of passionate abandon, and yet shaded with such delicacy. At the conclusion of the act, where the orchestra adds its overpowering tour de force to the singers', the audience burst into applause that lasted for several minutes. It was the spontaneous gratitude of hundreds of war-tired souls whose bonds had been relaxed for an hour by the magic touch ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... the family is ipso facto the priest. When families grew into clans, and clans into tribes and confederacies, a necessity would arise of delegating to some heads of families the performance of duties which, from having been the spontaneous acts of individuals, had become the traditional acts of families and clans" (510.183). Africa, Asia, America, furnish us abundant evidence of this. Our own language testifies to it also. We speak of the "Fathers of the Church,"—patres, ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... maiden, pause, I pray, Take further earnest thought, Nor stay the longings of your heart, With heaven-born nature fraught Duties there are on every side, Awaiting willing hands, All unrestricted, unconfined By any creeds or lands. Sweet ties of home are holier far, Spontaneous acts more true, Than any Shaker work ordained For ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... not a spontaneous fungus which grows without proper care, as character is an essential that must be cultivated in the fertile soil of morality, as there is no code of morals which will stand the crucial test of godliness ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg
... unfeigned and spontaneous, and her father's irritation grew more pronounced. He had not meant that. ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... good habits in thought or conduct there are good and real reasons in the nature of things. To leave such habits attached to false opinions is to lessen the weight of these natural or spontaneous reasons, and so to do more harm in the long run than effacement of them seems for a time to do good. Most excellences in human character have a spontaneous root in our nature. Moreover if they had not, and where they ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... Lord Jesus! reveal to us the Father. Let His name, His infinite Father-love, the love with which He loved Thee, according to Thy prayer, BE IN US. Then shall we say aright, 'OUR FATHER!' Then shall we apprehend Thy teaching, and the first spontaneous breathing of our heart will be: 'Our Father, Thy Name, Thy Kingdom, Thy Will.' And we shall bring our needs and our sins and our temptations to Him in the confidence that the love of such a Father cares ...
— Lord, Teach Us To Pray • Andrew Murray
... that deadly and poisonous criminal Monsieur Auguste and that aged archtraitor Monsieur Pet-airs, and that incomparably wicked person Surplice, and a ragged gentle being who one day presented us with a broken spoon which he had found somewhere—the gift being a purely spontaneous mark of approval and affection—who for this reason was known as The Spoonman and the vast and immeasurable honour of departing for Precigne pour la duree de la guerre. If ever I can create by some occult process of imagining ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... gainsaying the fact that Naomi Lawrence was a beautiful woman. Dressed simply for an evening at home in a strikingly plain gown of a rich black material, and with her magnificent neck and shoulders rising above the midnight hue—she caused a spontaneous thrill of masculine admiration to surge through the ordinarily immune ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... without being a patriot. That is to say, he is of the type that believes in big armaments and in a diplomacy even more brutal than armaments; but the militarism and diplomacy are not humanized either by the ancient national sanctities which surround the Czar of Russia, or the spontaneous national popularity which established the King of Serbia. He is not national, but international; and even in his peaceful activities has been not so much a neutral as ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... the idea. He had seen many well-bred women on social pinnacles look like that, whose houses were at present barred against him. The Pratt sisters were fixed into their smartness as some faces are fixed into a grin. It was not spontaneous, fugitive, evanescent as a smile, gracefully worn, or lightly laid aside, as in Hester's case. He had known Hester slightly in London for several years. He had seen her on terms of intimacy, such as she never showed to his sisters, with ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... touched. With a spontaneous movement he sprang to the armchair in which Juve sat, seized and wrung ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... cheek. Her feeling now was that she had made advances, spontaneous and friendly, and been smartly rebuffed. What cared he for the troubles of ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... intelligence, pure intentions, and projects for the public good. It was not, indeed, free from parties, or wholly unanimous; but the mass was not dominated by any man or idea; and it was the mass which, upon a conviction ever untrammelled and often entirely spontaneous, decided the deliberations and bestowed popularity. The following were the divisions of views and ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... of composition, and it seems to me that since Tintoret no one has equaled him in the combination. Of modern men, I know only Baron Leys and Delacroix who possessed to the same degree the power of spontaneous, harmonious composition, except Turner in landscape; all other modern art has, to my mind, more or less of the pose plastique, the air of the tableau vivant. His death, at a time when he should have been at the height of his powers, a premature ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... For the original output represents a genuine aspect of the author's mind, prejudices inclusive; and I am not sure that, had he lived to bring out a revised and enlarged impression, I should have looked upon it as so characteristic and spontaneous; and the same criticism applies to a number of other productions, dependent for their appreciation by us not upon their substantial, so much as on ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... travelling monarch; or in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, whilst the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready spontaneous language of our souls! Devotion is the favourite employment of your heart; so it is of mine: what incentives then to, and powers for reverence, 'gratitude, faith, and hope, in all the fervours of adoration and praise ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Schumann, there is a certain repose and balance all his own. We get the idea of one never carried away by his genius, or delivering passionate utterances from the Delphic tripod, but the master of all his powers, the conscious and skillful ruler of his own inspirations. If the sense of spontaneous freshness is sometimes lost, perhaps there is a gain in breadth and finish. If Schubert has unequaled melody and dramatic force, Schumann drastic and pointed intensity, Robert Franz deserves the palm for the finish and ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... ripened mind—the mind that knows the world of men and which has grappled with earth's problems. He also considered that letters should not be a profession in itself—to make a business of an art is to degrade it. Literature should be the spontaneous output of the mind that has known and felt. To work the mine of spirit as a business and sift its product for hire, is to overwork the vein and palm off slag for sterling metal. Shakespeare was a theater-manager, Milton a secretary, Bobby Burns a farmer, Lamb a bookkeeper, Wordsworth ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... of wealth, which are either (a) wholly non-material—i.e., intellectual, artistic, or other personal services; (b) partly non-material—e.g., works of art or skill, whose value consists chiefly in the embodiment of individual taste or spontaneous energy, or (c) too irregular or not sufficiently extended in demand to admit the application of machinery. The learned professions, art, science, and literature, and those branches of labour engaged in producing luxuries ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... belongs to Thrasymachus, whose style (in all his writings which are extant) is numerous even to a fault. But Gorgias, as I have already remarked, was the original inventor of those measured forms of expression which have a kind of spontaneous harmony,—such as a regular succession of words with the same termination, and the comparing similar, or contracting opposite circumstances: though it is also notoriously true that he used them to excess. This, however, is one of the three branches of composition above- mentioned. ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... well known for his intellectual fibre and sympathy with letters as for his judicial abilities. He was one of the most brilliant members of the old Saturday Club, of which ours might be considered the offspring and succursal; of wit the most spontaneous and electric, whose sallies burst in the merriment of our al fresco camp dinners with the flash and surprise of rockets, and left behind them the perfume of erudition as did no others of the company, not even Lowell's. ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... He allowed himself to imagine, with a certain satisfaction, that were he to make this young woman jealous she would think nothing of thrusting a dagger between his ribs. Reality,—what a delight it is! The actual touch and feeling of the spontaneous natural creature have been so buried beneath centuries of hypocrisy and humbug that we have ceased to believe in them save as a metaphysical abstraction. But even as water, long depressed under-ground in perverse channels, surges up to the surface, and above it, at last, in a fountain of relief, ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... strong native pressure which will certainly ensue after the adoption of any drastic measure of political reform, would appear to be undesirable. It would probably be wise and statesmanlike not to await this pressure, but to let the concession be the spontaneous act of the French Government and nation rather than give the appearance of its having been wrung reluctantly from France by the insistence of the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... obdurate heart, and preparing it to attend to further instruction. After some years of comfort at home, on hearing of plans for a mission to the South Sea Islands, Wilson resolved to offer himself as a free and spontaneous fellow-worker, ready to sacrifice his whole ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... he answered those spontaneous offerings of the heart, which flowed in upon him from every part of a grateful nation, when his views were once more seriously turned to this truly interesting subject. Its magnitude was also impressed on others; and the value of obtaining the aid which his influence and active interference ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... insure the prolongation of this dictatorship, which all judged useful at the present moment, and of which few people had foreseen the danger. Bonaparte persisted in hiding his thought; he waited for the spontaneous homage of the constituent bodies in the name of the grateful nation. Cambaceres was acquainted with this desire, and he exerted himself to prepare the votes in the Senate. A certain mistrust reigned in some minds. The Tribunate, alone ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... on that, for the writing shall confront her forever. Like the Roman Pilate, what she has written, she has written. Here are the purblind human instincts to direct and culture; the vagrant, unbridled hosts of the spontaneous emotions to be tutored and restrained; the affections and the tastes to be trained toward the true, the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul, the moral and spiritual nature, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the exhibition of oddities, and the telling of tall stories outside the regular course of the narrative, which bubbles over with somewhat boisterous fun. And his humour is genuine and spontaneous; it is farcical without descending to buffoonery. His comic types are built up on character, and, if not subtle, are undeniably human and living. They ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... they lived and worked. But the outer world they had to conceive, and they did not conceive it instinctively, nor absorb trustworthy knowledge of it just by living. Therefore, the only environment in which spontaneous politics were possible was one confined within the range of the ruler's direct and certain knowledge. There is no escaping this conclusion, wherever you found government on the natural range of men's faculties. "If," as Aristotle ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... time, before moth eggs are laid, into boxes, trunks, drawers, or closets even, where moths cannot enter, will be safe from the ravages of moth-worms, provided none were in them that were laid late in the autumn, for they are not of spontaneous production. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... seems to spread itself over even those things which are commonplace. The songs and cries of birds acquire a strange sound to me: I cannot understand the little spontaneous tongues, the quivering throats, the open beaks, the small bright eyes that gleam with unknown emotion, the nimble capricious heads that twist this way and that with ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... with headache and flushed face, crochets in a senseless way and thinks she is weaving a wreath for her mother's grave, her mother being still alive. We often meet with actions like this. Characteristic is the report of spontaneous, fearful headache, without the patient's putting this in relation to her peculiar behavior. We lay more stress upon this condition than has been done previously in the literature. We believe that this symptom is wanting in ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... arise we know not why; and it is more than probable that the majority of varieties have arisen in this "spontaneous" manner, though we are, of course, far from denying that they may be traced, in some cases, to distinct external influences; which are assuredly competent to alter the character of the tegumentary covering, to change colour, to increase or diminish the size of muscles, to modify constitution, and, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... following account of Mr. Gladstone during one of these scenes; when Mr. Gladstone, having accidentally mentioned the approach of his eightieth birthday, "the vast audience suddenly leapt to its feet and burst into ringing cheers. Mr. Gladstone was evidently deeply touched by this spontaneous outburst of almost personal affection. He stood with hands folded, head bent down, and legs quivering." The fun of this joke, however, lies in the fact that the "legs" which quivered were the telegraph operators'. The ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... shaggy-browed gray eyes studied me across the table. I, too, studied him. Despite his violent past, killer and driver that he was, I could not help liking the man. He was honest, genuine. Almost more than for that, I liked him for the spontaneous boyish laugh he gave on the occasions when I reached the points of several funny stories. No man could laugh like that and be all bad. I was glad that it was he, and not Mr. Mellaire, who was to sit opposite throughout the voyage. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... description should precede appears yet to be undetermined; for many text-books treat one first, and perhaps as many the other. I have thought it wiser to begin with the short story, because it is easier to gain free, spontaneous expression with narration than with description. To write a whole page of description is a task for a master, and very few attempt it; but for the uninitiated amateur about three sentences of description ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... had searched for a twelve-month she could scarce have found a more provoking remark than her spontaneous exclamation, "Oh! how ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... your attention to two very recent and very flattering extracts from editorial articles that appeared in newspapers of known standing and reputation in the city of New York, both of which articles were wholly unsolicited by us, being the spontaneous testimony of ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... distinguished living naturalist. "To explain the beginning of these worms within the human body, on the common doctrine that all created beings proceed from their likes, or a primordial egg, is so difficult, that the moderns have been driven to speculate, as our fathers did, on their spontaneous birth; but they have received the hypothesis with some modification. Thus it is not from putrefaction or fermentation that the entozoa are born, for both of these processes are rather fatal to their existence, but from the aggregation and fit apposition of matter which is already organized, or ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... Combustible Material in the Construction of the Shaft; (2) Precautions for Rapidly Localising an Outbreak of Fire in the Shaft; (3) Precautions to be Adopted in case those under 1 and 2 Fail or Prove Inefficient. Precautions against Spontaneous Ignition of Coal. Precautions for Preventing Explosions of Fire-damp and Coal Dust. Employment of Electricity in Mining, particularly in Fiery Pits. Experiments on the Ignition of Fire-damp Mixtures and Clouds of Coal Dust by Electricity — Indications of an Existing or Incipient Fire ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech
... communion with the Father. He is most at home in the forensic view of justification, and dwells on salvation as a scheme rather than as an experience. He insists on good works as the sign of justifying faith, as labors to be achieved to the glory of God, but he rarely represents them as the spontaneous, necessary outflow of a soul filled with divine love. He is at home in the external, the polemical, the historical, the circumstantial, and is only episodically devout and practical. The great majority of his published ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... self-love which calls itself "sensitive feeling" and frets at imaginary offences; is the tendency to be grateful for kindness, yet take kindness meekly, and accept as a benefit what the vain call a due? From dispositions thus blessed, sweet temper will come forth to gladden thee, spontaneous and free. Quick with some, with some slow, word and look emerge out of the heart. Be thy first question, "Is the heart itself generous and tender?" If it be so, self-control comes with deepening affection. Call not that a good heart which, hastening to sting if a fibre be ruffled, cries, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... force being soon spent, it remained suspended only ten minutes, and fell gently in a vineyard at a distance of about a mile and a half from the place of its ascension. So memorable a feat lighted up the glow of national vanity, and the two Montgolfiers were hailed and exalted by the spontaneous impulse ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... House, pale and still panting from the excitement of his reception in the streets. As he sat there the entire Liberal party - with the exception of Lord Hartington, Sir Henry James, Mr. Chamberlain and Sir George Trevelyan - and the Nationalist members, by a spontaneous impulse, sprang to their feet and cheered him again and again. The speech which he delivered was in every way worthy of the occasion. It expounded, with marvelous lucidity and a noble eloquence, a tremendous scheme of constructive legislation ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... reading his paper. He did not in reality sense one word which he read. He acknowledged to himself that he was very unhappy. He was caught in a labyrinth from which he saw no way of escape into the open. He realized that love for Maria had become almost impossible—that is, spontaneous love—even if she should change her attitude towards him. He realized a lurking sense of guilt as to his sentiments towards Evelyn, and he realized also that his mother and Maria could never live together in peace. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... attempted, with increasing daring, to circumvent or to undermine the Spanish power, and to invade the sources of the wealth which made it dangerous to them; but the attempt, so far as it was made on the seas and beyond them, was in the main, and for a long time, due to the spontaneous energies of volunteers, not to the action of governments. Francis I. of France sent out the Venetian Verazzano to explore the American shores of the North Atlantic, as Henry VII. of England had earlier sent ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir
... foul condition into which such draggletailed dresses must soon get is positively sickening. If a dozen of them were thrown into a closet and left there for a few hours, I have no doubt they would burn of spontaneous combustion." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... question is to what extent this ought to be indulged, in what degree men and women ought to assume the direction of other lives, and whether it is wholesome for the director to allow a desire for personal dominance to be substituted for more spontaneous motives. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... (1) In the prose Edda the slaying of Swanhild is a spontaneous and sudden act on the part of the king. As he came back from hunting one day, there sat Swanhild washing her linen, and it came into the king's mind how that she was the cause of all his woe, so he and his men rode ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... was spontaneous. Mr. Juxon was in a frame of mind in which he felt that he ought to do something pleasant for somebody, to set off against the bloodthirsty designs which had passed through his mind in the morning. He knew that if he had not been over friendly to John, it had been John's own fault; but since he ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... Roy of that spontaneous, Tara-like outpouring had been greater than she knew—than he could ever let her know. For the old intimacy had never been quite re-established between them since the day of his tactless juvenile proposal—for so he saw it now. They had only met ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... and thin, their fellowship as spontaneous as it was insincere; and within a few days the edge had worn off the strangeness that had surrounded Harlan, and he had been accepted with hardly a ripple ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... for that matter—but custom and the surprising dignity of his employees compelled him to utter the greeting in a casual, bored manner, quite as if he did it automatically and always as if he was on the point of clearing his throat. He sorely missed Melissa's spontaneous, even vulgar "Morning, Mist' Bingle," and the rattle of cutlery and chinaware. Melissa had acquired a fine but watchful dignity. She now said "good morning, sir" in the hushed, impersonal voice of the trained servant. She never "joked" with him, as of yore, although ...
— Mr. Bingle • George Barr McCutcheon
... and plants which we see to-day, or that have ever lived, have descended in a natural way from earlier and different species; all come from one common stock, or from a few common ancestors. These remote ancestors must have been quite simple organisms of the lowest type, arising by spontaneous generation from inorganic matter. The succeeding species have been constantly modified by adaptation to their varying environment (especially by use and habit), and have transmitted their modifications ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... 10 minutes before administering medicine, and this allows time for a portion of the contents of the stomach to pass into the bowel, and renders it safer to give medicine. In many cases the walking exercise and the diarrhea bring about a spontaneous cure of this disorder, but as in some instances the cramps and pains of the stomachs persist, one may give 1 ounce of sulphuric ether and 1 ounce of tincture of opium, shaken up with a pint of warm water, and repeat the dose in half an hour if the animal is not relieved. In an emergency ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... Cato quickly perceiving his design, refused all such engagements and made it a rule to do nothing else while the Senate was assembled. For it was neither for the sake of reputation, nor self-aggrandisement, nor by a kind of spontaneous movement, nor by chance, like some others, that he was thrown into the management of state affairs, but he selected a public career as the proper labour of a good man, and thought that he ought to attend to public concerns more ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... and weigh the comparative force of the different parts of the argument, and cut out and cut down until your best points for the purpose have the most space. In a debate the same end is gained by rehearsals of the main speeches; in the rebuttal, which is best when it is spontaneous, you have to trust to the judgment gained ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... here find no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity, no perpetual gloom or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private and social virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity, or articulate language, no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... comedy of hatred you mean to play for Monsieur de l'Estorade's benefit, you need moderation. If you do not manage it by careful transitions, you may miss your end. Never allow the influence of circumstances to appear when it is desirable than an impulse or an action should seem spontaneous." ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... he pleases, but he can only please to do so at certain points which have been fixed for him by others, or in the case of unexpected obstructions which force him to please to do so. His pleasure is not spontaneous; there is an unseen choir of influences around him, which make it impossible for him to act in any other way than one. It is known beforehand how much strength must be given to these influences, just as it is known beforehand how much coal and water are necessary for ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... fact—and I desire only this fact to confound us—is it not true that spontaneous benevolence, so pure in its primitive conception (eleemosyna, sympathy, tenderness), alms, in fine, has become for the unfortunate a sign of degradation, a public stigma? And socialists, rebuking Christianity, dare to talk to us of love! The Christian thought, the conscience ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... 'higher criticism'; he read into the Bible a great many dogmas which were not there, and accepted rather questionable historical data. But perhaps he felt some essential characteristics of the book more thoroughly than far more cultivated people. No critic can instil into a reader that spontaneous sympathy with the thoughts and emotions incarnated in the great masterpieces without which all reading is cold and valueless. In spite of all differences of dialect and costume, the great men can place themselves in spiritual contact with men of most distant races ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... capable of adopting certain convictions and absolutely refractory to the acceptance of others. These factors prepare the ground in which are suddenly seen to germinate certain new ideas whose force and consequences are a cause of astonishment, though they are only spontaneous in appearance. The outburst and putting in practice of certain ideas among crowds present at times a startling suddenness. This is only a superficial effect, behind which must be sought a preliminary and ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... ends in one of six different ways. Inflammation may terminate in resolution, i.e., spontaneous recovery; by suppuration, in the formation of matter; by effusion, as the inflammation caused by a blister-plaster terminates by effusion of water; by adhesion, the part inflamed forming an attachment to some ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... her beauty, so astonishing was the perfection of her form and feature, so accurate was the living representation of the ideal goddess that the whole vast audience after one glance burst forth into pealing thunders of spontaneous and irresistible applause. ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... exercise. Time, place, the same colour or sound or smell or taste, will often call up some thought or recollection either accidentally or naturally associated with them. But it is equally noticeable that the new thought may occur to us, we cannot tell how or why, by the spontaneous action of the mind itself or by the latent influence of the body. Both science and poetry are made up of associations or recollections, but we must observe also that the mind is not wholly dependent on them, having also ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... and making a second speech himself, but with little avail. Even the free fight which broke out during the distribution of the ice-cream of the Neapolitans (the announcement of which addition to the regular menu evoked the loudest spontaneous applause of the evening) resulted, until the police checked it, decidedly in favor of the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... had not rendered any previous service to any others in distress, and that what I had done on this occasion was voluntary and spontaneous, without thought of reward. I considered it only as a duty to my fellow-man; and since the Government had been pleased to acknowledge the service, I was truly grateful. I was then complimented by the gentlemen ...
— Notes by the Way in A Sailor's Life • Arthur E. Knights
... as every normal human being craves it, yet getting little, he had, I think, a certain consciousness of living in the shadow. I greatly doubt whether his daydreams ever went so far as to let him imagine a service like this. Such a cordial and spontaneous outgoing towards him on our part would surprise as much as ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... necessary, has been granted to mankind on easy terms. Prudence, as it is always wanted, is without great difficulty obtained. It requires neither extensive view nor profound search, but forces itself, by spontaneous impulse, upon a mind neither great nor busy, neither engrossed by vast designs, nor distracted by multiplicity ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... lit with pleasure at his good fortune, but her smile was less spontaneous than it had been. "That will be very nice. I quite envy you," she said. "I suppose you know ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... own tastes, whether or not this may have included the society of a man-friend—such a woman suddenly finds on marriage, and without any assertion of authority on her husband's part, that all the outward circumstances of her life are reversed and all her inner spontaneous movements arrested. There may be no signs of this on the surface of her conduct. She loves her husband too much to wish to hurt his feelings by explaining the situation, and she values domestic peace too much to risk friction by making ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... instance the animals concerned began life in the wild state, and had none of the advantages of hereditary influence possessed by the domesticated dog and horse. Among the most interesting examples of spontaneous acts of intelligence of the ape tribe are those related by Romanes, in his "Animal Intelligence," of the doings of a cebus monkey, which he kept for several months under close observation in his own house. Instead of selecting general examples of ape actions, we ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... although God passes into the universe, or therein manifests all the elements of his being, he is not 'exhausted in the act.' Now, granting, for the sake of argument, that God is not entirely absorbed in the universe, Cousin's pet doctrine of the 'Spontaneous Apperception of Absolute Truths' clearly renders man a modification of God. Difference in degree, you know, implies sameness of kind; from this there is no escape. He says, 'The God of consciousness is not a solitary sovereign, banished beyond creation, upon the throne ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... and odd square miles of territory may only be governed by a handful of ragged soldiers so long as there is no concerted action against authority, extemporized and spontaneous palavers ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... took his leave. Miss De Stancy did not return to the castle that night, and he walked through the wood as he had come, feeling that he had been talking with a man of simple nature, who flattered his own understanding by devising Machiavellian theories after the event, to account for any spontaneous action of himself or his daughter, which might ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... better even than Marcus Aurelius; for in addition to the virtues, the kindness, the deep feeling and wisdom of his adopted son, he had something of greater virility and energy, of simpler happiness, something more real, spontaneous, closer to everyday life—Antoninus Pius lay on his bed, awaiting the summons of death, his eyes dim with unbidden tears, his limbs moist with the pale sweat of agony. At that moment there entered ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... reconnoiterings. Between the Astico and the Brenta Rivers in the Sugana Valley, the Italians were again forced to fall back gradually on their main lines after repulsing heavy attacks throughout the day. The retreat, however, was orderly and spontaneous. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... most easily recognize Spirit when it is perceived transfiguring human character, and most easily achieve it by means of sympathetic contagion. Though the new light may flash, as it seems, directly into the soul of the specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous outbreaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even here, careful analysis will generally reveal the extent in which environment, tradition, teaching literary or oral, have prepared the way for it. There is no aptitude so great that it can afford ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... are stripped of their bark. I mention this circumstance to prove how difficult, within the tropics, on the banks of great rivers, are the first attempts of man to appropriate to himself a little spot of earth in that vast domain of nature, invaded by animals, and covered by spontaneous plants. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... brush-wood and tops of trees are thrown into the edge of the woods. It follows, as a matter of course, that the greatest danger to be apprehended is the burning the boundary-fences of farms. I have heard it asserted that these fires are sometimes caused by spontaneous combustion, which I ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... and, above all, his relations with Biddy Joyce, had saved the Hewishes from these formalities; and the great distances that separated the houses of gentlefolk in the west of Ireland would have made hospitality a more spontaneous and less formal affair in any case. In Devon, as Gabrielle soon discovered, calling was a ritual complicated by innumerable shades of social finesse. Lady Halberton had already coached her in the list of people whom she must know, people she could safely know at a distance, and people whom it was ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all actual and all possible antagonists." "A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he." "Great works of art," he again says, "teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-natured inflexibility, the more when the whole cry of voices ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... and by it so faithfully treasured for the benefit of all peoples!" This eloquent address will ever remain carefully guarded by history, a noble monument of gratitude, and not only this, but also as a testimony, all the more valuable as it is the spontaneous utterance of men of the most cultivated intellect, in favor of that sovereignty the destruction of which was sought, and has been accomplished, by a party in whose ranks could be counted only rude soldiers, bands of filibusters ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... with a little smile. Its spontaneous friendliness was like a warm hand clasping hers. Yes, she would go, she decided, as she splashed refreshingly in her bath, and that not for Nick's sake. She knew instinctively that she was going to discover a close sympathy with this woman who, though ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... man is able to create: two principal conditions.—"Creative spontaneity," which resolves itself into needs, tendencies, desires.—Every imaginative creation has a motor origin.—The spontaneous revival of images.—The creative imagination reduced to three forms: outlined, fixed, objectified. ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... countries has been frequently adopted by a young nation with a sort of fanatical admiration. The genius of those countries having been so often placed before it as the perfect model of all greatness and all beauty, every spontaneous movement has been repressed, in order to make room for the most servile imitation; and every national attempt to develop an original character has been sacrificed to the reproduction of something conformable to the model which has been ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is more naturally a poet than most modern literators who possess the accomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literary life, but who lack a spontaneous impulse toward rhythm. It may even be suggested that his little poems are less artificial than most French verse; they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped in numbers; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously acquired. His lyric note, although ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... people of Massachusetts.... It is an art to rise above what we have been taught.... All great men are seen to possess this freedom. They derive their standard from their own natures, and their observations on life are so natural and spontaneous that it would seem as if the most illiterate person with a scrap of common-sense would have made the same.... We become wiser with them, and know not how the difficult appears ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... his mind and feelings are acting, the whole body is affected, and helps to propagate his emotions to the hearer. Amidst all the exaggerated colouring of Patrick Henry's biographer, there is doubtless enough that is true, to prove a power in the spontaneous energy of an excited speaker, superior in its effects to any thing that can be produced by writing. Something of the same sort has been witnessed by every one who is in the habit of attending in the courts of justice, or the chambers of legislation. And this, not only in the instances of ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... be well if the positive school would spend in this spiritual analysis but a little of that skill they have attained to in their analysis of matter. In their experiments, for instance, on spontaneous generation, what untold pains have been taken! With what laborious thought, with what emulous ingenuity, have they struggled to completely sterilise the fluids in which they are to seek for the new production of life! How jealously do they guard against leaving ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... of my search for light was a conviction of the importance of his theory of art. I might almost say his religion of art, inasmuch as he had no traffic with anything that was not spontaneous, effervescing. To him a hammer and a chisel were actual and very real, and the plastic art appealed especially to him in its character of smiting. To smite from the stone, to finish with all a craftsman's cunning care—there seemed to him real joy in this; and so I think he felt the influence ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... as, when spring-time comes, the grass grows and the leaves burst forth, although the heaven is yet dark, and many a northern blast yet lingers in the air, so did affectionate feelings and joyful hours spring up again in the family of the Franks, from the spontaneous vernal spirit ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... broken. Life lost its meaning and charm. Her father's sympathy and pride in her work had been her chief incentive and ambition, and had spurred her on when her own confidence and spirit failed. Never afterwards did she find complete and spontaneous expression. She decided to go abroad as the best means of regaining composure and strength and sailed once more in May for England, where she was welcomed now by the friends she had made, almost as to another home. She spent the summer very quietly at Richmond,an ideally beautiful ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... of Mr. Darke[*] doubtless awaited me; and this was to be the result of my spontaneous gift of a tomahawk to the old man! This savage had evidently been watching us all night, and his party were concealed behind the hill. Our only remaining little dog, Procyon, had been very restless during the night, when these people were, probably, drinking at the pond near us. ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... you be well when he meets you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to salute for him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking; he will sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve you of the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes which must, with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary phrase, are formally expressed by him,—good appetite to you, when you go to dinner much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... that the law in all the Southern States forbade Negro instruction under the severest penalties. How then was the Negro to learn the Greek syntax? How then was he to evidence to Mr. Calhoun his human nature? Why, it is manifest that Mr. Calhoun expected the Greek syntax to grow in Negro brains, by spontaneous generation! ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... scenery, which vividly recalls the landscape backgrounds elsewhere in the master's own work, who can fail to admire the natural and unstudied grouping of the figures, the artlessness of the whole, the loving simplicity with which the painter has done his work? All is spontaneous; the spirit is not that of a laborious imitator, painfully seeking "effects" from another's inspiration; sincerity and naivete are too apparent for this to be the work of any but a quite young artist, and one whose style is so thoroughly "Giorgionesque" ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... that these illuminations and fireworks, like the assassinations, are merely the natural and spontaneous expressions of that overflowing joy with which the thought of the birth of the Virgin must fill every pious heart; but when we remember how often the Church has skilfully decanted the new wine of Christianity into ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... ones, were the spontaneous expressions of men who had long contended against the change of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... the same affair Bonaparte, in a few days, from the spontaneous expression of blame dictated by hate, was reduced to the necessity of declaring his approbation, which he did, as may be seen, with studied coldness, and even taking pains to make his praises apply to Colonel Liebert, and not to ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... requirements of form it is set off in a class by itself. In the ode the poet enjoys his greatest freedom, for he may use any meter, may write at any length and in any manner, grave, gay or grotesque. Accordingly the odes of our language are most spontaneous, musical, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester |
