"Survival" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poor sheep without a shepherd, shorn to the pink hide with one tuft of wool left over his eyes—those "good old days" are gone forever. It is some time now since he became convinced that if a lion and a lamb ever did lie down together the lamb would not get a wink of sleep. As a matter of survival he has been making use of the interval to become a lion himself and the process has been productive of a great roaring ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... those things that could long endure the assaults of travesty. The spell was potent enough in its way, but it dissolved when once interruptive laughter became generally audible. A creature of theatrical tradition, curiously sophisticated and enveloped in absurdities, its long survival is perhaps more surprising than the fact of its decease. Some attempt at ridiculing it seems to have been made so far back as the seventeenth century, in the Duke of Buckingham's "Rehearsal." Two characters enter, each bearing a lute and ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... but there are many who still hold to the tradition that the chief purpose of education is to sharpen the intellectual tools of the individual for the sake of his personal success. This notion is a misleading survival, for tools are of value only in terms of the character using them. The same equipment may serve, equally, good or bad ends. Only as education focusses on the development of positive and effective moral character can it aid in solving the ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... immense family. His wife had long since died; her mother, a toothless old crone, kept house for him and was supposed to look after the younger children; but generally the Veales and their domestic arrangements were considered as a survival of a barbaric state of society and a disgrace in these highly polished modern times. People said that Veale was half a gipsy, that his boys were growing up as hardy young poachers, and that every time he got drunk at the Barradine Arms he would himself produce wire nooses from his pocket, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... us go further, and ask ourselves where is the key to be found for the many marvellous effects of so-called spirit phenomena? Who can read F. W. Myer's Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, and not feel that we are standing on the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... "Natural survival pattern," Cal commented. "In the woods, in their natural state, when they came up against a fallen log, it took more effort to lift their heavy bodies in flight over it than it took to walk around the log. It became a fixed pattern of ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... question of the meaning of life, and uniformly answer it, it is only necessary that those who regard themselves as enlightened should cease to think and to inculcate to other generations that religion is atavism, the survival of a past wild state, and that for the good life of men the spreading of education is sufficient—i.e. the spread of the most varied knowledge which is in some way to bring men to justice and to a moral life. ...
— "Bethink Yourselves" • Leo Tolstoy
... unjust; they call it simply business,'" said Faith bitterly. "The one who sells the most goods is considered the smartest. It is a case where might makes right—the survival of the fittest." ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... survival of the fittest. Mr. Darwin invented the theory that goes by that name, but the Ornithorhynchus was the first to put it to actual experiment and prove that it could be done. Hence it should have as much of the credit as Mr. Darwin. It was never in the Ark; you will find no mention of it there; it ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... marsupial order in Australia has, besides practically establishing the long isolation of that continent from the rest of the globe, also given rise to a number of ingenious theories professing to account for its survival to this last stronghold." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... of the unconscious survival of gesture language is afforded by the ready and involuntary response made in signs to signs when a man with the speech and habits of civilization is brought into close contact with Indians or deaf-mutes. Without having ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... descent than to my immediate public, but any book that desires to see out a literary three-score years and ten must offer something to future generations as well as to its own. It is a condition of its survival that it shall do this, and herein lies one of the author's chief difficulties. If books only lived as long as men and women, we should know better how to grow them; as matters stand, however, the author ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... one of the few cases in which Chinese superstition coincides with that of the West; for our own church bells were once consecrated in very much the same manner, a survival of that ancient universal custom of sacrifice. With the exception of this resemblance, which, however, has nothing to do with actual music, everything in Chinese art is exactly the opposite of our western ideas ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... respectively. In the nursery row 73 percent of the larger transplanted seedlings were large enough for budding the following summer, while only 59 percent of the smaller seedlings attained proper size. Bud survival was 22 percent on the larger stocks indicating the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... heard your campaign speeches. By some henidical process—henidical, by the way is a favorite word of mine which nobody understands—by some henidical process you persuade yourself that you believe in the competitive system and the survival of the strong, and at the same time you indorse with might and main all sorts of measures to shear the strength ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Terry, Fred Leslie and Nellie Farren are particularly connected, developed from the earlier extravaganzas of J.R. Planche, written frequently round fairy tales. The Gaiety type of burlesque has since given place to the "musical comedy," and its only survival is to be found in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Your neighbours loved each other, and played Pollyanna when things went wrong. And you wore white frocks and blue sashes whenever there was a lawn party or a sociable." He paused, perhaps for breath, and then—"I'm different," he said; "I struggled for my education; it was always the survival of the fittest with me. I worked my way through medical school. I had my hospital experience in Bellevue and on the Island—most of my patients were the lowest of the low. I've tried to cure diseased bodies—but I've left diseased minds alone. ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... as unlike him as one man could be unlike another—white, fair-haired, delicate, with soft blue eyes and silken lashes, and a passive hand that accepted the pressure of Taquisara's rather than returned it—the pale survival of another ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... years in the stagnant back-waters of the world had brought to their descendants a lapse into illiteracy and semi-squalor, but through it all had fought that thin, insistent flame of instinct. Such a survival was the boy's clinging to his hounds. Once, they had symbolized the spirit of the nobility; the gentleman's fondness for his sport with horse and dog and gun. Samson South did not know the origin of his fondness for this remnant of a pack. He did not know that in the long ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... strikes us. Perhaps Bill thinks we have died and he is annoyed because he wasn't invited to the funeral. Ought we to wire him? No, because after all we are not dead, and even if he thinks we are, his subsequent relief at hearing the good news of our survival will outweigh his bitterness during the interval. One of these days we will write him a letter that will really express our heart, filled with all the grindings and gear-work of our mind, rich in affection and fallacy. But we had better let it ripen ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... a man stood at the eastern window of a room which formed the top story of one of the houses in Peter the Great Terrace—that survival from the early nineteenth century which forms a kind of recess in the broad thoroughfare linking Waterloo Bridge with the Strand. The man's name was Shirley Sherston, and among the happy, prosperous few who are concerned with ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... protecting the property, had its advantages. We will come back to self-government yet, but higher up in the scale. It was like a big country school, in a country town, where lessons in self-reliance are handed out with the bark on. The survival of the fittest prevails, and out of the mass emerges now and then a strong man who makes his mark ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... faded into a mere itching for pleasure. The modern devices for combining pleasure with sterility, now universally known and accessible, enable these persons to weed themselves out of the race, a process already vigorously at work; and the consequent survival of the intelligently fertile means the survival of the partizans of the Superman; for what is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... benefit of non-Hindu readers I may explain that Kayasthas are split into clans—probably a survival of the tribal organisation which preceded the family almost everywhere. According to tradition, a King of Bengal named Adisur imported five Brahmans, and as many Kayastha servants from Kanauj in Upper India. From the latter are ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... for this reason we hear hardly anything of them in the literature of the time. Not only a want of philanthropic feeling in their betters, but an inherited contempt for all small industry and retail dealing, has helped to hide them away from us: an inherited contempt, because it is in fact a survival from an older social system, when the citizen did not need the work of the artisan and small retailer, but supplied all his own wants within the circle of his household, i.e. his own family and slaves, and produced on his farm the material of his food and clothing. ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... disreputable the substitute the happier the owner, despite the fact that all his past glories centred round a shining helmet or jaunty lancer cap, irresistible in plume and polish. But it was a great spectacle to see the survival of the fittest squadrons of the Scarlet Lancers filing past. There are half a dozen Cavalry Regiments against whom no one could throw a stone—the 9th and 16th Lancers are of these. But it would be invidious to particularise ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... a test of a kind, and it is a test which every serious writer feels most intimately. The essential is the matter of excellence: that a piece of work should achieve its end. But in either character, the character of survival or the character of intrinsic excellence, construction deliberate and successful is the ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... farther through fields, one of which is known as Dog-fight, another Broad moor, and a third Pry-close, brings us to the church (St. Margaret also) of Old Woodhall. The name of this field “Pry-close” would seem to be an interesting Norman survival; “Pre” is a meadow. Near Northampton are “the verdant meads of De la Prè.” And this may have been the home pasture of the old Wood-Hall. Praie, however, is an old word meaning coarse grass, which is still to be seen in the field. ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... great at leading that peculiarly dirge-like wail at the huge Yorkshire funerals. I never could quite make out any words, but as a singularly effective and musical cadence in a minor key, it was no doubt a survival, as I once heard Canon Atkinson say, the famous vicar of Danby, my immediate neighbour on the moors. At last I attended Frank Hutchinson daily in his prolonged decay, and received his solemn blessing and commendation on my work; and he received at my hand a few hours before ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... that the practice is a survival of Asiatic barbarism. While there is no denying the truth of the above picture, it does go against the grain to think of a woman asking a man to marry her. We know that ladies of queenly rank have to do it, and lose no dignity thereby; but we are not all anxious to ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... honorificatudinibility and disproportionableness, with a department at the back devoted to twisters like phthisic, and mullein-stalk, and diphtheria, and gneiss. We used to have a fine old sport on Friday afternoons, called "choose-up-and-spell-down." I don't know if you ever played it. It was a survival, pure and simple, from the Old Red School-house. There was where it really lived. There was where it flourished as a gladiatorial spectacle. The crack spellers of District Number 34 would challenge the crack spellers of the Sinking ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... "Flight and survival equipment for ultra-atmospheric operations, including space vehicles, space bases, and devices for ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... always the professors, as in art there are always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated. Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or pure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of any organising ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... modified in course of descent from other species. This is no more Mr. Darwin's theory than it is the reader's or my own. Darwin's theory is concerned only with "the particular means by which the change of species has been brought about"; his contention being that this is mainly due to the natural survival of those individuals that have happened by some accident to be born most favourably adapted to their surroundings, or, in other words, through accumulation in the common course of nature of the more ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... opposition to every species of reform. He was five years old when the fight at Concord began the struggle that ended with American Independence, but the great event which overshadowed his childhood had no apparent effect upon his later judgment. This belated survival of the tradition of Hillsborough thought and said that America ought to look to England "as the guardian power to which she was indebted not only for her comforts, not only for her rank in the scale of civilization, but for her very existence." ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... alive to-day who is the intellectual peer of Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates. Yet where are the Greeks? What did their exalted intellectual equipment do to save them in the desperate struggle for the survival of the fittest? The Greeks of to-day are selling fruit at corner stands; Plato's descendants shine the world's shoes. They live to warn away the most casual evolutionist from the theory that intellectual supremacy necessarily means supremacy of type. Where, then, you ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... know as the survival of the fittest, the mere's capacity had snuffed out her weaker spouse's incompetency; she had taken her place at the helm, because she belonged there by virtue of natural fitness. There were no tender illusions which would suffer, in seeing the husband allotted ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... vegetables and flowers, the most important precaution to be taken against insects and disease is to have them in a healthy, thriving, growing condition. It is a part of Nature's law of the survival of the fittest that any backward or weakling plant or tree seems to fall first prey to the ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... the characteristic thinkers of the new age were chiefly remarkable for the arid formalism with which they preached the gospel of salvation for the strong and damnation to the weak. The results of the new creed were not long in showing themselves in the political sphere. If the survival of the fittest were the last word of philosophy, where was the need to struggle on behalf of the weak and oppressed? In that case, it might be better to leave them to the following clutch of the new scientific devil; while those who had charged through to the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... another husband, and it may happen that I might have another child by him: so that the fire of separation I can quench somewhat with the water of hope, and for the poison of the death of a husband find a cure in the antidote of the survival of a son; but it is not possible, since my father and mother are dead, for me to get another brother; therefore I bestow my love on him [i.e., she chooses the brother]." The Dahak is moved to pity, and spares her ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... perfect right to roll up their untold millions, even as the working-man has a right to seek the highest wages that he can get. All in different ways are seeking their own; and the keenest competitors are the best men. The prizes must go to the strongest and the shrewdest. It is the survival of ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... unique governmental (p. 190) arrangements of London are the product in part of historical survival and in part of special and comparatively recent legislation. Technically, the "city" of London is still what it has been through centuries, i.e., an area with a government of its own comprising but a single square mile on the left ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... Wordsworth was the only poet worth considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... would abolish the competitive system and put an end to the struggle for existence. According to the objectors, this would be to destroy an invaluable school of character and testing process for the weeding out of inferiority, and the development and survival as leaders of the best types of humanity. Now, if your contemporaries had excused themselves for tolerating the competitive system on the ground that, bad and cruel as it was, the world was not ripe for any other, the attitude would have been intelligible, if ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... fourth part of the deceased's estate, we have repealed the said enactment, and not permitted its insertion in our Code from that of Theodosius. By the constitution which we have published, and by which we have altogether deprived it of validity, we have provided that in case of the survival of grandchildren by a daughter, greatgrandchildren by a granddaughter, or more remote descendants related through a female, the agnates shall have no claim to any part of the estate of the deceased, that collaterals ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It's the kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it's what the scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr. Parvis, evidently pleased with ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... we study their experiences, benefit from their successes and learn from their mistakes? Can we not take lessons out of their voluminous notebooks, avoid their blunders and direct our own feet along paths that fulfil our lives at the same time that they meet the widespread demand for survival and well-being? ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... doubtless a survival of old pagan superstitions. The introduction of the Icon is a modern innovation, which illustrates that curious blending of paganism and Christianity which is often to be met with in Russia, and of which I shall have more to ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... especially as embodied in its construction maybe found survivals of early methods of arrangement that have long ago become extinct in the constantly improving art of housebuilding, but which are preserved through the well known tendency of the survival of ancient practice in matters pertaining to the religious observances of a primitive people. Unfortunately, in the past the Zui have been exposed to the repressive policy of the Spanish authorities, and this has probably seriously affected the purity of the kiva type. ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... excellence, they have in time past generally failed as soldiers when pitted against an equal number of Moslems. But the latter show no constructive powers in time of peace, and have very rarely assimilated the conquered races. Putting the matter baldly, we may say that it is a question of the survival of the fittest between beavers and bears. And in the Nineteenth Century the advantage has been increasingly ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... appeared gradually, and we called it bird-life. Some felt a desire to burrow in the ground, and lo! came the moles, gophers, etc. It wanted a thinking creature, and Man with his wonderful brain was evolved. Evolution is more than a mere survival of the fittest; natural selection, etc. Although it uses these laws as tools and instruments, still back of them is that insistent urge—that ever-impelling desire—that ever-active Creative Will. Lamark was nearer right than Darwin when he claimed that Desire was back ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... were, and he's to give you that same look. Got that cigarette going? All ready. Lights! Camera!" Merton was achieving his first close-up. Under the hum of the lights he was thinking that he had been a fool not to learn dancing, no matter how the Reverend Otto Carmichael denounced it as a survival from the barbaric Congo. He was also thinking that the Montague girl ought to be kept away from people who were trying to do really creative things, and he was bitterly regretting that he had no silver cigarette case. The gloom of his ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... ever got away safely. I have often told the public about that frantic scene alongside the steamers, but words are only a poor medium, for not Hugo, nor even Clark Russell, the matchless, could give a fair idea of that daily survival of danger, and recklessness, and almost insane audacity. The skipper was used to put in his word pretty freely on all occasions, for Blair's men were not drilled in the style of ordinary yachtsmen. Freeman, like ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... nine o'clock. Nine o'clock, and the flowers still answering to the glow of the sun! And the people down there—in the States—called it a frozen land, a hell of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place of the survival of the fittest! Well, to just such extremes had stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and knowledge. It was ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... went on. "But I am a little curious about them. Of course, they're silly and useless and flabby, but it seems queer that there are such a lot of 'em. If they're no good, why don't they pass out of existence? That's the rule of life, you tell me, the survival of the fittest. If they're not fit they ought to have died ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... official had gradually waned before those of his rival. He was always a great lord, drawing a great salary and maintaining great state, but doing little service, and really of far less importance to the province than the new man. He was a survival of the old feudal government, superseded by the centralized monarchy of which the intendant was the representative.[Footnote: The generalite governed by the intendant, and the province to which the royal governor was ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... principles—for a generation somewhat obscured, it must be confessed, by the Shining Sword and the Almighty Dollar, by the lengthening shadow of Imperialism and the soporific haze of Historic Rights and the Survival of the Fittest—it is to these principles, these "glittering generalities," that the minds of men are turning again in this day of desolation as a refuge from the cult of efficiency and from faith in "that which is just by the judgment ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... that so broadly and unqualifiedly put forth by the "panspermists" as to meet with a ready refutation. He is laboring, of course, to strengthen his position that nature eternally works to get rid of her imperfect forms, or to ensure "the survival of the fittest." But while his facts accomplish little in this direction, they establish much in another, as the reader will see. He says: "In Staffordshire, on an estate of a relative, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the various methods by which statesmen were seeking to prevent that survival of Slavery, addressing himself by turns to the arguments of those who, with John Sherman, "seemed," said he, "to consider it as within the power of Congress by virtue of its Legislative authority;" ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... there's positively no state of affairs at all. Contrary to public declaration, there's actually nothing chaotic in the whole business; on the contrary, everything is in order, and just as it should be. The survival of the fittest as regards the presidency, don't you see, and, well—Suffolk Street is itself again! A new government has come in, and, as I told the members the other night, I congratulate the Society on the result of their vote, for no longer can it be said that the right man ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... survival of mediaeval habits under altered circumstances. During the municipal wars of the thirteenth century, and afterwards during the struggle of the despots for ascendency, the nation had become accustomed to internecine ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... nomination of Lincoln it had secured the doubtful vote of the conservative States. Or rather, perhaps, might it be said that it was hardly the work of the delegates—it was the concurrent product of popular wisdom. Political evolution had with scientific precision wrought "the survival of the fittest." The delegates leaving Chicago on the various homeward-bound railroad trains that night, saw that already the enthusiasm of the convention was transferred from the wigwam to the country. ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... lines of the Great War on land and sea were now beginning to encircle the earth. While the gigantic armies on the battle grounds of Europe were engaged in the greatest test of "the survival of the fittest" that the world had ever witnessed, while the sharp encounters on the seas were carrying the war around the globe, the outbreaks in the Far East were bringing the Orient and the Occident—the two competitive systems of civilization—into a strange alignment. The Moslem ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... sense, or on what plane, any particular letter should be taken. I think it probably that in the Sacred Language before mentioned, this could at once have been recognized by a difference in the intonation of the voice. This may have been a survival to some extent of the chanting which was the distinguishing characteristic of the speech of the Second Race. (Secret Doctrine, vol. II, p. 198) In the written language it is not easily possible to discover this without much thought, ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... come again to your model. What makes her so remarkable, so significant, so touching, so exquisite, so human, is the fact that her face seems almost a survival out of a past in which the beacon-lights of humanity did more openly appear on the features. In her case one beacon-light most of all,—the greatest that has ever shone on the faces of women,—the one which seems to be slowly vanishing from the faces of ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... nothing but a general and fused recollection of the many thousand earlier occasions on which we have dressed, or gone to bed. Men invariably put the same leg first into their trousers—this is the survival of memory in a residuum; but they cannot, till they actually put on a pair of trousers, remember which leg they DO put in first; this is the rapid fading away of any ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... But I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest. Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee! If our age is to be beaten, let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be first to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers. There! have I repeated my catechism correctly? You would have it! Now oblige ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... could display his talents for shirking work, for cheating, for cadging; where he could find surely some one to wheedle and some one to bully—and where he would be paid for doing all this. They all knew him. Is there a spot on earth where such a man is unknown, an ominous survival testifying to the eternal fitness of lies and impudence? A taciturn long-armed shellback, with hooked fingers, who had been lying on his back smoking, turned in his bed to examine him dispassionately, then, over his head, sent a long jet of clear saliva ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... us, and then said, "Yes; to-morrow at a quarter to five." I begged Madame de Rastail to tell me about her; but all that I could learn was that she was a widow with a beautiful house in Park Lane, and as some scientific bore began a dissertation on widows, as exemplifying the survival of the matrimonially fittest, I ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... diseases. Imagine how nice this would be with the jury-box full! I must admit the presiding Judge performed his task of selection with discretion, particularly when he let me off. But I observe that before the Judge there is a bouquet of flowers. I am told that this is the survival of an old custom of placing hyssop before the Bench by way of febrifuge to protect him from pestilential vapours from the dock. I would like to suggest that a bunch of hyssop be again substituted for the bouquet of flowers. In justice, ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... it, wondering, as many times she had gazed and wondered before. It was a marvelous survival of primaeval life. It was so vast, so forbidding. Its torn crown, so sparse and weary looking, its barren trunk, too, dark and forbidding against the dwarfed surroundings of green, were they not a fit beacon for the village below? It suggested ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... this is the primitive attire of Eastern man in all hot climates, and that it still holds its ground in that grand survival of heathenry, the Meccan Pilgrimage. In Galland the four strips are of taffetas jaune, the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... object of terror, like the twin children; it was just thrown away because no one would be bothered to rear it, but when Miss Slessor had had all the trouble of it the natives had no objection to pet and play with it, calling it "the child of wonder," because of its survival. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... maskers their rights in the Ghetto, but only there. Purim thus is now chiefly retained as a children's feast, and still better as a feast of charity, of the interchange of gifts between friends, and the bestowal of alms on the needy. This is a worthy survival. ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... the most interesting of these animals is the desert-rat, whose habits, seemingly intelligent and equally curious, enable him to maintain a home amid surroundings most unfavorable to his survival. He is a big, active fellow of a glossy gray color, and since he always leaves something in place of whatever he may carry off, he is often called the trade rat. ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... method is the most practical, the most successful and most popular? Which will stand the test of "the survival of the fittest" in the great struggle ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... which, besides having an unusual position, is remarkable as being one of the most complete groups of buildings set apart for this object. A noticeable feature of the cloister garth is a Norman arch belonging to a doorway that appears to be of later date. This is probably the only survival of the first monastery founded, it is said, by Roald, Constable of Richmond Castle, in 1152. Building of an extensive character was, therefore, in progress at the same time in these sloping meadows, as on the castle heights, and St. Martin's Priory, close to the ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... on air to escape strangulation on the ground, and for donning larger and more gorgeous apparel to attract attention in the fierce competition for insect trade waged about them. Here, where the struggle for survival is incomparably easier, we have terrestrial orchids, small, and quietly clad, for the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... was not hurt. It is somewhat extraordinary that this shell should have waited so long to act, as the after part of the ship was generally well cooled off. There was still much heat and some flames about the bow. One extraordinary fact is the survival, in proper shape, of many powder grains, baked hard; several of these were picked up ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... is made more effective by the equal salaries of teachers everywhere, thus securing better instruction in the country. Adolescence is the golden period for acquiring the skill that comes by practice, so essential in the struggle for survival. In general this kind of motor education is least of all free, but subservient to the tool, machine, process, finished product, or end in view; and to these health and development are subordinated, so that they tend to be ever ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? Negro leadership, therefore, sought from the first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival ...
— The Negro Problem • Booker T. Washington, et al.
... Jimville as anything more than a survival, like the herb-eating, bony-cased old tortoise that pokes cheerfully about those borders some thousands of years beyond his proper epoch. Not that Jimville is old, but it has an atmosphere favorable to the type of a half century back, if not "forty-niners," of that breed. It is said of Jimville ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... it flutters away into the azure. Dick's caught Bergson with the goods on him, filched straight from the treasure-house of science. His very cocksureness is filched from Darwin's morality of strength based on the survival of the fittest. And what did Bergson do with it? Touched it up with a bit of James' pragmatism, rosied it over with the eternal hope in man's breast that he will live again, and made it all a-shine with ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... breeze in her canvas, rises white and strong against the blueness of sea and sky, triumphant over all the assaults of external nature, animated by human will and courage, the most indomitable of all created things, and affording perhaps the best example of the survival and unconquerable power of these masters of the world: till again there arises in the heavens another hurricane, furious, ungovernable, rousing the sea to madness, striking once more the canvas from the yards, the masts from the deck, and leaving a mere hulk at the mercy ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... my love away Cannot hope for long survival, And I pity him to-day As I did a former rival Who believed her single-hearted When my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... process had been, of course, gradual. The canonical Gospels had to compete with several others before they became canonical. They had to make good their own claims and to displace rival documents; and they succeeded. It is a striking instance of the 'survival of the fittest.' That they were really the fittest is confirmed by nearly every fragment of the lost Gospels that remains, but it would be almost sufficiently proved by the very fact that ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... slanted. Jack was shoved hard against the rear boards by the weight of the other men. He didn't answer until the pressure had eased and his ribs were free to work for more than mere survival. ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... Far from it. He was but one of the hordes of creatures struggling for existence and the sooner he learned that caution and stealth led to success while bravado led to failure, the greater were his chances of survival and growth to the stage where he could fearlessly proclaim ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... in its real meaning is almost the condition for the survival of the family. It is its protection, it is the opportunity of its development. God has the joy of unlimited creation—He can make something out of nothing; but He has given to Man the joy of limited creation—Man ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... their hands were clasped about a slender rod. They grasped the rod at once and could be lifted from the bed by it and kept in this position about half a minute. He argued that this early strength of arm, which soon begins to disappear, was survival from the remote period when the baby's ancestors were monkeys or monkey-like ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... kindred and their ways. But even Finn, despite his huge strength and exceptional knowledge, would not have come through this ordeal so well as Jan did, unless it had come to him as early in life as it came to Jan. And even then his survival would have been doubtful. The difference between the climates of Australia and the North-west Territory is hardly greater than the difference in stress and hardness between Finn's life in the Tinnaburra ranges, as leader of a dingo ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... existence of a friendly antoh which reminded me of the superstition of the "Nokken" in the rivers of Norway. It lives in rivers, is very rarely beheld by mortals, and the one who sees it becomes rich beyond dreams of avarice. The Long-Glats call it sangiang, a survival of Hindu influence. An old man in Long Tujo is reported to have seen this antoh, and according to him it had the appearance of a woman sitting underneath the water. No doubt other ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... evolution thus proved, and the "survival of the fittest" an accomplished fact, the next step was to ascertain "how," as Cope asked, "the fittest originated?" It was felt by some that natural selection alone was not adequate to explain the first steps in the origin of genera, families, orders, classes, and branches or phyla. It ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... see a bull fight rendered in the most magnificent Spanish style, where greatly to my surprise and horror, I found that I had seen, with comparative indifference, five bulls and many more horses killed. The sense that this was the last survival of all the glories of the amphitheater, the illusion that the riders on the caparisoned horses might have been knights of a tournament, or the matadore a slightly armed gladiator facing his martyrdom, and all the rest of the obscure yet vivid ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... Church of Tiverton stands on a hill, whence it overlooks the little village, with one or two pine-shaded neighborhoods beyond, and, when the air is clear, a thin blue line of upland delusively like the sea. Set thus austerely aloft, it seems now a survival of the day when men used to go to meeting gun in hand, and when one stayed, a lookout by the door, to watch and listen. But this the present dwellers do not remember. Conceding not a sigh to the ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... interested in the subject of survival after hanging. He wrote an early Reflector essay, "On the Inconveniences of Being Hanged," on the subject, and it is the pivot of his farce "The ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... royal assertions too seriously. Even in this country there are documents issued from time to time bearing the royal sign manual which every one regards as interesting but meaningless formalities—interesting because they are a survival of mediaeval documents which meant something some hundreds of years ago and still remain though their meanings have long since lapsed. And yet there are persons in this country who peruse such documents and know that they are simply words ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... is prophesied in terms not very unlike those he used. To my mind this is far-fetched: Virgil had Gaul behind him, if you must look for explanations in outside things; and at least in after ages Celtic Messianism was as persistent a doctrine as Jewish. A survival, of course; in truth the initiated or partly initiated among all ancient peoples knew that avatars come. Virgil, if he understood as much about Theosophy as he wrote into the Sixth Aeneid, would also ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... and which, perhaps, bears the same relation to their ordinary flight that dancing does to the every-day walk of men and women. The two seemed equally enchanted, and both sang. Little they knew of the "struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest." Adam and Eve, in Paradise, ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... audience were amused by the "tres chers freres" (dearly beloved brethren), with which the Abbe addressed them in this rather unorthodox lecture. It was evidently looked upon as a curious bit of "professional survival." ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... more charmingly girlish, or more prettily worded! The diminutive little note seems to have been preserved, an almost solitary survival of the memorials of the days to which it belongs. It must doubtless have been followed by sundry others, but was, I suppose, specially treasured as having been the first step towards a friendship which was already ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... home in the cab, but she was pulled up with a jerk when Jonah led the way to the tram. He wore an anxious look, as if he had spent more than he could afford, and yet the money was a mere flea-bite to him. But whenever he spent money, a panic terror seized him—a survival of the street-arab's instinct, who counted his money in pennies instead ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... snatchers and the snatched-from. Everything that breathes is either a sparrow or a finch. 'T is the universal war—the struggle for existence—the survival of the most unscrupulous. 'T is a miniature presentment of what's going on ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... cut off your heads,' they say; 'if we had been less lucky you would have cut off ours.' The English always go in for this kind of posthumous politeness. They call it behaving like sportsmen. It's really a survival of the 'enemy's taboo.'" ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... others who think that the Indian has been absurdly pampered by the Government, and that it would be as sensible to try to change the arrangement of seasons as to attempt to prevent the survival of the fittest, or, in other words, to interfere with the gradual, but in their opinion ...
— My Native Land • James Cox |
