"Disembodied" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... walking for hours, and yet she had no feeling of fatigue. She seemed to move through the streets without any effort of her own. Towards the morning she was carried along with a complete absence of bodily sensation, as if she had been in very truth one of those disembodied spirits of Mrs. Johns' spirit world, driven through the solitude of the ages by the implacable decree of some incalculable malignant force called immortality. She felt as though centuries of time had rolled over her head when the murk of the lowering sky lightened, and the London dawn was ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... idea of the quality of the music. The veery, that never claims an audience, sings at night also, and its weird, sweet strains floating through the woods at dusk, thrill one like the mysterious voice of a disembodied spirit. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... approaching night was a terrible ordeal through which she must go. Her reason fled away to parts unknown, and only imagination remained to create a mountain lion in every thicket, and mysterious, unearthly, disembodied presences in the air, behind her back, at her very elbow. She was grateful when Carver came to sit beside her. With Virginia on the other side, two less avenues of approach were opened. At all events she would not talk about her fear; and, acting upon ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... with the strength of his vision, could cry to-day, "It is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true." For poetry, to which all literature aspires, is not the shadow of reality but the image of perfection, the light of disembodied beauty toward which creation gropes. And that poetic consciousness is the key to the complex and half-concealed art ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... following words: 'In the northern parts of the Realm it is customary, when an unmarried youth and an unmarried girl breathe their last, that the two families each charge a match-maker to demand the other party in marriage. Such go-betweens are called match-makers for disembodied souls. They acquaint the two families with each other's circumstances, and then cast lots for the marriage by order of the parents on both sides. If they augur that the union will be a happy one, (wedding) garments for the next world are cut out, and the match-makers repair to the grave of ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... Religious Principle, driven out of most Churches, either lies unseen in the hearts of good men, looking and longing and silently working there towards some new Revelation; or else wanders homeless over the world, like a disembodied soul seeking its terrestrial organization,—into how many strange shapes, of Superstition and Fanaticism, does it not tentatively and errantly cast itself! The higher Enthusiasm of man's nature ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... with the French word for ghost—revenant. There is no such thing as a 'comer-back,' or an 'earth-bound spirit.' Personally, I do not believe in immortality, in the usually accepted sense of the word; but I have always felt that were there such a thing as a disembodied spirit, it would have something better to do than to walk along old corridors, frightening housemaids! But, to come to the point, concerning our ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... thought as the luminiferous ether conveys waves of light, is the theory advanced in explanation of these phenomena. Spiritualists had long before advanced a like theory in explanation of their phenomena, claiming that disembodied as well as living minds have the power of influencing and controlling other minds, through the agency of such a psychic atmosphere, and also of acting upon and moving physical substances through a like agency. As to the probability of all this, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... water-thrush,—whose song is likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good fortune. For nearly two years this strain of the pretty walker was little more than a disembodied voice to me, and I was puzzled by it as Thoreau by his mysterious night-warbler, which, by the way, I suspect was no new bird at all, but one he was otherwise familiar with. The little bird himself ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... with us, and I heard her last evening for the second time. She is master of the English language, and whether or not one can believe she sees and hears from the world of the disembodied what she feels she does, one can not but realize that she is a great woman and has a wonderful theory of how human souls return to earth. But I tell her that it seems to me repellent that we have to come back here through ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt—as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... comparatively small extent. At the time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the terrible country through which the souls of the departed made their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made no ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... spirit struggled with the exhausted body and panted to escape. He no longer heard when Laura called, but he still lived: his eyes were wide open and he spoke again. But they were single, disconnected words, which belonged to the dreamland and the forms of the invisible world which his almost disembodied spirit now ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... should. Particularly is this true of some conscientious students who feel they must not take any time from their study. But this denotes a false conception of mental action. The human organism needs exercise. Man is not a disembodied spirit; he must pay attention to the claims of the body. Indeed it will be found that time spent in exercise will result in a higher grade of mental work. This is recognized by colleges and universities ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... exposure no foible was spared, though by her very reproof she roused dormant courage and self-confidence. And so unerring seemed her insight, that her companion felt as if standing bare before a disembodied spirit, and communicated without reserve thoughts and emotions, which, even to himself, he had ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... Sung by the ancient masters of the lyre, Where disembodied spirits, ere they left Their earthly mansions, lingered for a time Upon the confines of eternal night, Mourning their doom; and oft the astonished hind, As home he journeyed at the fall of eve, Viewed unknown forms flitting across his ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... to that bourne whence no traveller returns,' and we fervently trust and hope that the disembodied spirits of the tens of thousands whom he has treated in this sphere will treat him with the same science with which he treated them while in this ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... Is this new feeling But a visioned ghost of slumber? If indeed I am a soul, A free, a disembodied soul, 165 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... applicant as himself; and he had less than a dollar. He explained something of this over the wire, adding that if Markley would see Flavilla at the end of the day the money would be forthcoming. That, the crisp, disembodied tone replied, was impossible; he must call in the middle of the morning, but no difficulty would be made about his bill; Doret could send ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... imagination. Moreover, lightning struck the palace in Kyoto, and the three principal contrivers of Michizane's disgrace, Fujiwara Tokihira, Fujiwara Sugane, and Minamoto Hikaru, all expired within a few years' interval. At that epoch a wide-spread belief existed in the powers of disembodied spirits for evil or for good. Such a creed grew logically out of the cult of ancestor worship. It began to be whispered abroad that Michizane's spirit was taking vengeance upon his enemies. The Emperor was the first to act upon this ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... ape-man sprang into the trees and fled like a disembodied spirit eastward in the direction of the forgotten city ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... seen hereafter from heaven, will seem like an hour passed long ago, and dimly remembered;—that long, laborious, full of joys and sorrows as it is, it will then have dwindled down to a mere point, hardly visible to the far-reaching ken of the disembodied spirit. But the spirit itself soars onward. And thus death is neither an end nor a beginning. It is a transition not from one existence to another, but from one state of existence to another. No link is broken in the chain of being; any more than in passing from infancy to manhood, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... the psychologists have explored the matter, it is really a disastrous thing to do. For to adapt ourselves to sex is one of the problems that cannot be escaped. In this world we cannot live the disembodied life. What we may do is to live a clean and happy bodily life, but only if we build our house of life ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... in touch rather than in sight amidst the darkness which the disembodied voices broke upon. "Enraghty's house? Then we've got ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... calling to the other for help in piteous tones. The effect was curious, and had a peculiarly melancholy sound; indeed we might easily have supposed them to be the cries of captive slaves, or perhaps a more fanciful person might describe them as disembodied spirits in some haunted island. Meanwhile the night wind, sighing through the lofty trees, came moaning down towards us. At length darkness compelled us to give up our sport, and, with an abundant supply of fish, we pulled slowly back towards our usual landing-place, where, having unladen ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... hers. He did not trust himself to look at her. She was his, all of her and forever. It was marvelous. The secret clasp of her hand was sufficient for the present. He was still doubtful of his fortune and unnerved by his temerity. He felt aloof and disembodied—an uninvolved spectator. And this was love, the journey's end—this smiling stillness, which was so different from anything he ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... that was absolutely painful all these pleasant fancies passed away, and I imagined myself to be a disembodied spirit floating helplessly in the midst of immeasurable space, enveloped in murky clouds and thick darkness, and whirled hither and thither at the mercy ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... love! O woman I love! O bride! O wife! more resistless than I can tell, the thought of you! Then separate, as disembodied or another born, Ethereal, the last athletic reality, my consolation, I ascend, I float in the regions of your love O man, O sharer ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... had felt Judith's body rigid and tense. There was nothing rigid about Arnold. He was relaxed in an exhausted passivity, a beaten man. Let what would, befall. He seemed beyond feeling. She knew that probably never again, so life goes, could they speak together thus, like disembodied spirits, freed for once from the blinding, entangling tragic web of self-consciousness. She wondered again if he would find it in his heart to speak to her of Judith. She remembered something else she had meant to ask him, if she could ever find words ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... as much display as is compatible with their station in life. An imposing grave is built in a spot facing a pleasant prospect, while trees are planted, and sometimes even artificial pieces of water made, so that the disembodied spirit may be able to enjoy shady groves and cooling breezes. Sacrifices are offered at this shrine not once, but year after year, and by his children's children, with an absolute certainty of the spirit's ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... looked up with a curse. There was nobody in the room, but the voice had been louder than ever he had heard it before. It seemed as though it emanated from a disembodied spirit that was floating through the air. There was a ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... Scripture, and Dionysius the Areopagite, he attempts to define the stages by which the soul passes from the earthly to the unseen beauty. A change indeed had passed over him, as if the chilling touch of the abstract and disembodied beauty Platonists profess to long for was already upon him; and perhaps it was a sense of this, coupled with that over-brightness which in the popular imagination always betokens an early death, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... ghosts! Has not Ito[u] Dono two spearmen when he goes abroad? When he has an interview with his lord does he tremble with fear? When the enemy in life, with all physical powers, is not feared; why fear a disembodied spirit deprived of all means of venting its wrath and spite? It is but the imagination which works havoc. None are more helpless than the dead. With them time and occasion has reached an end. If O'Iwa returns to Yotsuya, it will be in her own person. With O'Iwa, the beggar ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... of secret and collusive agencies was heightened by the vibration of the air above us, in which the shells from the batteries made furrows that were audible without being visible, as though the whole firmament were populated with disembodied spirits. The passivity of the toilers in the field below us, who, absorbed in their husbandry, regarded not the air above them, and the dreaming beauty of the distant city almost persuaded us that ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... one-sidedness to a conversation of this nature which might well weary a person in the body; and only a disembodied spirit, it may be surmised, could thoroughly enjoy it. A fine thing to do would be to put two of those great conversationalists against each other, as was sometimes done with Sydney Smith and Macaulay. It is said that the two ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... name of Elohim is applied to a ghost, or disembodied soul, conceived as the image of the body in which it once dwelt, is of no little importance. For it is well known that the same term was employed to denote the gods of the heathen, who were thought to have definite quasi-corporeal forms and to be as much real entities ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... prove how in all cases the imagination is based upon, and appeals to, a deep heart feeling; and how faithful and earnest it is in contemplation of the subject matter, never losing sight of it, or disguising it, but depriving it of extraneous and material accidents, and regarding it in its disembodied essence. I have not, however, sufficiently noted in opposition to it, that diseased action of the fancy which depends more on nervous temperament than intellectual power; and which, as in dreaming, fever, insanity, and ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... of pleasure from the performance came back, for he had resolutely kept away from even the dress rehearsal, and the entire creative force of his lines was about to come to him. "In a few moments my characters will step forth from the world of the disembodied into the mellow glow of the foot-lights," he thought, and the anticipated joy of welcoming them warmed his brain and the chill clutch of fear fell away from his throat. The dignity and the glow, the possibilities of the theatre as a temple ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... her no figure of Mr. Brumley as intimate, as habitual. She could as easily imagine his skeleton. He remained in all this queer speculation something friendly, something incidental, more than a trifle disembodied, entirely devoted of course in that hovering ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... gave him visions wild— The midnight wind came wild and dread, Swell'd with the voices of the dead; Far on the future battle-heath His eye beheld the ranks of death: Thus the lone seer, from mankind hurl'd, Shap'd forth a disembodied ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... Saint-Sebaldus, at Nuremberg, the Virgins of the Duomo, at Milan, the whole population of a hundred Gothic Cathedrals, all the race of beings who burst their mould to visit you, great imaginative artists—all these angelic and disembodied maidens gathered round ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... vast, medieval cathedral. The Coda, beginning in A-flat major, with an impressive mood of resignation, illustrates at its close a psychological use of programmistic effect; for the first theme, treated as a real person, disintegrates before our very eyes—becoming, as it were, a disembodied spirit. Nothing can show more clearly than this passage the widening of the expressive powers of music which we owe to the genius of Beethoven. The same effect with a slightly different dramatic purpose is found at the end of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... be consigned to the abodes of the disembodied spirits, who are punished according to the nature of their crimes. For instance, saki merchants who have sold bad spirit are believed to be confined in stagnant pools; and murderers are supposed to haunt the graves of their victims, until the prayers of their relatives ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... off. Now I've as good a right as any one!" she added with artless elation. Isabel was duly diverted, but there was a certain melancholy in her view. Henrietta, after all, had confessed herself human and feminine, Henrietta whom she had hitherto regarded as a light keen flame, a disembodied voice. It was a disappointment to find she had personal susceptibilities, that she was subject to common passions, and that her intimacy with Mr. Bantling had not been completely original. There was a want of originality in her marrying him—there was even a kind of stupidity; and for a moment, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... regular sibilation came to time, quavering out the chromatic moments of this nasal hour. High over all floated a faint whisper,—a song-cloud rising from the dream-mist of a peaceful breast,—a revelation timidly exhaled to the disembodied spirits of the air. Its hazy lullaby breathed down as from distant heights, and murmured of celestial rest. Its soul was like a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... suppose we might as well charge the crime up to the spirits and drop the case!" he said ironically. "No, Greig, we're not going on a still hunt for murderous, disembodied shades. We're going after living people—and we're not going very far. What puzzles you and the clerks—how anyone managed to get to him and fire the shot—is so simple that I'm surprised you're worrying over it. I have already ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... yoga exercise for twenty years. His miraculous feats began to attract widespread attention. It seems that he was always accompanied by a disembodied spirit whom he called 'Hazrat.' This invisible entity was able to fulfill ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Brutus that the consciousness of virtue, were sufficient consolations for any exile. How little have I lost in comparison with those two fairest possessions which I shall everywhere enjoy—nature and my own integrity! Whoever or whatever made the world—whether it were a deity, or disembodied reason, or a divine interfusing spirit, or destiny, or an immutable series of connected causes—the result was that nothing, except our very meanest possessions, should depend on the will of another. Man's best gifts lie beyond the power of ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... gathered in it, what were they? Men and a woman? Bodies? Earthly creatures? No. To his mind they were stripped bare of the clothes in which man—governed by decrees of some hidden power—must make his life pilgrimage. They were stripped bare and naked of their bodies. They were warm, stirring, disembodied things—they were flames leaping, waving, contending, aspiring. And he remembered the night when he sat alone in the drawing-room of Valentine, and saw the red walls glow, and the light deepen, and saw the stillness grow to movement, and ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... both embodied and disembodied, incarnate and excarnate, considered as a mass, may act as the terrurgic spiritual body and brain of the planet; subjective and responsive to the inspiration and guidance of the universal cosmic mind, acting from the ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... endless life after death indeed thinkable? How can we conceive the life of a disembodied spirit? How can we conceive such a spirit? How can we conceive a pure consciousness, without a corporal organism? Descartes divided the world into thought and extension, a dualism which was imposed upon him by the Christian dogma of the immortality of the soul. But is extension, ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... background, or body, of the aura, in and through which the mental and emotional auric colors play and move. It may interest you, however, to know that this phase of aura is always present around and about a "ghost" or dematerialized disembodied soul, or "spirit" as common usage ...
— The Human Aura - Astral Colors and Thought Forms • Swami Panchadasi
... hosts of scholars and followers and imitators. But they were nothing more, or at the most it may be said that they developed his idea to the furthest with varying success. It was realism—sometimes a kind of mystic evocation of nature, disembodied and divinely pure, as in Beato Angelico; often exquisitely fresh and youthful, as in his pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, whose vast series of frescoes half fills the Camposanto of Pisa—sometimes tentative and experimental, or gravely grand, as ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... hour,—looking as I said before, as the iron-bound prisoner to the revolving knife, and like him I was outwardly calm. I knelt beside her and looked on her shadowy form, her white, transparent skin, her dark, still lustrous, though sunken eyes, till it seemed that her spirit, almost disembodied, mingled mysteriously with mine, in earnest of a ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... two punts in the backwater a great peace descended after the hilarity of their feast. Clouds of cigarette smoke kept midges at bay. In the deepening stillness small sounds asserted themselves—piping of gnats, the trill of happy birds, snatches of disembodied laughter and talk from other parties in other punts, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... "'Course I am." Her disembodied voice had a ring of triumph. "I'm at the tipmost top. It's rather shaky, but scrumshous. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... world of Astralism. In any of these named worlds there is a material presence—which must be created, if only for a single or periodic purpose. It matters not whether a material presence already created can be receptive of a disembodied soul, or a soul unattached can have a body built up for it or around it; or, again, whether the body of a dead person can be made seeming quick through some diabolic influence manifested in the present, or an ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... never dying love: Day that shall never cease, No night there threatening, No winter there to chill joy's ever-during spring. Ye fields of changeless green Covered with living streams and fadeless flowers; Thou paradise serene, Eternal joyful hours Thy disembodied soul shall welcome in ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... again be divided. Some are weak characters, dominated by the will of others in a negative manner, as mediums, who are the prey of disembodied spirits desirous of obtaining a physical body when they have lost their own ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... directly west, and the church stood between the two houses, which were about five hundred yards apart. I have no impression whatever how I became transplanted from the house. The lady was in a camp bedstead, directly opposite to me, looking at and reaching out her arms towards me, when my disembodied spirit instantly disappeared to join the material body which it had left in some mysterious way. As I returned and was fitting in to my body on my left side, when half united I could see within ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... his associates): We still must go back to the one thing. The information we receive through these responses is of little importance to us compared with the information which we must obtain as to whether these sounds are produced by a disembodied Spirit or by some living person; that is, in deference to the Medium. (To Mr. Furness): Do ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission
... affectionate mother? Is she up among these gems of heaven? Is she yonder in the mighty Jupiter, looking down, and smiling at me? Is she permitted, in her new being, to come at will, and breathe to my mind holy thoughts and holy feelings? Disembodied, is she, as God, pervading all, and knowing all? Does she, with that devotion of heart which was so much hers in time, still love and protect me? Shall I, when purified by death, go to her? and shall this hope become a reality, ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... see the Country of Souls, and to judge with their own eyes if its situation and its delights had been truly told to them. Much had it been talked of, but who were they that talked? They were mortals—men, who had never quitted the corporeal state, nor stood forth disembodied spirits; things with the feelings which attend human nature. They wished to see if thorns and arrows would not wound the flesh of those who had departed hence; nor fire burn, nor cold freeze, nor hunger ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... I know thee in the sphere which keeps The disembodied spirits of the dead, When all of thee that time could wither sleeps And perishes ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... rim, and confessed: "It made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and beaten under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intrudes here; in these warm and glowing purple spaces disembodied spirits must range and soar, souls purged and purified and infinitely daring." Yet here I have heard the wild brayings of hungry mules and the worse ravings of angry men—none of them impressed as was the soul of ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... face, as he peered at her, seemed like a disembodied stare, for she could see only eyes behind a mask of lavender gray glass eyeholes, with its flapping ends ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... "soul;" and the old Greeks went in search of Atmu, the Hidden one, or the God-Soul of man, with the symbolical mirror of the Thesmophorian mysteries; so the spiritualists of today believe in the capacity of the spirits, or the souls of the disembodied persons, to communicate visibly and tangibly with those they loved on earth. And all these, Aryan Yogis, Greek philosophers, and modern spiritualists, affirm that possibility on the ground that the embodied soul and its never embodied spirit—the real self—are ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... wandered over the island, visiting the old, old temples, listening to the mysterious wailing of the wind bells, feeding the deer and crane, and drinking in the beauty of it all. I felt like a disembodied spirit, traveling back, back over the centuries, into dim forgotten ages. The dead seemed close about me, yet they brought no gloom, for I too was dead. All afternoon I had the impression of trying to keep my consciousness from drifting into oblivion through ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... with somewhat of a subdued silver sheen, like the sunny side of a cloud; and, falling over the wearer from head to foot, was supposed to insulate her from the material world, from time and space, and to endow her with many of the privileges of a disembodied spirit. ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... notice the absence of that rancour which had formerly been Allen's most prominent characteristic, and feeling that any information given to a disembodied spirit was safe as far as the world was concerned, launched out on the subject that possessed his ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... strained to the snapping point. Continually she was reminded of that vivid episode, of which she had been the unwitting cause. Sometimes she would open the door, and from out the dark would arise the sound of wolfish quarrels over the feast, disembodied snappings and snarlings. Or when the low-swimming moon shed a misty glimmer on the open she would peer through a thawed place on the window-pane, and see gray shapes circling about the half-picked skeletons. Sometimes, when Bill was gone, and all about the cabin was utterly still, ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... newspapers call the Indian cultivator a "riot." He never amounts to a riot if you treat him properly. He may be a disorderly crowd sometimes; but that is only when you embody him in a police force or convert him into cavalry. The atomic disembodied villager has no notion of rioting, ca-ira singing, or any of the tomfooleries of revolution. These pastimes are for men who are both idle and frivolous. When our villager wants to realise a political idea, he dies of famine. This has about it a certain air of ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... intercourse. But if, on the other hand, we can show that the mode of intercourse here needed does already exist, and appears in man's relations with his fellow-men, then the transition to messages from the unseen will be so much the less violent. We shall only be supposing that man can receive from the disembodied a kind of message which he already receives from the embodied, and which has no obvious dependence on a corporeal embodiment. One single proved transmission, direct from mind to mind, of the most ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... the other hand, it must be allowed that Mrs. Besant is right in her observation that "the more mystical dreamy East" has little dread of the "shadow cloaked from head to foot," since it is ever ever seeking to escape from "from the thraldom of the senses," and is apt to look upon "the disembodied state as eminently desirable and as most conducive to unfettered thought." In other words, that "when the brains are out," as Macbeth says, man's intellect undergoes a wonderful improvement; an opinion, by the way, which is quite ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... himself vanquished by difficulties before which a woman did not quail. Twice and thrice, however, they were both driven back again round some comparatively sheltered corner by the mere fury of the wind, which battled with them as stubbornly as though it were the disembodied spirits, of the ancient defenders of the place; and when, mechanically, and almost of necessity, Richard's arm sought the young girl's waist, whose garments made it more difficult for her to advance ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... not as out of my home. For nature has given it to us as an inn to tarry at by the way, not as a place to abide in. O glorious day! when I shall set out to join that blessed company and assembly of disembodied spirits, and quit this crowd and rabble of life! For I shall go my way, not only to those great men of whom I spoke, but to my own son Cato, than whom was never better man born, nor more full of dutiful affection; whose body I laid on ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... had proved the balloon answer wrong, I was badly puzzled. The idea of a disembodied light was the hardest thing to swallow that I'd ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... cold altogether! Nor am I in love with a future state in which there is so much dancing up and down lofty flights of stairs with terpsichorean energy, and manoeuvring in companies and circles with members of the softer sex. As a philosophical conception of disembodied existence, it is undeniably deficient in repose, though perhaps good enough ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... is not in sight from here. No, Grace, I never saw any thing supernatural: and I am sorry for it, for I laugh at people's notion that a dead man has any power to injure the living; how can a cold wind come from a disembodied spirit? I am all that a ghost is, and something more; and I only wish I COULD call the dead from their graves; I'd soon have a dozen gentlemen and ladies out of that old church-yard into this very room. ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... souls of them who had passed over from the New Land, mebby them disembodied faithful shades wuz a-tryin' to save their free sunny huntin' grounds from the hands of the invader, and their race from the fate that threatened 'em—mebby they hurled onseen tommyhawks, and shrieked down at 'em, tryin' ...
— Samantha at the World's Fair • Marietta Holley
... words, "Tell, my friend, tell, my friend—the law of the land which thou sawest, tell," and the answer, "I will not tell thee, friend, I will not tell thee—if I tell thee the law of the land which I saw, . . . sit down, weep." Ultimately, however, the person appealed to—apparently the disembodied Enki-du—reveals something concerning the condition of the souls in the place of his sojourn ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... spirits, while the holy angels that "minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation,"(897) are regarded by many as the spirits of the dead. But the Scriptures not only teach the existence of angels, both good and evil, but present unquestionable proof that these are not the disembodied spirits of dead men. ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... sinking and dying body, which, perhaps ere life should be extinct, might become the prey of voracious inhabitants of the deep;"—these things caused scarcely a thought, compared with the immediate prospect of the disembodied spirit being ushered into the presence of its Maker; the account to be rendered, and the awful and unalterable destiny that would await it there. "These momentous objects," he says, "absorbed all the powers of the mind, and produced ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... perpendicular wall, and felt a strange airy sense of pleasure in being thus between earth and heaven. A sense of relief, of beauty, and peacefulness would steal over him, as if he were indeed something disfranchised and disembodied, a part of the harmonious and beautiful world that lay stretched out beneath him; in a moment more he would waken himself with a start, and resume his toilsome journey with a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... escape. Often an insect or a stone is thought to harbour the spirit. As shown by Sir E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture, [123] the breath, the shadow and the pupil of the eye were sometimes held to be or to represent the soul or spirit. Disembodied spirits are imprisoned in a tree or hole by driving nails into the tree or ground to confine them and prevent their exit. When a man died accidentally or a woman in childbirth and fear was felt that their spirits might annoy or injure the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... lost, coats torn, boots burst and pantaloons dropped with magnificent miscellaneousness, and dozens of those who rose from the miry streets into which they had been thrown looked like the disembodied spirits of a mud bank. The snakes crawled on the sidewalk and into Broadway, where some of them died from injuries received, and others were dispatched by the excited populace. Several of the serpents of the copper-head species escaped the fury of the tumultuous masses, and, true to their ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... skull-masks, formed a ring round him, and treated him to a brisk dance. Was Democritus alarmed at the ghosts? Not he: "Come, enough of that nonsense," was all he had to say to them; and that without so much as looking up, or taking pen from paper. Evidently he had quite made up his mind about disembodied spirits.' 'Which simply proves,' retorted Eucrates, 'that Democritus was no wiser than yourself. Now I am going to tell you of another thing that happened to me personally; I did not get the story second-hand. Even you, Tychiades, will scarcely hold out against ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... there was no danger of detection, yet from long habit he moved through the plant of the International Machine Company with the noiselessness of a disembodied spirit. Occasionally, and just for the briefest instant, he flashed his lamp ahead of him, but though he had never been in the place before he found it scarcely necessary, so minute had been his instructions for reaching the office from ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... shadows hung all round the room, making the objects in it seem weird and ghost-like in the gloom. Sudden gusts of wind swept angrily round, causing the withered leaves and dying flowers in the vases to murmur with unearthly sounds, as of the sighing of disembodied souls. Only through the aperture above a streak of greyish light struck full upon the Caesar, as, with glowing eyes and cruel grasp, he compelled ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... were uselessly wearing out their lives in Korea. In his last moments he opened his eyes and exclaimed earnestly: "Let not the spirits of the hundred thousand troops I have sent to Korea become disembodied in a foreign land."(186) Ieyasu, on whom devolved the military responsibility after the Taiko's death, and who had never sympathized with his wishes and aims regarding Korea, did not delay the complete withdrawal of the troops which ...
— Japan • David Murray
... retired lion, but he is by no means a dead one. A quiet man of powerful silences, whose eyes can be ruthless, and his lips wise. A man who appears disembodied on first introduction, for one overlooks the rest of him under the domination of ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... His Coming. And how His Coming is forgotten! How few of His people truly wait for Him! How few pray that important and almost forgotten prayer, Even so, Come Lord Jesus! But we must also remember that our Lord is likewise waiting. Innumerable multitudes of disembodied spirits who are saved by Grace are waiting in His own presence for the moment when they will receive their resurrection bodies, which will be when He descends from Heaven and comes into the air. The faithful remnant of His people on earth wait for His Coming. ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... among the disembodied spirits in space; and I became conscious that certain of those in my vicinity were eyeing me askance and whispering together in a menacing and most disturbing manner——" At this point the spectre broke down for a moment, and sobbed ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Up. II, 1, 2); 'That person is not attached to anything' (B/ri/. Up. IV, 3, 15)[71]. All which passages establish the fact that so-called release differs from all the fruits of action, and is an eternally and essentially disembodied state. Among eternal things, some indeed may be 'eternal, although changing' (pari/n/aminitya), viz. those, the idea of whose identity is not destroyed, although they may undergo changes; such, for instance, are earth and the other ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... a feeble but frantic sound for some little time, as if wool-upped, disembodied spirits were exchanging kisses; then Rosannah said, "Excuse me just a moment, dear; I have an appointment, and am ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... says, "thought is independent of the brain." "The brain is, strictly speaking, neither an organ of thought, nor of feeling, nor of consciousness." He speaks of consciousness as if it were a disembodied something floating around in the air overhead, like wireless messages. If I do not think with my brain, with what do I think? Certainly not with my legs, or my abdomen, or my chest. I think with my head, or ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... His soul shook and thundered within him to repel these attacks upon his Lord and Master. As those unexpected random questions had poured in upon him thick and fast, all emerging, as it seemed to him, like disembodied evil spirits from the black pit of Satan and the damned, it was joy to him to deal to each that same straight, God-directed spear-thrust of a reply—killing them as they rose. His soul ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... together,' Rose said. She left the table and stood before the fire, one hand on the mantelshelf and one foot on the fender. The long, soft lines of her dark dress were merged into the shadows, and the white arm, the white face and neck seemed to be disembodied. Henrietta, struck dumb by that announcement, and feeling the situation wrested from the control of her young hands, stared at the slight figure which had typified beauty for her since she ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... coloured cobweb, we regret to say!"—and retire into the fields to cultivate onion-beds, and live frugally on vegetables. It is very notable. Old godlike Calvinism declares that its old body is now fallen to tatters, and done; and its mournful ghost, disembodied, seeking new embodiment, pipes again in the winds;—a ghost and spirit as yet, but heralding new Spirit-worlds, and better Dynasties than ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... mistaken; And then to be ashamed of such mistaking; His own internal ghost began to awaken Within him, and to quell his corporal quaking— Hinting that Soul and Body on the whole Were odds against a disembodied Soul. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... fifty years had been forecast in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must call the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew at once ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... by the arrival of the winter—a wild time in that region, fierce storm alternating with the calm of death. After howling nights, in which it seemed as if all the polter-geister of the universe must be out on a disembodied lark, the mountains stood there in the morning solemn still, each with his white turban of snow unrumpled on his head, in the profoundest silence of blue air, as if he had never in his life passed a more thoughtful, peaceful time than the very last night of all. To such ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that ran through me at the thought. "And when you once see our happy country, you could no more be persuaded to return to America than a disembodied spirit could be persuaded ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... the desire to achieve, yet from the depths of his soul came only emptiness. Vague, purposeless aspirations, like disembodied spirits, haunted him by night and by day. Before his inner vision came unfamiliar scenes, detached fragments of conversation, the atmosphere, the feeling of an old romance, then, by a swift change, darkness from which there seemed no ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... the kind of reason which he would most likely have had for the regret; and, upon the whole, it is my opinion, that Wallace actually saw the visions, and that the legend originated in the fact. I do not mean to imply that Fawdon became present, embodied or disembodied, whatever may have been the case with his spectre. I only say that what the legend reports Wallace to have seen, was actually in the hero's eyes. The remainder of the question ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... wasn't, just as he knew that she was a girl of education and refinement. A tantalizing thing to meet a disembodied voice like that, a low laugh, a mystery! The lady might have a face like a dried prune! (Only he knew that she hadn't!) Voices were not to be relied upon. Take that "hello-girl," for instance; she had had the softest lilting voice over the wire, then when he got a look at her she ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dead long enough, when I've been good long enough, perhaps. You know even in a disembodied spirit hope dies hard. Yes—I ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... recognise. It was a small tablet fixed in the wall. He went up to it, and found it intimated that James Montgomery the poet had been born there. Was it not almost as if one of the poets or philosophers of a former time had lighted, on revisiting the earth as a disembodied spirit, on his own monument? Of scarce less interest is his anecdote of Monboddo. The parents of the poet had gone abroad, as we have said, and their little boy was left with the Brethren at Fulneck, a Moravian settlement in the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... the Creed, in the Resurrection of the Flesh. The Bible teaches us to believe, that we, each of us, as human beings, men and women, shall have our share in that glorious day; not merely as ghosts, disembodied spirits (of which the Bible, thanks be to God, says little or nothing), but as real live human beings, with new bodies of our own, on a new earth, under a new heaven. Therefore, says David, my flesh shall rest in hope; ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... features that Aristotle was right when he discerned beauty in order and proportion; while another declared that he found there the evidence of Plato's doctrine of the identity of the good and the beautiful—for this face was so lovely because it was the mirror of a soul which had been disembodied in the plenitude of maiden purity and virtue, unjarred by any discord; and this gave rise to a vehement discussion as to the essential nature of beauty and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... very confused ideas about the local habitation of the disembodied spirit, after its former tenement has been laid in the grave. They seem, from the language of their funeral songs, sometimes to regard the departed spirit as residing in the coffin which holds the body from which it has been severed, sometimes to imagine that it ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... neither visible, nor tangible, nor portable, nor transferable. It is not a substance, nor a liquid, nor a vapour. It has neither colour nor form. Imagination can't conceive it. It can't be imitated or forged. It is confined to no clime or country, but is ubiquitous. It is disembodied when completed, but is instantly reproduced, and so is immortal. It is as old as the creation, and yet is as young and fresh as ever. It prexisted, still exists, and always will exist. It pervades all natur. The breeze as it passes kisses the rose, and the ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... brought him and the sharpest particles of a birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd Girl's suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... brink, Summons from the murky sink Many a disembodied ghost; And Peisander reached the coast To raise the spirit that he lost; With conviction strange and new, A gawky camel which he slew, Like ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon
... some people might say that a disembodied spirit had got your uncle to educate and prepare a little body for it. Now it's got into that little body and is off ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... though indeed at present it seems to me to be removed, that although men knew that the bodies of the dead had been burned, yet they conceived such things to be done in the infernal regions as could not be executed or imagined without a body; for they could not conceive how disembodied souls could exist; and, therefore, they looked out for some shape or figure. This was the origin of all that account of the dead in Homer. This was the idea that caused my friend Appius to frame his Necromancy; and this is how there got about that idea of the lake ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... received as to the existence of disembodied spirits is sufficient for others is very uncertain; but if it suffices for himself, it is not for us to quibble. Wallace agrees to allow us to have our opinions if we will let ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the delight and the fatigue of it, are felt exactly like bodily impressions; they have the same directness, although not the same localization. Their seat is not open to our daily observation, and therefore we leave them disembodied, and fancy they are peculiarly spiritual and intimate to the soul. Or we try to think that they flow by some logical necessity from the essences of objects simultaneously in our mind. We involve ourselves in endless perplexities in trying to deduce excellence and ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... ghosts; otherwise their introduction would not be a square deal. It would not be fair, in other words, to propose a conundrum on a basis of ostensible materialism, and then, when no other key would fit, to palm off a disembodied spirit on us. Tell me beforehand that your scenario is to include both worlds, and I have no objection to make; I simply attune my mind to the more extensive scope. But I rebel at an unheralded ghostland, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... by the material universe. He told Ellen that they must move to some place where they might hope to find more diamonds, and Ellen agreed—wishing with Paulett that the strife were over and the last agony suffered, and that they were among the free and disembodied spirits. London was their object; for there they might hope to find most of the materials of what was now the most precious of all things, water; and providing as well as they could for their necessities by the way, they quitted the cavern, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... closing lip—pausing with straining ears on every tread. With up-pressing feet she glided by the door within which Mr. Pyecroft lay in untroubled sleep, then started by the room that homed Jack and Mary, creeping with the footsteps of a disembodied spirit, fearful every second lest some door might spring open ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... machine, not the maid) with both hands, and peremptorily demands to be informed why I "don't jump on that fake called Spiritualism." O I don't know, unless it's because more corporeal things than spooks continue to jump on me. It seems a waste of energy to criticize disembodied spirits who do no worse than "revisit the pale glimpses of the moon." I have never heard of a ghost robbing other than its own grave. They are not addicted to despoiling widows and orphans, then putting up long-winded prayers. They do not sing "Jesus lover of my soul" ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... good many days. He became a convinced spiritualist, not enthusiastically—that could hardly have been expected from him—but in a grim, unshakable way. He could not be called exactly friendly to the disembodied inhabitants of our globe, as Captain Johns was. But he was now a firm, ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... each remember feeling a lazy wonder they should always be full, though I did nothing but empty them,—and at last solved the phenomenon by concluding I had become a kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sentence, had been reversed: then suddenly I felt as if I were disembodied,—a distant spectator of my own performances, and of the feast at which my person remained seated. The voices of my host, of the "Rector, of the Chief Justice, became thin and low, as though they reached me through a whispering tube; and when I rose to speak, it was ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... that there is something amiss in the processes of that part or member. As long as the whole economy of the frame goes on well and without interruption, our attention is not called to it. The intellectual man is like a disembodied spirit. ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... slumbering river has a dream- picture in its bosom. Which, after all, was the most real,—the picture, or the original?—the objects palpable to our grosser senses, or their apotheosis in the stream beneath? Surely the disembodied images stand in closer relation to the soul. But both the original and the reflection had here an ideal charm; and, had it been a thought more wild, I could have fancied that this river had strayed forth out of the rich ...
— The Old Manse (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is killing me! And there is no escape. If I took my life my disembodied ghost would follow her, less able to make itself felt than now! I cannot live without her, and she is not for me—not ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... happy faith, that the disembodied spirits of those whom we have loved and respected here are still, though invisible, watching over us with tender solicitude. Such a realization must be chastening in its influence, for who would do an unworthy deed, believing his every act visible to those eyes that he had delighted to please on ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray |
