"Disembodied spirit" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... eccentricity, Charley Steele is like a type of lawyer in our West, of an epoch when people were not yet content to witness ideals of themselves, but when they wished to be their poetry rather than to read it. In his second life he has the charm for the imagination that a disembodied spirit might have, if it could be made known to us in the circumstances of another world. He has, indeed, made almost as clean a break with his past as if he had really been drowned in the river. When, after the term of oblivion, in which he knows nothing of his past self, he is restored ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... still conscious of his own identity and his own condition, the knight felt enabled to consider them not only without alarm and sorrow, but as composedly as he might have viewed the story of his misfortunes acted upon a stage—or rather as a disembodied spirit might regard the transactions of its past existence. From this state of repose, amounting almost to apathy respecting the past, his thoughts were carried forward to the future, which, in spite of all that existed to overcloud the ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... dare say that the world is not, even now, entering upon a new era of progress, taking another step in the forward movement? May it not be, that the time is coming when the barrier between the living, and the disembodied spirit is to be broken down? When that viewless essence, that mystery of mysteries, the spirit of life, the immortal soul, shall be permitted to come back from the unknown country, to impart to the people of this world, ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... over the 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
... the impersonal and purely objective nature of his fiction. R. H. Hutton once called him the ghost of New England; and those who love his exquisite, though shadowy, art are impelled to give corporeal substance to this disembodied spirit: to draw him nearer out of his chill aloofness, by associating him with people and places with ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... "test" evidential value, the disembodied spirit supposed to be acting through Home should have caused the registering index to record a change in weight without necessitating, on the spectators' part, constant scrutiny of the medium's movements. But, in point of fact, a change in ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... see everything tonight as a disembodied spirit might see it, aware of what the impeding flesh could only dimly manifest; and she saw now that her husband's face had never been so ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... from what I have said, that this earthly life, when 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 ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... True, by reason of sin and its effects, it is now a "vile body;" and Paul speaks of it as "the body of this death." But, even while we are in this world, a body is an indispensable help to the soul. The disembodied spirit, probably, is not capable of sustaining a full, active relation to a world of matter; a material form is necessary to make its powers serviceable here. This being so, there is certainly reason, from analogy, to suppose that the addition of a spiritual body to the glorified soul will ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... 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 me the ununited spiritual part on glow like an electric light, ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... 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 fifth ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... may be morally sure 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
... 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 sister kingdom. He was one of their ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... was tremulous and faint like the voice of a disembodied spirit floating somewhere in the air. This time he ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... like some disembodied spirit from a long-covered grave, the spectre of the past. An icy chill crept over her. Would Lucy begin this new life with the same deceit with which she had begun the old? And if she did, would this Frenchman forgive her when he learned the facts? If he never learned them—and this was most ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... have answerable simplicity of sentiment and of language. He is unable to utter any particle of the pain which he feels in quitting her; but since the service which living he pays her, draws to an end, he pledges to her in the world whither he is going, the constant love-fealty of his disembodied spirit. He recalls to her, with a word only, the long love-torments he has endured for her, exchanged, in the hour when they should have been crowned with possession, for the pains of death. He heaps endearing names upon her. He glances at the vanity of human wishes imaged ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... wrong. "Young woman, you lie!" retorted Robert "I am in the wrong!" This beloved brother died at the age of twenty-five. During his last illness, Blake attended him with the most affectionate devotion, nor ever left the bedside till he beheld the disembodied spirit leave the frail clay and soar heavenward, clapping ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... here we were at Barnard's Inn. My depression was not alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... of land did that disembodied spirit of the Keeper of Redesdale choose for his own. As might be guessed, he fixed on the banks of the Rede, and he chose that part of it that lies between Todlawhaugh and Pringlehaugh. The fox that barks from the bracken ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... 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 would sit glaring at each other and maintain perfect ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... soul, in the glittering colours of Paradise, all that thou hast lost, and then see thee writhe in despair. Knew I more than I know, can the tongue formed of flesh make intelligible to the ear of flesh what lies beyond the bounds of sense, and the disembodied spirit ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... the piano, her adorer stands there, one moment an exanimate statue, the next a disembodied spirit,—while the listening zephyrs murmur more softly in reverence. In a 'Reproach to Laura' she is taxed with being the ruin of her lover's ambition. Because of her the 'giant has shriveled to a dwarf'. She has 'blown away the mountains', that he had 'rolled up' to the sunny ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... for the work of contemplation. There is need of health and vigour, and the means of maintaining it, food, warmth, interesting objects around you, leisure, absence of distracting care or pain. None would call a man happy upon the rack, except by way of maintaining a thesis. The happiness of a disembodied spirit is of course independent of bodily conditions, but it would appear that there are conditions of environment requisite ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J. |
