"Divination" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with that," she said quietly. "I have asked no favours save this last one for myself,—but it is a greater one than you may think. You know everything now, Kenneth. You have called me Rachel Carter. Was it divination or was it stubborn memory? I wonder. So far as I know, you are the only person left in the world who knows that I was not his wife, the only one who knows that I am still Rachel Carter. No matter what this man Braley may know, or what he may tell, he—But ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... passing it they heard a boy reading from the book of Samuel the words, 'And Samuel died.' Observing this, they concluded that their friend was dead. And it so happened that news was soon brought to them that Rabbi Samuel of Babylon had died." The Bath Kol seems to have been a sort of divination practised with the words of Scripture, like the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... Yamabushi was a Buddhist exorciser, usually a priest. Strictly speaking, the Hoin was a Yamabushi of higher rank. The Yamabushi used to practise divination as well as exorcism. They were forbidden to exercise these professions by the present government; and most of the little temples formerly occupied by them have disappeared or fallen into ruin. But among the peasantry Buddhist exorcisers are still ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the cursory look and plunged again into the unbroken wilderness. Two or three hours later he decided that he was being followed. He had not seen or heard anything, but it was a sort of divination. He sought to throw it aside, telling himself that it was mere foolishness, but he could not do it. The thought stayed with him, and then he knew that it ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Ulidia, that the vessels of mercy might there be gathered together. But Patrick being come forth on the dry land, a multitude of heathens met him who were waiting and expecting his coming; for the magicians and soothsayers, either by divination or by prophecy, had foreknown that the island would be converted by the preaching of Patrick, and had long before predicted his arrival in these words: "One shall arrive here, having his head shaven in a circle, bearing a crooked staff, and his table ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... shadowy face. Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom there was some relentless driving power besides the lust for gold! Cameron felt that between this man and himself there was a subtle affinity, vague and undefined, perhaps born of the divination that here was a desert wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper, an unintelligible relation having its roots back in the past. A long-forgotten sensation stirred in Cameron's breast, one so long forgotten that he could not recognize ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... of a division into several classes or sections: Religious Cults, Necromancy, Magic, Second Sight, Divination, Astrology, Palmistry, of which all have their special literatures and bibliographies. Major Irwin recently sold an extensive series of works on these and kindred topics. Cornelius Agrippa, Ashmole, Bulwer, Lilly, Partridge, Gadbury are among the foremost names of older ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... an old superstition. It used to be supposed that the chance words caught from the mouths of passers-by would solve any doubt on questions to which it might otherwise be impossible to obtain an answer. This was called the yufu-ura, or "evening divination," on account of its being practised in the evening. It has been found impossible in this instance to ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... seems to be upon one's first introduction to it, it was not long before I was able to understand much of what was said to me, and to express myself in a vague roundabout way. In the latter operation I was much assisted by a peculiar faculty of divination which the Russian peasant possesses to a remarkably high degree. If a foreigner succeeds in expressing about one-fourth of an idea, the Russian peasant can generally fill up the remaining three-fourths from his own intuition. This may perhaps be readily understood when one considers that ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... Banneker was far less sanguine; he had come to entertain a considerable respect for Marrineal's capacity. And he had another and more immediate complication on his mind, which fact his companion, by some occult exercise of divination, perceived. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... offset to my anecdotes about our being lost through inability to riddle out our name on the part of the police, I must relate an instance where the post-office displayed remarkable powers of divination. One day I received an official notification from the post-office that there was a misdirected parcel for me from Moscow, lying in the proper office,— would I please to call for it? I called. The address on the parcel was "Madame Argot," ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... have been misunderstood by Church writers as much as by their adversaries, for if Francis was particular not to put himself in the attitude of revolt, he would not compromise his independence, and he felt with an exquisite divination that all the privileges which the court of Rome could heap upon him were worth nothing in comparison with liberty. Alas, he was soon forced to resign himself to these gilded bonds, against which he never ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... of canticles! Pison, in his "Natural History of the East Indies," makes use of the word Vates (divine) to designate these insects, and speaks of that superstition, common to both Christians and heathens, that assigns to them the gifts of prophecy and divination. The habit that the mantis has of first stretching out one fore leg, and then the other, and of preserving such a position for some little time, has also led to the belief among the illiterate that it is in the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... all the Hellenes, if it be truly ye, whom by a king's ruthless command Jason is leading on the ship Argo in quest of the fleece. It is ye truly. Even yet my soul by its divination knows everything. Thanks I render to thee, O king, son of Leto, plunged in bitter affliction though I be. I beseech you by Zeus the god of suppliants, the sternest foe to sinful men, and for the sake of Phoebus and Hera herself, under whose especial ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... Greatest of all was this; when they fell sick Men had no help, no medicine edible, Potion or ointment, but for lack of cure Wasted away and perished, till my skill Taught them to mix the juice of sovran herbs, With which they now ward off all maladies. Of divination many ways I traced, Laid down the rules for telling which of dreams Would be fulfilled, and of foreboding sounds The mystery unfolded. Then I taught What sights are ominous to wayfarers. I showed which of the birds that wing the heavens Were lucky, which ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... person dies, they think that he or she has been killed by the evil magic of some ill-wisher, and one of the first things to be done is to discover the culprit in order that his life may be taken in revenge. For this purpose the Narrinyeri resort to a form of divination. On the first night after the death the nearest relation of the deceased sleeps with his head on the corpse, hoping thus to dream of the sorcerer who has done the mischief. Next day the corpse is placed on a sort of bier supported on men's shoulders. ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... 'As I believe that I see and feel Him.' But I, for my part, think that the intellect has a right to test what the soul only divines, and that it must be a real happiness to see this divination proved by well-founded arguments, and thus transformed to certainty. Did you ever hear of Plato, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Julian, every circumstance contributed to prolong and fortify the illusion; the magnificent temples of Greece and Asia; the works of those artists who had expressed, in painting or in sculpture, the divine conceptions of the poet; the pomp of festivals and sacrifices; the successful arts of divination; the popular traditions of oracles and prodigies; and the ancient practice of two thousand years. The weakness of polytheism was, in some measure, excused by the moderation of its claims; and the devotion of the Pagans was not incompatible with the most licentious ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... a little child before him, and was subsequently a sort of erratic follower of the party unto which Gilgal was allied; but he would at times forsake the assemblies of the faithful, when, it is said, the dark spirit of divination again came over him, and he would wander among the tombs, showing symptoms of a disordered intellect, though not of the same violent ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... Aurora since she had lived in foreign lands had been the so often arising necessity to think quickly what it would be proper to give. As the amount of the gratuity did not much matter to her she had felt a desperate wish often for the power of divination, by which to know what would be expected. On some occasions it had seemed to Aurora that it would be more delicate not to offer money; but experience had taught her that if she offered enough no offense would be taken. These singers were all poor young fellows, Clotilde had told her, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... conversation will seldom be taken in exchange for theirs without a large discount,—and this, by the by, eternally driving him into the hands of more equitable brokers, for such conversation as he can find, it requires no great spirit of divination to ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... over one of the doors, asked her companion, in a giggling tone, if she did not think he looked like a conjurer? Peregrine, nettled into spirits by this reception, answered for the other lady, "that it was an easy matter to be a conjurer in those times, when the simplicity of the age assisted his divination; but were he, or Merlin himself, to rise from the dead now, when such deceit and dissimulation prevail, they would not be able to earn their bread by the profession."—"O! Sir," said she, turning full upon him, "without doubt they would adopt new maxims; 'tis no disparagement in this enlightened ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... all five were seated. In that hour, When near the dawn the swallow her sad lay, Rememb'ring haply ancient grief, renews, And with our minds more wand'rers from the flesh, And less by thought restrain'd are, as 't were, full Of holy divination in their dreams, Then in a vision did I seem to view A golden-feather'd eagle in the sky, With open wings, and hov'ring for descent, And I was in that place, methought, from whence Young Ganymede, from his associates 'reft, Was snatch'd aloft to the high consistory. "Perhaps," thought I within ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... worth the money!" shouted Barto Rizzo, with a splendid divination of his thought. "You skulker! are you not paid and fattened to do business which you've only to remember, and it'll honey your legs in purgatory? You're the shooting-dog of that Greek, and you nose about the bushes for his birds, and who cares if any ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was tinged with the most puerile superstition; the influence of the clergy, and the errors of the people, were consecrated by his laws; and the oracles of Leo, which reveal, in prophetic style, the fates of the empire, are founded on the arts of astrology and divination. If we still inquire the reason of his sage appellation, it can only be replied, that the son of Basil was less ignorant than the greater part of his contemporaries in church and state; that his education had been directed by the learned Photius; and that several books of profane and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... poetical quotation, And master derivation, And the science of translation, And complex pagination, And perfect punctuation, And binomial equation, And accurate computation, And boundless permutation, And infinite gradation, And the craft of divination, And Scripture revelation, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... had determined to assume the cowl. At length, however, came the time at which he felt that leave the world he must. 'It was on the 23d of April 1475,' says Villari; 'he was sitting with his lute and playing a sad melody; his mother, as if moved by a spirit of divination, turned suddenly round to him, and exclaimed mournfully, My son, that is a sign we are soon to part. He roused himself, and continued, but with a trembling hand, to touch the strings of the lute, without raising his eyes from the ground.' This would make a picture: ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Nicholas," she said, regarding him, mournfully. "Listen to it, and judge of its effect on me. Thus it is written in Deuteronomy:—'There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch.' A witch, Nicholas—do you mark the word? And yet more particular is the next verse, wherein it is said;—'Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... so did Renoir; but the former was impartially impressionistic; the latter, ever ravished by a stray shaft of sunshine flecking the faces of the dancers, set it all down in charming tints. Not so Toulouse-Lautrec. Combined with a chronic pessimism, he exhibited a divination of character that, if he had lived and worked hard, might have placed him not far below Degas. He is savant. He has a line that proclaims the master. And unlike Aubrey Beardsley, his affinity to the Japanese never seduced him into the exercise of the decorative abnormal ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... was closed, and especially during the last three hundred years, may enable us to realize the significance of a most remarkable fact. Even in those early ages, when to all the nations surrounding Israel the heavenly bodies were objects for divination or idolatry, the attitude of the sacred writers toward them was perfect in its sanity ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... carried out, has been, I think, the guiding rule of his life. He had modelled himself on Bewsher; he walked like Bewsher; tried to think like Bewsher—that is, in the less important things of life—and, with the divination that marks his type of man, the little money he had, the little money that as a schoolboy he could borrow, he had spent with precision on clothes and other things that brought him personal distinction; in what people call necessities he starved ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... on her quality and, as perhaps might be said, her value from Lord Mark. She wished him, the wonderful lady, to have no pretext for not knowing what he thought of Miss Theale. Why his judgment so mattered remained to be seen; but it was this divination, in any case, that now determined Milly's rejoinder. "No. She knows you. She has probably reason to. And you all, here, know each other—I see that—so far as you know anything. You know what you're used to, and it's your being ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... had no such scruples. She was more like Esther in nature, with a touch of cynicism curling her dainty lip, arising, perhaps, from an early divination that she was to lack Esther's opportunities. Perhaps it was because she was the pessimist—the quite cheerful pessimist—of the family, that she was by far the cleverest and most industrious at the ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... were on the point of sailing away, when an eclipse of the moon, which was then at the full, took place. Most of the Athenians, deeply impressed by this occurrence, now urged the generals to wait; and Nicias, who was somewhat over-addicted to divination and practices of that kind, refused from that moment even to take the question of departure into consideration, until they had waited the thrice nine days prescribed by ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... rites, ceremonies, tricks and pretensions they closely resemble the Dactyli, Id and Curetes of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Magi of the Persians, and the Druids of Britain. Their pretended intercourse with spirits, their powers of magic and divination, and their rites are substantially the same, and point unmistakably to a common origin. The Dakota "Medicine-Man" can do the "rope-trick" of the Hindoo magician to perfection. The teepee used for the Wakan Wacipee—or Sacred Dance—is called the Wakan Teepee— the Sacred Teepee. Carver's ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... often keep the bodies in coffins above ground for several years, until the priests announce that they have discovered a lucky day and a lucky spot for the interment. This does not generally happen until he—the priest—finds he can extract no more money by divination, and that no more funeral feasts will be given by the friends. We passed through what they call the city of the dead, where thousands of coffins waiting for interment were lying above ground. The coffins are large and massive, but very plain, ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... other important matter, the natives used to have recourse to divination by means of little miniature darts made of rushes or reeds, or often of the leaf ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... twenty-four hours," repeated Galeotti firmly, "if there be one sparkle of true divination in those bright and mysterious intelligences, which speak, each on their courses, though without a tongue. I wish your ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Evadne's eye. She winked at me, acknowledging thereby that she had divulged the General's secret. But by what feminine process of divination had she guessed it? Charles came ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... leaped with joy. But the joy was short-lived. No such hope in this world for Bent Wade! This coincidence, however, left him with a strange, prophetic sense in his soul of a tragedy coming to White Slides Ranch. Wade possessed some power of divination, some strange gift to pierce the veil of the future. But he could not exercise this power at will; it came involuntarily, like a messenger of trouble in the dark night. Moreover, he had never yet been able to draw away from the fascination of this knowledge. It lured him on. Always his decision ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... to pass, I know not;* but by ancient and modern example it is evident, that no great accident befalls a city or province, but it is presaged by divination, or prodigy, or astrology, or some way or other. I shall here set down a ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... eyes inspired Joan with a flashing, reviving divination. Back upon her flooded all that tide of woman's subtle incalculable power to allure, to charge, to hold. Swiftly she went close to Kells. She stretched out her hands. One was bleeding from rough contract with the log wall during the struggle. Her wrists were red, swollen, bruised from ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... reason why he should move till the stranger had passed by. The shape resolved itself into a woman's; she was looking on the ground, and walking slowly as if searching for something that had been lost, her course being precisely that of Mr. Melbury's gig. Fitzpiers by a sort of divination jumped to the idea that the figure was Grace's; her nearer approach made the guess ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... begun which has had far reaching consequences. Paul and his company had been but a short time in the city when they came in conflict with the Roman authorities. A damsel, possessed with a spirit of divination, who brought much gain to her masters, testified to Paul and his work; this spirit Paul cast out and in consequence the owners of the girl brought the charge against Paul and Silas that they were Jews who taught customs not lawful for Romans to receive. Notice, the shrewdness ...
— Bible Studies in the Life of Paul - Historical and Constructive • Henry T. Sell
... exhausted) of a penny a piece; especially since they are sure of some proper amusement, and that it is impossible for me to want means to entertain them, having, besides the helps of my own parts, the power of divination, and that I can, by casting a figure, tell you all that will happen before it comes ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... represented himself for the time being, for he claimed the power, as God, to know and reveal the future. This explanation accounts for the fact that the witches always spoke of such animals as the Devil and believed that they could foretell the future by his means. The actual method of divination is not preserved; all that remains of the ceremony are the words and gestures which were used before the appearance of the animal, and these only in few cases. The method was probably such as obtained in other places where auguries by animals and ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... falls, like a pale prophetess, Under the swoon of holy divination: And what had all surpass'd her simple guess, She now resolves in this dark revelation; Death's very mystery,—oblivious death;— Long sleep,—deep night, and an ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... Cleopatra or Bilouche. These two animals caught Gazonal's eye in 1845, when in company with De Lora and Bixiou he visited the fortune-teller's. The Southerner, however, asked only a five-franc divination, while in the same year Mme. Cibot, who came to consult her on an important matter, had to pay a hundred francs. According to Bixiou, "a third of the lorettes, a fourth of the statesmen and a half of the artists" consulted Mme. Fontaine. She was ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... not care whether the region they propose to search has been scientifically tested and thought to contain gold. They adhere to the miner's adage, "Gold is where you find it"; and they seem to have some occult power of divination for they have uncovered fabulous fortunes in regions which, like Cripple Creek, had been declared "barren of gold." Yet, as the old settlers say, "Prospectors never get anything out of their finds." Having struck it rich, they take to the trail again, to search ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... any blame to myself for not foreseeing the misprints which our author pleads, because they must have baffled far higher powers of divination than mine. Thus I found [124:2] the author stating that the fourth Evangelist 'only once distinguishes John the Baptist by the appellation [Greek: ho baptistes],' [124:3] whereas, as a matter of fact, he never does so; and comparing ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... divest our patients of nerves, I fancy you have no further need of me than to recommend you not to allow your imagination to take too wide a field." Valentine colored. M. d'Avrigny carried the science of divination almost to a miraculous extent, for he was one of the physicians who always work upon the body through the mind. "No," she replied, "it is for my poor grandmother. You know the calamity that has happened to ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The Maya codices are made up, for the most part, of the records of the sacred period of two hundred and sixty days, a period called in Nahuatl, tonalamatl, and other numerical calculations. The tonalamatl was used for purposes of divination in order to find out whether good or bad fortune was in store for an individual. It is not necessary at this place to go into the different means taken to record this period of time or its methods of use. It may be well, however, to explain the usual distribution of the pictures ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... of the most ancient, is much less advanced than that of the hieroglyphs. When documents in the old language, or at least written in the primitive ideographic characters, are attacked, the process is one of divination rather than of translation in the ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... limits of liberty in a girls' school, and it was manifestly infeasible, as well as very chilly, to attempt to stray out alone at the stroke of twelve, robed merely in a nightgown, and fetch three pails of water to place by one's bedside. Gowan's north country recipe for divination was equally impracticable—to go out at midnight, and "dip your smock in a south-running spring where the lairds' lands meet," then hang it to dry before the fire. They discussed it quite seriously, however, in all ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... the Ozarks, where once she had traveled—true, against her will, but yet through scenes which she now remembered. And always there came up in her mind a question which she found no way to ask. It was Jeanne herself who, either by divination or by ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... decrees and wisdom is to gratify the passions of the flesh at the expense of the spirit. The prophets and those who have stood nearest the fountain of universal knowledge used dreams with more frequency than any other mode of divination. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... believe, and pardonable in the belief, that the Irish and their priesthood were rather prone to be irreverent; but observe, under this exterior, the deep sources of feeling that lie hidden and wait but the wand of divination to be revealed. In a thousand similar ways are the actions and the motives of the Irish understood by those who are careless of them; or worse, misrepresented by those whose interest, and too often business, ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... to yield to her desire for rest. The word, however, was to strike him as strangely misapplied, for from the day of their arrival she was in state of perpetual activity. She seemed to have mastered her Paris by divination, and between the hounds of the Boulevards and the Place Vendome she moved at ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... bow myself to this goddess Night,—holy, pure, running her course during this the northern journey of the sun,[1] let my desire be fulfilled." Saying this, she, in a purified condition of body and soul, worshipped the goddess Night. And in the name of her chastity and truth she had recourse to divination.[2] And she asked, "Show me the place where the king of the gods is. Let truth be verified by truth." And it was thus that she addressed the goddess ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... supposed, and has been conquered by implements and weapons very different in precision and power from what they purposed to rely on. But the combination of patient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius, in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle to impeach ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... chariots, under awnings of purple or of yellow silk. Then came the brehons, the great judges of the land, and the chief bards of the high court of Tara, and the Druids, crowned with oak leaves, and carrying wands of divination ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... a few points in this case upon which Camille wished he could bring to bear those purely intellectual—not magical—powers of divination which he modestly told his clients were the secret of all his sagacious advice. He wished he could determine conclusively and exactly what was the mutual relation of Attalie and her lodger. Out of the minutest corner of one eye he ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... had procured one that would suit me, and by which I should not be obliged to quit her. I exhausted all my conjectures in guessing what this occupation could be, but I must have possessed the art of divination to have hit it on the right. I had money sufficient to make my journey agreeable: Mademoiselle du Chatelet persuaded me to hire a horse, but this I could not consent to, and I was certainly right, for ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... if you mention it to me I'm afraid you WILL mention it to him. You always do speak of things that you have on your mind, and you might get papa all stirred up again about—" Alice paused, a light of divination flickering in her eyes. "Oh!" she cried. ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... banished. He recanted in a work called Querelae, and by the intercession of his friends, above all, of Cicero, obtained pardon from Caesar. Caecina was regarded as an important authority on the Etruscan system of divination (Etrusca Disciplina), which he endeavoured to place on a scientific footing by harmonizing its theories with the doctrines of the Stoics. Considerable fragments of his work (dealing with lightning) are to be found in Seneca (Naturales ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... longer I live the more I am impressed with the importance of manners. When we reflect upon their persuasive and cheering force, how they recommend, prepare and draw people together; when we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high and inspiring character they convey and what divination is required of us for the reading of this fine telegraphy, we see what ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... which probably accounts for the fact that his literary output has been small. But the same power of analysis and attention to detail have been most effective in his political activities. In these his divination has been prophetic and in his manipulation of contending elements he shows a dexterity that has baffled even ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... with scarce a pause by the "Lewa," a kind of festal revel, in which the dancers move inwards and outwards as they circle round; and this in turn yields place to the "Bondogaya" and two religious figures, the "Damali" and "Chinughi," which are said when properly performed to give men the power of divination. ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... and said: 'Eurymachus, surely the day of my father's returning hath gone by. Therefore no more do I put faith in tidings, whencesoever they may come, neither have I regard unto any divination, whereof my mother may inquire at the lips of a diviner, when she hath bidden him to the hall. But as for that man, he is a friend of my house from Taphos, and he avows him to be Mentes, son of wise Anchialus, and he hath lordship among the ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... was obviously possessed by the idea that numerous premonitions had been vouchsafed to him; and what chiefly moved in him a desire to visit Scotland was, not its scenery, its lakes, its mountains, or its people, but a wish to inquire into the (as he supposed) natural faculty of divination. The dream may be of Jove[19]—Homer is a sound heathen authority upon this point; but Talleyrand was no dreamer. His "presentiments" (for so he loved to call them), were, apparently, sudden intuitions, which he was wholly ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... Syria Hadad is hardly to be distinguished from a solar deity. The process of assimilation did not proceed so far in Babylonia and Assyria, but Shamash and Adad became in combination the gods of oracles and of divination in general. Whether the will of the gods is determined through the inspection of the liver of the sacrificial animal, through observing the action of oil bubbles in a basin of water or through the observation of the movements of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Midian would appeal for aid to the God of their enemies instead of to their own divinity, for in those days the principal business of a deity was to wage war in behalf of his worshipers. Balaam was a Midianite, and Balak sent messengers to him "with the reward of divination in their hand," and begged that he would kindly come over and knock the Israelites off the Christmas tree with one of his smooth-bore, muzzle-loading maledictions; "for," said he, with a pious fervor that proves ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... to the foot of the terrace, sweetly repeats her wish to adopt the little boy, when Butterfly, emerging from the inner room, comes to look for her long lost husband, whose presence she feels with the divination ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Thomas—as well as the two others—seemed to possess the power of divination. And during the whole of the dinner his manner showed distinct apprehension. The meal concluded, even to the use of the finger-bowl, and all dishes disposed upon the tray, he hung about, puttering with the table, picking up crumbs and pins, dusting ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates
... that have scarcely yet died out in Scotland. As she told of tricks she had often played, of the apple eaten facing a mirror, of the dripping sheet, of the basins of water, of the nuts burning side by side, and many other such innocent ways of divination, by which laughing, trembling English maidens sought to see the form of their future husbands, if husbands they were to have, then Faith listened breathlessly, asking short, eager questions, as if some ray of hope had entered into her gloomy heart. Lois went on speaking, telling her of all ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... kind of genius, and has developed an art form for expressing goodness in words, is necessarily an exceptional man. And it is unreasonable and unfair in the public to expect a man to get up in the pulpit and, with no costume and no accessories, merely with a kind of shrewd holiness or divination into human nature, present goodness so that we seem to be there. It is small wonder that a man who finds he is expected to be a kind of combination of biograph, brother, spiritual detective, and angel all in one, in order to do his work successfully has days ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... comedie) of an old, rambling, wainscoted, out-of-the-way English country-house, in the age of Goldsmith. Here Mr. Abbey is in his element—given up equally to unerring observation and still more infallible divination. The whole place, and the figures that come and go in it, live again, with their individual look, their peculiarities, their special signs and oddities. The spirit of the dramatist has passed completely into ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... she lamented and wept for. Be that as it may, the next morning she conjured Caesar not to go out that day if he could possibly avoid it, but to adjourn the senate; and, if he had no regard to her dreams, to have recourse to some other species of divination, or to sacrifices, for information as to his fate. This gave him some suspicion and alarm; for he had never known before, in Calpurnia, anything of the weakness or superstition of her sex, though she ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair front. Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination. At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself—too late, like the chaste Susanne,—the prey of the delighted lorgnette of an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who becomes criminal gratis. On the other hand, a handsome ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... either from or through him, Thou conveyedst to me, and tracedst in my memory, what I might hereafter examine for myself. But at that time neither he, nor my dearest Nebridius, a youth singularly good and of a holy fear, who derided the whole body of divination, could persuade me to cast it aside, the authority of the authors swaying me yet more, and as yet I had found no certain proof (such as I sought) whereby it might without all doubt appear, that what had been truly foretold by those consulted was the result of haphazard, ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... now ceased, and the attention of the company was riveted upon Flint and his neighbor. Winifred felt herself growing intensely nervous. She had no fear of Miss Wabash's extraordinary power of divination, but she had still less confidence in the delicacy of her perceptions, and she dreaded some remark which would embarrass her through ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... not lived in the family five years when she triumphantly declared that she had heard, or rather overheard, sufficient to enable her to say what had been the former fate of her associates. Could Katy have possessed enough of divination to pronounce upon their future lot, her task would have been accomplished. From the private conversations of the parent and child, she learned that a fire had reduced them from competence to poverty, and at the same time diminished the number of their family to two. There was ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... very little doubt that amongst the various tricks of ancient divination ventriloquism found a place; but I cannot give that direct evidence which MR. SANSOM asks for. I think it very likely that "the wizards that peep and mutter" (Isa. viii. 19.) were of this class; but it is not clear that the [Hebrew: 'obot]—the [Greek eggastrimuthoi] ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 45, Saturday, September 7, 1850 • Various
... permitted that I send for my priests, who tell by divination, having burnt strange herbs to the gods ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... it is actually impossible. It is almost incredible that men who are themselves working philosophers should pretend that any philosophy can be, or ever has been, constructed without the help of personal preference, belief, or divination. How have they succeeded in so stultifying their sense for the living facts of human nature as not to perceive that every philosopher, or man of science either, whose initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought, has ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Chinese music is still found. However deficient his knowledge of the art, his passion for music was extraordinary. After hearing a fine performance "he was unable for [Page 92] three months to enjoy his food." A fifth task was the editing of the Yih-King,[*] the book of divination compiled by Wen-wang. How thoroughly he believed in it is apparent from his saying, "Should it please Heaven to grant me five or ten years to study this book, I would not be in danger of falling into great errors." He meant that he would then be ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... be observed in little folks at a very early age. With some children they are not very pronounced, and the child seems like hundreds of others without any particular inclination, artistic or otherwise. It is then that the teacher's powers of divination should be brought into play. Before any real progress can be made the nature of the child must be studied carefully. In the case of other children, the individuality is very marked at an early age. As a rule, the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... reality which they do not possess, and misconceives the nature of socialism, which is exclusively critical. M. Blanc, therefore, has given us the spectacle of a vivid imagination ready to confront an impossibility; he has believed in the divination of genius; but he must have perceived that science does not improvise itself, and that, be one's name Adolphe Boyer, Louis Blanc, or J. J. Rousseau, provided there is nothing in experience, there is nothing ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... Joe took up is one of the oldest—perhaps the oldest—form of alleged human divination, and has been called "mirror-gazing," "crystal-gazing," "crystal vision," and the like. Its practice dates back certainly three thousand years, having been noted in all ages, and among nations uncivilized ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... bear it—to admit that she stood alone, and must judge for herself. What possible bliss or reward could there ever be for her but just this: to be allowed to watch and suffer with Oliver—to bring him the invention, the patience, the healing divination of love? And if it were not to be hers, then what remained was to go down into the arena, where all that is ugliest and most piteous in life bleeds and gasps, and throw herself blindly into the fight. Perhaps some heavenly voice might ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... which are naturally, but Conjectures upon the Experience of time past; and supernaturall, divine Revelation; the same authors of the Religion of the Gentiles, partly upon pretended Experience, partly upon pretended Revelation, have added innumerable other superstitious wayes of Divination; and made men believe they should find their fortunes, sometimes in the ambiguous or senslesse answers of the priests at Delphi, Delos, Ammon, and other famous Oracles; which answers, were made ambiguous by designe, to own the event both wayes; or absurd by the intoxicating ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... only look at the practical side of divination, it seems absurd to imagine that events in a man's past life and secrets known only to himself can be represented on the spur of the moment by a pack of cards which he shuffles and cuts for the fortune-teller to lay out in piles according ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... or power of divination might indeed have given me a passing glimpse of the things which lay beyond, through the portals of that day, for I answered him ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... been implanted in Polly, enabling her to pierce straight through John's self-sufficiency or Ned's vapourings, to the real kernel of goodness that no doubt lay hid below. He himself could not get at it; but then his powers of divination were the exact opposite of Polly's. He was always struck by the weak or ridiculous side of a person, and had to dig laboriously down to the virtues. While his young wife, by a kind of genius, saw the good at a glance—and saw ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... that the worshipful Laird of Ellangowan was not so preceese as he might have been in clearing his land of witches (concerning whom it is said, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live"), nor of those who had familiar spirits, and consulted with divination, and sorcery, and lots, which is the fashion with the Egyptians, as they ca' themsells, and other unhappy bodies, in this our country. And the Laird was three years married without having a family; and he was sae left to himsell, that it was thought he held ower muckle troking and communing ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... feet high upon the face of the rocks of Behistun; and though the alphabets and the languages in which these long inscriptions were "graven with a pen of iron and lead upon the rocks for ever," had been long dead and unknown, yet, by a kind of philological divination, Archaeology has exorcised and resuscitated both; and from these dumb stones, and from the analogous inscriptions of Van, Elwend, Persepolis, etc., it has evoked official gazettes and royal contemporaneous annals of the deeds and dominions of Darius, Xerxes, and ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... of the latter, while Ashurbanipal is a great example of the magic-ridden kings. Hammurabi apparently strove to put down magic. The eternal struggle between the "science" (falsely so-called) of magic and divination on the one hand and the higher claims of religious duty on the other, is the key to much that is misunderstood in the politics of the time. It would be too much to say that the priestly party were always on the side of morality, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, Contracts and Letters • C. H. W. Johns
... the steps beneath the shadowing archway, Leigh caught a reflected glow of enthusiasm from his guide's prophetic gaze. He was stirred by an appreciation of the dream so grandly conceived, so imperfectly realized, by a divination of the long struggle ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... professed disciples. The latter confesses, in a well-known passage, that "Ivanhoe" was the inspirer of his "Conquete d'Angleterre," and styles the novelist "le plus grand maitre qu'il y ait jamais eu en fait de divination historique." [45] ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Lord George's stables, which, if he could have laid claim to the powers of divination would have kept him still "Lord Paramount of the Turf." They were the yearlings Surplice and Loadstone, and both were destined to make historic names ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... forms had been close and dancing about him for a time not measurable merely by the hours of a single night, that in a sense they were always there though he had but just discovered them. His earlier glimpses had been a very partial divination of a truth, immense and beautiful, that now dawned quite ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... young and good looking, a dainty morsel that should please the taste of the officiating doctors, and her owner and uncle was a man of no importance: so accordingly he had made known the sin of her name through the divination. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle |
