"Environment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which Prussianism or militarism is here used it denotes a mental attitude or view. It is a condition of mind which is partisan, exaggerated and egotistical, and is developed by environment and training. Just as the professional spirit in any other occupation leads to an exhibition of exaggerated importance, the despotic doctrine of militarism assumes superiority over rational motives and deliberations. Everything ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... further enriched by the coming of the Hon. Samuel Budd, lawyer and budding statesman. As a recreation, the Hon. Sam was an anthropologist: he knew the mountaineers from Virginia to Alabama and they were his pet illustrations of his pet theories of the effect of a mountain environment on human life and character. Hale took a great fancy to him from the first moment he saw his smooth, ageless, kindly face, surmounted by a huge pair of spectacles that were hooked behind two large ears, above which his pale yellow hair, parted in the middle, was drawn back with plaster-like ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... before the end of the next century. The hegemony of the English-speaking nations seems likely to be within attainment by that one of them which appears destined to become far the most powerful of all in numbers, in wealth, and in security of environment. Time may show to our successors in this world some effective method of establishing agreements amounting to that solidarity for English-speaking action which has been acclaimed as existent for English-speaking thinking by a mind so eminently reasonable ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... forceful woman. She had power. It was in her lean, high-shouldered, ungraceful figure. It was in her thin, mobile lips and her high-bridged nose with its thin, clean-cut nostrils. She impressed herself upon her environment. Standing there at the mantel, her hands clasped behind her, she was so caught up by the possibilities of the future that she succeeded in imparting to the grey envelope ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... accurately delineated single steps in the growth of the soul. They have shown how the process of the soul's awakening may be, and often has been, hastened. It may be hindered by false ideals and a vicious environment, and it may be hastened by lofty ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... public order are alarmed by every chance comer whose power lies in his making a great outcry and respecting nothing. It insures the reign of transitory passion, the triumph of the inferior will. I compare these two educations—one, the exaltation of the environment, the other of the individual; one the absolutism of tradition, the other the tyranny of the new—and I find them equally baneful. But the most disastrous of all is the combination of the two, which produces ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... Mr. Baring-Gould's well-known 'Old Country Life,' describes the life and environment ...
— The Wallypug in London • G. E. Farrow
... Mephistophetes changes into a trio when he enters to urge Faust to depart. Meanwhile, Marguerite's neighbors gather in the street and warn Dame Martha of the misdeeds of Marguerite. The next scene seems to have been devised only to give an environment to Berlioz's paraphrase of Goethe's immortal song at the spinning-wheel. From the distance is heard the fading song of the students and the last echo of drums and trumpets sounding the retreat. Marguerite rushes to the window, ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... a habit," Calhoun told him severely. "You should taper off. Remember, when anything in your environment becomes a normal part of your environment, it becomes a necessity. Coffee should be a luxury, to be savored as such, instead of something you expect and resent being ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the sweets of choosing your own friends, and snubbing the others. You have gone so far towards the attainment of the harmonious environment, the Perfect Relation. Your friends shall be as carefully selected, shall mean as much to you as your books and flowers and pictures; and your leisure shall be a priest's garden, in which none but ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... liable to forget that the end of the War has not brought an end either to the work of the Y.W.C.A. or to the claim which that work has upon our recognition. There is pressing need of accommodation and protection and healthy environment for the large army of girls who have been demobilized and are now engaged in, or seeking for, civilian employment. The funds of the Y.W.C.A. do not admit of the establishment and maintenance of sufficient hostels for this good purpose. At the moment a chance is offered to them ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... breathe too, you know," he said. "They breathe, they eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to their environment as men and animals do. They have a nervous system too... at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of nerve cells. They may have memory too. Certainly, they know definite action in response to stimulus. And though this may be physiological, ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... of French absolutism than to the peculiar customs of parliamentary government in England. Unlike their father, who had been most upright in private life and most loyal to the Anglican Church, both Charles and James had acquired from their foreign environment at once a taste for vicious living and a strong attachment to the Roman Catholic Church. In these two Stuarts Catholicism was combined with absolutism; and the Englishmen represented in Parliament were therefore brought face to face not only with a ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... selection" is a misnomer, as Darwin himself perceived. It means merely survival. "Selection" proper involves intention, and belongs to human reason. Selection by man we call artificial. Natural selection is the outcome of certain physical facts: 1. Environment: the complex of forces, such as soil, climate, food, and competitors. 2. Heredity: the tendency in offspring to follow the type of the parent. 3. Variation: the tendency to diverge from that type. 4. Over-population: ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... gotter do at six o'clock is roll off and turn to!" Well, that is just what he would get at sea. In most steamers the engineer walks out of the mess-room, bathroom, or berth, into an alley-way on either side of the engine platform. The beat of the engines becomes part of his environment. He sleeps with it pulsing in his ears, so that if she slows or stops he opens his eyes. When I go up at four o'clock and call the Second Engineer, he will stretch, yawn, half open one eye, and mutter, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... but a part of the great high road which leads from Silverhampton to Studley and Slipton and the other towns of the Black Country; but it calls itself Sedgehill High Street as it passes through the place, and so identifies itself with its environment, after the manner of caterpillars and polar bears and other similarly wise and adaptable beings. At the point where this road adopts the pseudonym of the High Street, close by Sedgehill Church, a lane branches off from it at right angles, and runs down a steep slope until it comes ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... Every man has a creed, but in his soul he knows that that creed has another side, possibly not less logical, which it does not suit him to produce. Our most honest convictions are not the children of pure reason, but of temperament, environment, necessity, and interest. Most of us take sides in life and forget the one we reject. But our conscience tells us it is there, and we can on occasion state it with a fairness and fulness which proves that ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... education—feeling set aside—she would have answered without hesitation that it would be utterly impossible. Yet so it was. She could not decide. She could not place him. She could not imagine what his parentage, what his youth, his manhood had been. She could not fancy him in any environment—save that golden light, that blue radiance, in which she had first consciously and fully met him face to face. She could not hear him in converse with any set of men or women, or invent, in her mind, what he might be likely to say to them. She could not ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... they are not important as giving us knowledge of the time of perception, cognition, or association, except in so far as we discover the relations of these various processes and the conditions under which they occur most satisfactorily. To determine how this or that factor in the environment influences the activities of the nervous system, and in what way system may be adjusted to system or part-process to whole, is the task of ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... you have the two men combined in one man. Ivery was the best brain Macgillivray and I ever encountered, the most cunning and patient and long-sighted. Combine him with the other, the chameleon who can blend himself with his environment, and has as many personalities as there are types and traits on the earth. What kind of enemy is that to have ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... that I had taken humanity as it ran, good, bad and indifferent, instead of choosing children from the most discouraging homes. I thought, of course, that they were going to be little villains. They ought to be, if there is anything either in heredity or environment, but just look at them at this moment—a favorable moment, I grant you—but just look at them! Forty pretty-near-angels, that's ...
— The Girl and the Kingdom - Learning to Teach • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... with the utmost clearness he had over and over again repeated. Now the only difference between such naturalists and their successors of the present day is, that the latter have grown up in a Darwinian environment, and so, as already remarked, have more or less thoughtlessly adopted some form of Darwinian creed. But this scientific creed is not a whit less dogmatic and intolerant than was the more theological one which it has supplanted; and while it usually ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... shall indulge in no theorisings whatever, but stick to the facts, facts which can now be ascertained with certainty. My endeavour will be to tell a plain, unvarnished tale of what Wagner did and of what he suffered, of the environment amidst which he grew up and laboured and struggled: with all that he said and wrote I shall deal as briefly as may be, regarding his endless loquacity of mouth and pen as of interest only when it throws real light on the artist. ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the moment of its being liberated. The phenomenon of marked change which he describes in the upper currents is highly interesting, and tallies with what the writer has frequently experienced over London proper. Such higher currents may be due to natural environment, and to conditions necessarily prevailing over so vast and varied a city, and they may be able to play an all-important part in the dispersal of London smoke or fog. This point will be touched on later. In this particular voyage Green records that as he was rising ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... medical knowledge, medical need, and medical ethics in the 18th century permitted patent medicines to fit quite comfortably into the environment. As to what actually caused diseases, man knew little more than had the ancient Greeks. There were many theories, however, and the speculations of the learned often sound as quaint in retrospect as do the cocky assertions of the quack bills. Pamphlet warfare among physicians ...
— Old English Patent Medicines in America • George B. Griffenhagen
... far as its ultimate purpose is the utilisation of non-human things. The coercive utilisation of man by man is not felt to be an industrial function; but all effort directed to enhance human life by taking advantage of the non-human environment is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man's "power over nature" is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial productivity. This industrial power ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... experience are familiar through current European memoirs. Silvio Pellico has made the life of an Austrian prisoner-of-state, in its outward environment and inward struggles, as well known as that of the Arctic explorer or the English factory-operative. A confirmatory supplement to this dark chapter in the history of modern civilization has recently appeared from the pen of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by the active operation of his own intellect and not as the passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what he really needs most is ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... Environment: mostly uninhabitable; katabatic (gravity) winds blow coastward from the high interior; frequent blizzards form near the foot of the plateau; cyclonic storms form over the ocean and move clockwise around the coast; during summer more solar radiation reaches the surface at the South Pole ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... associations in that calm realm of business activity, where so much of the brain-work of vast industrial enterprises was conducted as noiselessly as the movements of one of those powerful machines that run in an oil bath. I do not say that she would not have been superior to her home environment without her fortunate associations down-town. I give the business small credit, for our superior jewels are intrinsically precious before the artisan gives the polish by which we more often make our comparisons. But there can be no question that she worked among associations ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... environment he found himself with the "Tuebingen doctors" and the "Wuertemberg divines," his letters reveal. On the publication of the "Prodromus," Hafenreffer wrote to warn him:—"God forbid you should endeavor to bring your hypothesis openly into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... stumbling into a half-broken English language, because, I think, of the atmosphere and environment, "long before you were born, or your father, or grandfather, or even his father, this strange thing happened. It is a story for women to hear, to remember. Women are the future mothers of the tribe, and we of the Pacific Coast hold such in high regard, in great reverence. The women ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... years of his life in the study of disagreeable animals, that he might prove the adaptability of organism to environment. How much pleasanter and briefer had been his task, if he had begun his studies at once with the creature whose long history has been one unbroken succession of ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... frequently sees, an idea be unacceptable because of having been presented before those belonging to a particular environment, common sense, by applying its laws, will recognize that the point of view must be changed before the ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... makes them of purpose. Then purpose is shown by the obvious usefulness of things: men from the beginning have had the benefit of senses suited to their environment—eyes to see what is visible, ears to hear what is audible. Smells are of use because we have noses; things that we eat are sweet or bitter or agreeable in the mouth, because we have palates. Then again the eye is a delicate organ, but is fitted with an eyelid to keep ...
— The Prayer Book Explained • Percival Jackson
... tutor, and his groom, and the heavy social responsibilities that bored him so heartily. With the honesty of a naturally brilliant mind cultivated by hard experience, and much solitary reading, she was quite ready to admit that her marriage had placed her in a new and confusing environment; she wanted only to adapt herself, to learn the strange laws by which it was controlled. And she would naturally have turned quite simply ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... Madigans to fill those lieutenancies without which the spectacular features of his production must be a failure—this last as a matter of course. For there were many Madigans, and those of them that were not leaders by instinct had developed leadership through force of environment, a natural desire to bully others being not the least important by-product of being bullied. Besides, the reputation they had of being talented the professor knew to be almost as efficacious in lending ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... usual ancient idea that in the creation of human life, man is the important factor. The child is his fruit, he is the soul. The spirit the vital spark. The woman merely the earth that warms and nourishes the seed, the earthly environment. This unscientific idea still holds among people ignorant of physiology and psychology. This notion chimes in with the popular view of woman's secondary place in the world, and so is accepted as law and gospel. The word "beget" applied only to men in Scripture is additional ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... half mile. That night was dark and stormy, with rain at intervals, and as we sat in this room, reading, the three of us—" The Judge paused and gazed a moment at the faces in the lamplight, at the chairs where his guests sat. It was as if he called back to their old environment for a moment the two familiar figures which had belonged here, which had gone out of his life. "We sat in this room, the three of us," he repeated, "and the butler ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... was. The land no longer was. The Arangi certainly was, along with the life that cluttered her deck. And he proceeded to get acquainted with what was—in short, to know and to adjust himself to his new environment. ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... undertakes to do more than sketch his environment in the blurred large method corresponding to ordinary passing impressions—is the rhetorical sublime of this mountain lake ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... Environment - current issues: pollution of coastal waters from sewage outlets, especially in tourist-related areas such as Kotor; air pollution around Belgrade and other industrial cities; water pollution from industrial wastes dumped into the Sava ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... You see the Russians recently came out with a wonder drug, a sort of gene stimulator, that they claim produces highly intelligent and well-proportioned children. The Chinese now claim that, by using a controlled environment in their communes, they are producing a super race. We had to do something! Our side is going to claim that the union of a red-blooded American male and a modern capitalist female will produce offspring far superior to anything else in the ...
— Mother America • Sam McClatchie
... Norse Sea-king, Columbus, my hero, royalest Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment this of thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee, mutinous, discouraged souls; behind thee, disgrace and ruin; before thee, the unpenetrated veil of Night. Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... want to do it just because I am not strong enough to resist the world and my fleshly desires. I must be in an absolutely pure environment and lead an abstemious life, only then will I remain good. I have tried it for three weeks. But then I fell ill and was nursed and petted by kind hands and then Satan again had me ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... outcome. There are those, of course, who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, "'Tis all barren"; but the ordinarily intelligent traveller may find much to delight and interest on the banks of the Rhine, always provided that he suits his mood to his environment, and takes but little of Rhine scenery at a time. For surely between Coblentz and Bingen there is an iteration as regards castles and ruins which is downright wearisome. Do we not between these points find Lahneck, Marksburg, Sterrenberg, Liebenstein, The Mouse, Rheinfels, The Cat, Schoenburg, ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... failure of character when the sinner, like Horace, sees and applauds the higher while he follows the lower. But when, on the other hand, one has made allowances—and can our human allowance be as generous as God's?—for the sins which are the inevitable product of early environment, for the sins which are due to hereditary and inborn taint, and to the sins which are due to clear physical causes, then the total of active sin is greatly reduced. Could one, for example, imagine ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... neared the barriers, however, and was gradually recalled to the harsh realities of her daily environment, these fleeting dreams had disappeared with the rest, leaving the old, fixed feelings of hopelessness and sullen combativeness. With this revival came the pain from the still recent blows of ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... sunshine. Stacpoole thoroughly enjoyed his new surroundings, which he associated with the description of Malvern Hills in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857): "Keepers of Piers Plowman's visions / Through the sunshine and the snow." This environment encouraged his interest ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... for a space ere he can go to sleep again. In that candid hour, after the exaltation of the evening and before the hope of the dawn, he will see everything in its true colours—except himself. There is nothing like a sleepless couch for a clear vision of one's environment. He will see all his wife's faults and the hopelessness of trying to cure them. He will momentarily see, though with less sharpness of outline, his own faults. He will probably decide that the anxieties of children outweigh the joys connected ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... which we cannot measure or describe. The psychic world is the final world, though its towers and pinnacles no eye hath seen. If we try to shut out for an hour the outer world, and descend into the soul-world of the life of man, we find ourselves in a new environment, and with an outlook over new forms and powers. We find ourselves in a world of images and attractions, of impulses and desires, of instincts and attainments. It is not only a world of separate and individual souls, but each soul is as a thousand; for within each man there is an inner host contending ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... where the greatest good could be accomplished." A careful reading of the accounts of his healings, in the light of modern science, shows that he observed, in his practice of mental therapeutics, the conditions of environment and harmonious influence that are essential to success. In the case of Jairus' daughter they are fully set forth. He kept the unbelievers away, "put them all out," and permitting only the father and mother, with his closest friends and followers, Peter, James, and ...
— Pulpit and Press • Mary Baker Eddy
... environment, which the sun's rays vainly attempted to penetrate, began to have a depressing effect on my spirits. After a couple of nights spent thus, a longing for sunshine came over me and I decided to stay one ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... on the certainty that faults cannot be atoned for, or blotted out, but must always have their consequences. At the same time, there is the other certainty that through progressive evolution, by slow adaptation to the conditions of environment they may be transformed. Only when this stage is reached will education begin to be a science and art. We will then give up all belief in the miraculous effects of sudden interference; we shall act in the psychological sphere in accordance with the principle of the ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... many of the peasants of the Black Belt; barely able to support themselves, often plundered with more or less of legality by landlord and storekeeper, shut up to heavy, dull, almost hopeless lives. Inheritance weighs on them as well as environment; when these plantations were recruited from Virginia, it was only the worst of the slaves whom their masters would sell, and the bad elements propagated their like. The case of these people to-day presents one of the open sores, the unanswered questions,—we might say the impossible ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... people or over things. These are the trades, and—less distinctive in their outward aspects, at least—the professions. It is not odd that a fishing village or a mining camp should take on a certain character unique to itself, but surely one would not expect a lawyer to impress on his environment a stamp so unmistakable that one could say, observing it from without, "In this building lawyers plot." Superficially there would be said to be scant difference between a lawyer and a broker or a real estate dealer or an insurance man. Yet in New York City, where communities of these professions ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... Adolph and his sister Friederike Wagner. This extraordinarily interesting man, whose influence afterwards became ever more stimulating to me, now for the first time brought himself and his singular environment into ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... certain period in his life, came under the influence of Pericles and his contemporaries, but it is clear from his writings that he received from Attic thought and style little definite inspiration. J. P. Mahaffy has likened him to Goldsmith in his aloofness from his environment. Often ridiculed by his friends for simplicity, Goldsmith far exceeded his clever critics in directness and pathos, and thus gained a place in literature which contemporaries never dreamed would be his. The narrative of Herodotus, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... men there was a large element of Puritanism. Many of the most severe Calvinistic doctrines held sway in Newman's home life, and even if the atmosphere was a little less thickly charged with religious thunderclouds in the early environment of Martineau, yet certainly, from all accounts, Sunday was pre-eminently a day that "hid its real meaning and brightness behind a frowning face." I cannot help quoting here a story which a little reveals ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... attempted in his great work to classify man, as Buffon has classified animals, and to show that his varieties of character, like the differences of form in the lower creation, come from environment. The three great divisions of the Comedie Humaine are "Etudes de Moeurs," "Etudes Philosophiques," and "Etudes Analytiques"; and the "Etudes de Moeurs" comprise many subdivisions, each of which, ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... one knew this better than Omega, for the sun shone on with undiminished power. Yet the rotation of the earth had slackened until twenty-five hours constituted a day, while the year was 379 days and a fraction in length. Man, gradually adjusting himself to the new conditions and environment, had triumphed even in the face of a losing fight. For he had learned to smile into the hollow sockets of death, to laugh at ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... in life that lies too deep for any mere change of environment to touch. Sammy remembered a lesson the shepherd had given her: gentle spirit may express itself in the rude words of illiteracy; it is not therefore rude. Ruffianism may speak the language of learning ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... the background in politics, society, and letters on which the life of Dryden was laid during the last half of the seventeenth century. There were conditions in his environment which materially modified his life and affected his literary form, and without a knowledge of these conditions no study of the man or his works can be effective or satisfactory. Dryden was preminently a ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... to find Odal before the sun set. Find him and kill him. Those were the terms of the duel. He fingered the stubby cylinderical stat-wind in his tunic pocket. That was the weapon he had chosen, his weapon, his own invention. And this was the environment he had picked: his city, busy, noisy, crowded, the metropolis Dulaq had known and ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... newcomer in Albemarle. He had bought a thousand acres, with an idea of grafting on to Southern environment his own ideas of luxurious living. The county families had not called, but he was not yet aware of his social isolation. He was rich, and most of the county families were poor—from his point of view the odds were in his favor—and it was never hard to get guests. He could always motor up to ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... Historical Background. Literary Environment. The National Spirit in Prose and Verse. The Knickerbocker School. Halleck, Drake, Willis and Paulding. Southern Writers. Simms, Kennedy, Wilde and Wirt. Various New England Writers. First Literature of the West. Major Writers of the Period. Irving. Bryant. Cooper. Poe. ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... it an ultimate that all the philosophies of the world have signally failed to explain. It is something that grows, increases or decreases, expands, becomes confused, according to the conditions of bodily organ and function, heredity, environment, personal effort and the like; but so far as we know, it is the same thing, large or small, wise or foolish. It is still, measure for measure, ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... standard which should fairly represent at least all the common types of association and which should show the extent of such variation as might be due to differences in sex, temperament, education, and environment, we have applied the test to over ...
— A Study of Association in Insanity • Grace Helen Kent
... luring her on, a young choir soprano leaves the little village where she was born and the limited audience of St. Jude's to train for the opera in New York. She leaves love behind her and meets love more ardent but not more sincere in her new environment. How she works, how she studies, how ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... is the Master power that moulds and makes, And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills, Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:— He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: Environment ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... stood on the pavement, gazing after the car as it moved off. She had not her brother's simplicity nor his optimism. Her married years had taken her away from the environment which had enabled him to live his busy, uncomplicated life; where, the only medical man in a growing community, he had learned to form his own sturdy decisions and then to abide ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lingering late in town—if the few nebulous, unorganised, and scattered social groups could be called society—small coteries drawn temporarily together through accident of environment, inherited family acquaintance, traditional, material, or religious interest, and sometimes by ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... ruler who has the divine gift of sympathy, and serve him with devotion. Macaulay has branded them with cowardice. If the charge were true, it was surely illogical and unmanly to reproach a community numbering 50,000,000 for inherited defects. Difference of environment and social customs will account for the superior virility of Europeans as compared with their distant kinsmen whose lot is cast in the sweltering tropics. But no one who has observed Bengali schoolboys standing up bare-legged to fast bowling will question their bravery. In fact, the instinct ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... up to mischief, and she had begun to fear—sacrilegious though she felt it to be to harbor such a suspicion—that there was man enough, weak, vain, susceptible man enough, in Victor Dorn to make Jane a danger. The more she had thought about Jane and her environment, the clearer it had become that there could be no permanent and deep sincerity in Jane's aspirations after emancipation from her class. It was simply the old, old story of a woman of the upper class becoming infatuated with a man of a genuine kind of manhood rarely found ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... such radiance upon this hideous environment that the scene of her industry had seemed to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... cloisters, one end of which was closed by the chapel. To Sommers the cheap factory finish of the chapel and the ostentatious display of ritualism were alike distasteful. The crude fervors of the boy priests were strangely out of harmony with the environment. But Alves, to whom the place was full of associations, liked the services. As they entered the cloisters, a tiny bell was jangling, and the students were hurrying into the chapel, their long cassocks ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... modern realists lies in the fact that they have studied the things which surround us and our relations to them, and thus have they been able to make their creations conform to human experience. The ancients gave little attention to this; the man, with them, was the important thing; the environment the unimportant. There are, of course, exceptions; the interview between Ulysses and Nausiskaa is probably the most striking. From the standpoint of environment, Petronius, in the greater portion of his work, is an ancient; but one exception there is, and it is as brilliant as it ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... had persisted in being an exception to the influences of both heredity and environment. Though his father and both grandfathers were officers who believed theirs to be the true gentleman's profession, he had preferred any kind of mechanical toy to arranging the most gayly painted tin soldiers in formation on the nursery floor; ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... contented herself with an indiscriminate affection for their very creditable bodies. Lady Isabel had—if the saying may be reversed—"les qualites de ses defauts," and these latter could have no environment less critical and more congenial than that in which it had pleased her mother to place her. It was right and fitting that the wife of the reigning Talbot-Lowry of Mount Music, should inevitably lead the way ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Jim Campbell's prescription is taking effect, I guess. He said the change of air and environment would do me good. I tell you, Hephzy, I have made up my mind to enjoy life while I can. I realize as well as you do that the trouble is bound to come, but I'm not going to let it trouble me beforehand. And I advise you to ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... fitted to arouse tenderness. Add virtue and sound principle to Sukey's other attractions, and she would have made a wife good enough for a king—too good, far too good. For the lack of those qualities she was not to blame, since they spring from heredity or environment. Sukey's parents were good, honest folk, but wholly unfitted to bring up a daughter. Sukey at fourteen was quite mature, and gave evidence of beauty so marked as to attract men twice her age, who "kept company" with her, as ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... was a trifle different; one would have said of him that he was of the world, worldly, albeit there was that in his attire which attested a certain fellowship with the organisms of his environment. His coat would hardly have passed muster in San Francisco; his foot-gear was not of urban origin, and the hat that lay by him on the floor (he was the only one uncovered) was such that if one had considered it as an article of mere personal ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... difficulties and dangers of exploration, and how they were overcome by earnestness and perseverance; the risks and hardships of settlement, and how they were met and conquered; the independence and patriotism of the colonists, and how they triumphed; the effect of environment upon character; the development of the people in politics and government and in social life; and the progress of invention and its effect ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, "Go and sin no more," because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment. Considered as a figure, therefore, the materialist has the fantastic outline of the ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... valley of the Seine. Then came Franks through the gap of Belfort and over the hills by Nancy, down to the Marne and the Aube; Celts and Flemings from the north, and Norsemen from the west, all met and mingled with the native Gauls and eventually became Parisians. Environment acted its part, and so did the forces of Nature. The soil of the basin of Paris is fruitful, the climate equable, but neither encourage idlers; both demand a toll of strenuous labour, yet not so trying to man's strength as to leave him exhausted at the ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... Civilisation in England," in connection with that of Europe, tried it, but failed; visited the East for his health, and died at Damascus; his theory as regards the development of civilisation is, that national character depends on material environment, and that progress depends upon the emancipation of rationality, an extremely imperfect reading and rendering of the elements at work, and indeed a total omission of nearly all the more vital ones; he was ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... than relieved by the successes, both diplomatic and military, which were compressed within that narrow strip of time. Let us try, by a glance at the chief items in the record of that year, to bring before our eyes the historic environment amid which the governor of Virginia then wrought at his heavy tasks: July 6, 1777, American evacuation of Ticonderoga at the approach of Burgoyne; August 6, defeat of Herkimer by the British under St. Leger; August ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of environment—a tour in Scotland, or abroad—shook him into his old thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the Lyrical Ballads, the poems of 1804, and the Prelude, and the Excursion, Wordsworth's ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... justifiable in reason, and ought not by wit and eloquence to be juggled out of the ingenuous mind. The masses are governed by religion, directly and indirectly, to an extent much greater than at first thought appears. The daily life of the agnostic himself is shaped by his Christian heredity and environment. Now our Author furnishes no substitute for this intuitive demand of being. If reason can supply nothing in place of religion, why not allow those who possess religious conviction to retain so agreeable, and to others beneficial, a belief?—Now right ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... to philosophy, we find the same principle running through them both. The main thing in the philosophy of to-day is the extraordinary emphasis of environment and heredity. A man's destiny is the way the crowd of his ancestors ballot for his life. His soul—if he has a soul—is an atom acted upon by a majority ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Nothing was changed here, either. Strickland was indifferent to his surroundings, and he had lived in the other's studio without thinking of altering a thing. It was deliberately artistic. It represented Stroeve's idea of the proper environment for an artist. There were bits of old brocade on the walls, and the piano was covered with a piece of silk, beautiful and tarnished; in one corner was a copy of the Venus of Milo, and in another ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... faintly as he spoke in a quiet manner, his r s coming off his tongue with a stately roll. His environment and the company had given him a fair degree of stimulation. There was a fine dignity in his deep voice, and his body bristled with it, from his stiff and heavy shock of blonde hair parted carefully on the left side, to his ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... in which the sociological studies could be pursued under conditions more favorable than those to be found in a great city. In his mind's eye he saw himself domiciled in some thriving interior town, working and studying among people who were not unindividualized by an artificial environment. In such a community theory and practice might go hand in hand; he could know and be known; and the money at his command would be vastly more of a moulding and controlling influence than it could possibly be in the smallest of circles in New York. The picture, struck out upon the instant, pleased ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... impressionable period of his life fixed the characteristics of his style as a composer, and we may well suppose that they exercised a decisive influence on his personality and character. His youth had been spent in the respectable middle-class environment of his home at Halle; then came the three years at Hamburg, fantastic and exciting, yet, despite all the artistic stimulus of Keiser's opera-house, inevitably sordid and provincial. Italy introduced him to an entirely different atmosphere—to a life ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... adapt yourself to your environment; I can do so with the men. There are some fine young fellows here; though they are usually at work, except when they are hunting, or swimming or fishing. I believe girls are scarce; at least I know very few. I will bring Duffield and Reid around ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... most complete disaster. So far as Myra went, he recognized that domestic tragedy as a natural consequence. He did not know, he was unable to say if his wife had simply been a weak and shallow woman, left too long alone, thrown too largely on her own resources in an environment so strongly tinctured by the high-pitched and reckless spirit generated by the war. He had always known that his wife—women generally were the same, he supposed—was dominated by emotional urges, rather than cold reason. But that had never struck ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... was of the Valley, content. He meant her to be so always. The man who had instilled into her young mind a discontent with her environment, a longing for the "flesh-pots" of the world as he had styled it once, would have had short shrift at Last's. He would have received his time and "gone ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... is abroad. There you have the material for a tragedy drawn straight from life—and the piece could be called 'The Price They Paid for Empire.' And of course one would have to work in studies of the struggle of hereditary tendency against environment and all that sort of thing. The woman's father could have been an Envoy to some of the smaller German Courts; that's where she'd get her passion for visiting the poor, in spite of the most careful upbringing. C'est le premier pa qui compte, as the cuckoo said when ...
— Reginald • Saki
... abundantly shown in his Golden Bough. This uniformity is not, however, due to necessary uniformity of origin, but to a great extent to the fact that it represents the state of equilibrium arrived at between minds at a certain level and their environment, along lines of thought directed by the momentum given by the traditions of millennia, and the survival in history of the men who carefully regarded them. The apparently unreasoned prohibitions often known as 'taboos,' many of which still ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... Protestant sense of the word, is requisite for salvation. And this denial the Church enforces by her recognition of the "religious state" [2] as an extraordinary vocation. The purpose of "orders" and "congregations" is to provide a suitable environment for people of a religious temperament whose circumstances permit them to attend to its development in a more exclusive and, as it were, professional way. Not, indeed, that all religious-minded persons do, or ought to, enter into that external state of life; nor ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... shown in section, Fig. 17. He is now enclosed in a luminous prison, and his buzzing protests are audible and his vehemence visible from the outside of the sac. Let us suppose that he at length has become reconciled to his condition, and has determined to rationally fulfil the ideal of his environment, as he may perhaps have already done voluntarily before. The buzzing ceases, and our bee is now finding sweet solace for his incarceration in the copious nectar which he finds secreted among the fringy hairs in the upper narrowed portion of the flower, as shown at Fig. 18 ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... rapturously. But after the awakening, everything was changed. Things assumed a hitherto hidden significance. Beauty broke her blossoms everywhere about the grey streets and the sordid interiors that were my environment. ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... of one's environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... into that receptive frame of mind which was normal then. Such an occasion is recorded by Macaulay, when he tells how in some Indian hill station, where books were rare, he let loose a copy of "Clarissa." The effect was what might have been expected. Richardson in a suitable environment went through the community like a mild fever. They lived him, and dreamed him, until the whole episode passed into literary history, never to be forgotten by those who experienced it. It is tuned, for every ear. That beautiful style is so correct and yet ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... astonishment was apt to diminish, the repentance to cease, and the good resolves to vanish away; but resolute purpose had kept Susy at them until in the course of time there was a perceptible improvement in the environment of Cherub Court, and a percentage of souls rescued from the ranks of ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... rich with harvest fields and farmhouses. There are similar landscapes between Fribourg and Vevay, in Switzerland—finer, perhaps, except that all cultivated scenery in Norway gains wonderfully in effect from the savage environment of the barren fjelds. Here, cultivation is somewhat of a phenomenon, and a rich, thickly settled valley strikes one with a certain surprise. The Norwegians have been accused of neglecting agriculture; but I do ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... tied to town in winter by fetters as fine as frostwork filigree, which we could not break without destroying a whole world of endearment. That seems an obscure image; but it means what the Germans would call in English—our winter environment. We are imprisoned in a net of our own weaving—an invisible net; yet we can see it when we choose—just as a bird can see, when he chooses, the wires of his cage, that are invisible in his happiness, as he keeps hopping and fluttering about ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... he urged his jaded pony into a gallop to pass it quickly. Lights gleamed also in the patio and Chinese servants flitted here and there among the crowded tables. He felt a hot surge of resentment as the subdued murmur of masculine voices and jarring laughter floated after him. What an environment for such ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... a breath of coal dust and smoke to choke the lungs. Even the Greek firemen sweated and cursed, though they were used to that environment. An ordinary man might have succumbed simply to that fiery, foul atmosphere. It was like a glimpse of hell, ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... birth of a daughter, Kerstin, in May, brought this tranquillity to a sudden end. Strindberg, who had lived in a state of nervous depression since the 1880's, felt himself put on one side by the child, and felt ill at ease in an environment of, as he put it in the autobiographical The Quarantine Master, 'articles of food, excrements, wet-nurses treated like milch-cows, cooks and decaying vegetables.' He longed for cleanliness and peace, ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... made a friend, and in this new environment where he was conscious of being very much of an outsider the consciousness brought him a sense of ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... military character and rightly apportioning the credit due to his great achievements, much stress must be laid upon the constant effort for professional improvement made by him from his early life. "Without the opportunity and the environment which enabled him to develop himself," writes one who knew him for over forty years, "Farragut might have gone to his rest comparatively unknown; yet among his comrades and contemporaries in the navy he would have been recognized as no ordinary man, no merely ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... often prove that there can be little of dramatic import in environment. Any room can present a tragic front; any room can be comic. This little den was now hideous as a torture-chamber. The new faces of the men themselves had changed it upon the instant. The Swede held a huge fist in front of Johnnie's ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... think of me you will have in mind all those who have left everything behind: their family, their surroundings, their whole social environment; all those of whom their nearest and dearest think only in the past, saying, 'We had once a brother, who, many years ago, withdrew from this world, we know nothing of his fate.' Then I, feeling that you too have abandoned all human attachment, will walk freely in this life, closed ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... downward-spiraling syndrome of failure. They were the kind of men and women who, on Earth in an earlier time, had been able to endure the harshness of the sea, of arctic cold, jungle disease, desert heat; to make those first steps in taming a hostile environment, so that men with less endurance, but with more delicately poised and sensitive minds, ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... ways. Numbers of times I have sought to work out some industrial policy which had succeeded, and could not but have succeeded, in England, Germany, or America, only to meet general failure here because of the unconsidered elements of a different environment, a totally different stage of industrial evolution. Warriors from the beginning and with a record for continuous government unsurpassed by any European country, our political and military achievements ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... thing. It seems it is an easy thing to change one's environment, but not so easy to change one's character. I am just as excited over the ugly business as I should have been had I remained near the boulevards, where I could have got a newspaper half a dozen times a day. I only get one a day, and this morning I got that one with difficulty. My "Figaro," which ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... for some reason of excuse to myself for my liking of him, I hit upon the expedient of regarding him as a modern Robin Hood, whom we are taught to admire without shame, a Robin Hood up to date, adapted to the changed conditions of modern environment; making his living relieving the rich; taking ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... vast majority of people express their developing nature in accordance with the fashion of their environment. If this environmental influence were rationally non-religious, the language would be that of a non-religious philosophy. As, however, supernaturalism, in some form or other, is still a potent force we have a contrary result. It is ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... nourishing medium. Science plainly shows us that this primal nucleus is given, in the human species, by the union of the contents of a sperm cell with those of a germ cell; that this dynamic start is imparted from the life force of the parents; and that this feeding environment is ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... said, with smiling weariness; "it's the unvarnished truth about the average man. Why wink at it? The average man can like a lot of girls enough to spoon and sentimentalise with them. It's the pure accident of circumstance and environment that chooses for him the one he marries. There are myriads of others in the world with whom, under proper circumstances and environment, he'd have been just as happy—often happier. Choice is a mystery, constancy a gamble, discontent the one best bet. It isn't pleasant; ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... ingratitude is met with, you angrily wish to pull down mountains, and resolve to give up doing good, you are no longer a Christian. You injure yourself and accomplish nothing. Can you not be mindful of your environment—that you are still in the world where vice and ingratitude hold sway? that you are, as the phrase goes, with "those who return evil for good"? He who would escape this fact must flee the boundaries of the world. It requires no great wisdom ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... point of view seemed most beneficial. That the methods chosen have been rich in results, it is only necessary to know something of the deep and extensive influence of Hampton, Tuskegee, Normal, and other industrial schools, in directly, or indirectly, improving the environment and daily life of ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... As to the environment in which Florimel found him, it was to her a region of confused and broken colour and form—a kind of chaos out of which beauty was ever ready to start. Pictures stood on easels, leaned against chair backs, glowed from the wall—each ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... selfishness—an unwillingness to give anybody a specimen of my abilities. Let them chatter! Little do they guess—and never will they know—the abilities sitting on this chair! Give them a specimen! Yet I must confess also that my specimen seemed somehow isolated and apart from my environment. It was all right in itself, but it needed a setting; it was like a button without a coat, like an eye without a face, like a ...
— The Perfect Gentleman • Ralph Bergengren
... following pages, will be understood to apply generally to all of the tribes which have been mentioned as inhabiting this region, although, of course, minor differences did exist, principally due to environment. As in the case of all primitive peoples, their mode of life, food supply, etc., were largely determined by natural conditions, and the tribes living in the warm foot-hills differed somewhat in these respects from those dwelling higher ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark
... vehicles which it externalizes as instruments through which to function on the various planes of being, we shall find that we have reached a principle in ourselves which stands in loco dei towards all our vehicles and also towards our environment. It is above them all, and creates them, however unaware we may be of the fact, and relatively to them it occupies the place of first cause. The recognition of this is the discovery of our own relation ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... them but as derivatives from one original. Thus he is led to overlook the great truth that the mind of man is everywhere practically the same, and that the innumerable differences of its products are indices merely of different stages of growth or are the results of different conditions of environment. In its development the human mind is limited by no ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... It is important that the good citizen should know his physical environment; it is just as important for him "to know his social and political environment, to have some appreciation of the nature of the state and society, some sense of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, some ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... some day to come, the taste that justified Gargantua and the Decameron will give this literary refugee shelter and setting among the more conventional writing of Mark Twain. Human taste is a curious thing; delicacy is purely a matter of environment and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain |
