"Fetish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in this country, when a boy or girl went to an institution of higher learning for only one reason: to get an education. And now! Stadia and bowls instead of laboratories and classrooms. Physical perfection has become a fetish and ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... the black negroid type, their varieties being only imperfectly known. The tendency of some of the lower negroid types has been to drift towards the west coast, where they still practise cannibalistic and fetish rites. On the east coast are found much higher types approaching to the Christian races of Abyssinia, and from east to west there has been a wide admixture of Arab blood producing a light-brown type. In Uganda ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... "The fetish-men know how to exorcise him, and afterwards go to the huts and say that Mzimu is angry; so the negroes bring them bananas, honey, pombe (beer made of sorghum plant), eggs, and meat in ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... because he was not like myself. There was a girl in the town who was beautiful; many asked for her as their wife, but her father had long promised her to my friend; he refused even the greatest warrior of the place, who went away in wrath to the fetish-man, and throwing him his gold armlets asked for a fetish against his rival. It was given, and two days before he was to be married my friend died. His mother came to me, and it was enough. I put on my war dress, I seized my weapons, sat for a whole day with ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat
... tropics,—the native land of the hammock,—not only the mysteries of the night, but the affairs of the day may be legitimately investigated from this aerial point of view. It is a fetish of belief in hot countries that every unacclimatized white man must, sooner or later, succumb to that sacred custom, the siesta. In the cool of the day he may work vigorously, but this hour of rest is indispensable. To a healthful person, living a reasonable life, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... town, and let no slave-takers come near them, so my fader go there, and we live there, and work and grow rich, and many more people come, and we not fear any of our enemies. All the people were heathens, and prayed to the fetish. ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... motion. Ptolemy's efforts at exactness were baulked, as we have seen, by the supposed necessity of all the orbit planes passing through the earth, and if Copernicus had simply transferred this responsibility to the sun he would have done better. But he would not sacrifice the old fetish, and so, the orbit of the earth being clearly not circular with respect to the sun, he made all his planetary planes pass through the centre of the earth's orbit, instead of through the sun, thus handicapping himself in ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... doubt uncomfortable—for the Old 'Un and his pals. THAT'S EXACTLY WHY WE LIKE IT! What's the use of hitting above the belt only when the foe's only vulnerable below it? We rejoice to see the B.B. knocking the sawdust out of the Grand Old Fistic Fetish, and squelching the cant and claptrap out ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 7, 1891 • Various
... words, that Socialist friendship for these classes has gone to the point of risking the existence of their organization. Surely their presence is a guarantee that Socialists have not been ruled by the working class or proletarian "fetish," against which Marx warned them more than half ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the cult. Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, thought it be only a memorial spoon, is holy and is eagerly and passionately and gratefully bought by the disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house. I say bought, for the Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it has for sale. And the terms are cash; and not cash only but cash in advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar. Not a spiritual Dollar, but a real one. From end to end of the Christian-Science ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of grub, twenty pounds of blankets, ten of tent, say eight or ten of hardware including the axe, about twenty of duffel. This was further increased by the idiosyncrasy of Billy. He, like most woodsmen, was wedded to a single utterly foolish article of personal belonging, which he worshipped as a fetish, and without which he was unhappy. In his case it was a huge winter overcoat that must have weighed fifteen pounds. The total amounted to about one hundred and ninety pounds. We gave Dick twenty, I took seventy-six, and Billy ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... story. As Faulkner put it, Anderson's "was the fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity ... to seek always to penetrate to thought's uttermost end." And in many younger writers who may not even be aware of the Anderson influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... language, his horsemanship, his daring and resource in scout work, had stood him in good stead. Paul—who scarcely knew him at the time—very soon discovered that he had secured an asset for the Regiment—the great Fetish, that claimed his paramount allegiance, and began to look ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... first rank of antiquarians. To-day, well-off, owning this shop, "The Mercury," you attribute the success of your undertakings to that clasp. To lose it would to your eyes spell bankruptcy and poverty. Your whole life has been centred upon it. It is your fetish. It is the little household god who watches over you and guides your steps. It is there, somewhere, hidden in this jungle; and no one of course would ever have suspected anything—for I repeat, you are decent people, ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... hastened to the convent, an interminable procession of devotees hungering after hope, who rubbed medals, chaplets, pictures, and missals against the dead woman's dress, to obtain from her one more favour, a fetish bringing happiness. Even in death her dream of solitude was denied her: a mob of the wretched ones of this world rushed to the spot, drinking in illusion around her coffin. And it was noticed that ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... century, the ages roll on, polytheism comes back under the disguise of Mariolatry and the adoration of saints; image-worship becomes as rampant as in old Egypt; adoration of relics takes the place of the old fetish-worship; the virtues of the ephod pale before those of holy coats and handkerchiefs; shrines and calvaries make up for the loss of the ark and of the high places; and even the lustral fluid of paganism is ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... throughout that we are dealing with the Atlantean race only, so that any reference would be out of place that bore on the still more degraded fetish-worship that even then existed—as it still does—amongst the debased ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... that without us—if," I said. "You must remember we've made him a fetish with our rank and file. And he's something of a fetish with the country, now that he's President. No, we can't destroy him—can't even injure him. He'll have to do that ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... irrefragable laws? "Supply and demand"—sacrosanct enactments of man's brains—how shall they prevail over the clear dictates of the conscience that thunder in our ears that it is murderous to grind the life out of the poor in the name of an economical fetish? Is not the man more than the meat, and the body more than the raiment? How shall not man, then, be better than many economical laws? If the laws outrage our sense of justice, then are they false laws, because false to reason, and ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... most imperfect and degraded, has something that ought to be sacred to us, for there is in all religions a secret yearning after the true, though unknown, God. Whether we see the Papua squatting in dumb meditation before his fetish, or whether we listen to Firdusi exclaiming: 'The heighth and the depth of the whole world have their centre in Thee, O my God! I do not know Thee what Thou art: but I know that Thou art what Thou alone canst be,'—we ought to feel that the place whereon ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... notices, as if this were perhaps rather a Secular Sect, and not a Religious one; nevertheless, to the psychologic eye its devotional and even sacrificial character plainly enough reveals itself. Whether it belongs to the class of Fetish-worships, or of Hero-worships or Polytheisms, or to what other class, may in the present state of our intelligence remain undecided (schweben). A certain touch of Manicheism, not indeed in the Gnostic shape, is discernible enough; also (for human Error walks in ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... white or potato color or something," said Lathrop, to whom Harry confided his expectation, "this red thatch of mine is a nuisance. At school I was always Brick-top or Red-Head and out here the natives all look at my carrot-colored top-knot as if they'd like to scalp me and keep it for a fetish." ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... rather, what convention would have been more apt if it had not been lost sight of as a convention and come to be regarded as an idea in actual correspondence with a more or less knowable reality? A convention was converted into a fetish, and now that its worthlessness as a fetish is being generally felt, its great value as a hieroglyph or convention is in danger of being lost sight of. No doubt the psalmist was seeking for Sir William Grove's conception, if haply he might feel after it and find it, and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 299: Pruning this sentence of its magniloquence, might it perhaps mean that there was a large palisaded village, and that the chief had some books in Roman characters, a relic of some castaway, which he kept as a fetish?] ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... unproductive; while the imagination is unfettered but also unfed. First and last, these shepherd folk receive from the immense monotony of their environment the impression of unity.[1182] Therefore all of them, upon outgrowing their primitive fetish and nature worship, gravitate inevitably into monotheism. Their religion is in accord with their whole mental make-up; it is a growth, a natural efflorescence. Therefore it is strong. Its tenets form the warp of all their ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... are going. I saw one die just now; a young woman. She was talking to another woman and seemed quite well, only tired, till suddenly she said in a loud voice, 'I am going to die, that I may come back as a spirit and bewitch these devils till they are spirits too.' Then she called upon the fetish of her tribe, put her hands to her breast and fell down dead. At least," added Hans, spitting reflectively, "she did not fall quite down because the slave-stick held her head off the ground. The Arabs were very angry, both because she had cursed them and was ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... nature and easily deduced. How strange that among all this large number of politicians and scholars, who are as numerous as the trees in the forest and the perch in the stream, should have failed for all these years to notice these simple points; and now suddenly make a fetish of them because they have come out of the mouth of a foreigner. Is it because no one except a foreign doctor can discover such facts? Why even a humble learner like myself, though not so learned even to the extent of one ten-thousandth ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... his comfort, and paid him for the privilege of living on stony mountain or barren bog. The idea of their having any rights struck him as positively ludicrous. There was but one thing that had rights, and that was the fetish, property. Every attempt, therefore, to lift the people from that condition of serfdom he regarded as absolutely treasonable; and he was my chief opponent in any futile attempts I made to introduce some improvements into the wretched place. And of course he was hated. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... teaching. Usually the soloist who has not made a success as a concert artist takes up teaching as a last resort, without enthusiasm or the true vocational instinct. The false standards he sets up for his pupils are a natural result of his own ineffectual worship of the fetish of virtuosity—those of the musical mountebank of a hundred years ago. Of course such false prophets of the virtuose have nothing in common with such high-priests of public utterance as Ysaye, Kreisler and others, whose virtuosity is a true means for the higher ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, "was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... primrose yellow is a sign of the highest and most unselfish use of intellectual power, the pure reason directed to spiritual ends. The different shades of blue all indicate religious feeling, and range through all hues from the dark brown-blue of selfish devotion, or the pallid grey-blue of fetish-worship tinged with fear, up to the rich deep clear colour of heartfelt adoration, and the beautiful pale azure of that highest form which implies self-renunciation and union with the divine; the devotional thought of an unselfish heart is very lovely in colour, like the deep blue of a summer ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... The dethronement of a fetish may give a sounder faith its chance. In the time of decay and disintegration which lies before us, more persons will seek consolation where it can be found. 'Happiness and unhappiness,' says Spinoza, 'depend ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... caller. The emotional stability and the will to persevere even at considerable cost, which marked youth, are gone. At forty-five her life is objectlessly spasmodic, the old family-habit of talking of self and the family-fetish of discussing sickness have honeycombed her character and made her hopelessly tiresome. And her feeling-life is as ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... gain, and that the mere name of Empire wearied and sickened them. On these grounds they stood to save England; on these grounds they were elected, with what seemed like clear orders to destroy the blood-stained fetish of Empire as soon as possible. The present mellow condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa is proof of their honesty and obedience. Over and above this, their mere presence in office produced all along ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... wouldn't care to get a punch on the nose from him. Fine arms, but legs no good below the knee. Couldn't make cavalry men of them." And after glancing down complacently at his own shanks, he always concluded: "Pah! Don't they stink! You, Makola! Take that herd over to the fetish" (the storehouse was in every station called the fetish, perhaps because of the spirit of civilization it contained) "and give them up some of the rubbish you keep there. I'd rather see it full of bone than ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... "Fetish," he observed quietly, "the warrior appealing to his oracle of Delphi like a savage to his moon. Passing ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... existence of fetish "herbs" is denied by Mr. Max Muller, he does not, of course, forget Soma, that divine juice. It is also to be noted that in modern India, as Mr. Max Muller himself observes, Sir Alfred Lyall finds that "the husbandman prays to his plough and the fisher to his net," these ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... prospect. To him these trees and lawns were not the work of God. They were property, at so much an acre. He loved money, Miss Innes. He offered up everything to his golden calf. Not power, not ambition, was his fetish: it was money." Then he dropped his pulpit manner, and, turning to me with his engaging smile: "In spite of all this luxury," he said, "the country people here have a saying that Mr. Paul Armstrong could sit on a dollar and see all around it. Unlike the summer people, he gave neither ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... bigotry and lust for wealth were enacted. In Peru the Spaniards found a splendid civilisation among the strange races of the Incas, a condition of order which many modern states might envy, a religion absolutely free from fetish worship, and a standard of morality which has never been surpassed. But they ruthlessly destroyed it all, desecrated the temples where the sun was worshipped only as a visible representative of a God "of whom nothing could be known save by His works," as their tenet ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... occasion of great public fetes, of sacrifices to the fetish and to the divinities of the sea. All the temples were thrown open for these solemnities, the prayers of the nation were offered there, and at the last moment, when the ship set sail, fifteen prisoners of war were executed ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... to consider the teacher, the school, the pupil, the home. The teacher is likely to be conservative; to have fallen into ruts; to be joined to his idols; to make the text-book a fetish; to teach a particular book rather than the subject, so that the initiative in works of cooeperation must ...
— A Library Primer • John Cotton Dana
... melancholy? The seat of melancholy is the liver. Imagine a city with a liver—of brick and mortar, or stone and cement, a huge mass of masonry buried in its centre, like an enormous fetish, exercising a mysterious influence over the city's health—then you may imagine a city as suffering ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... night when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs. Lockhart It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang just the old things, ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish [Footnote: Fetish (also spelt "fetich"): a material object, venerated by certain African tribes; a sort of idol, which is sometimes punished by its owner in disappointment or anger.] which she punished for all her misfortunes. ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... supposed victim.[44] "Death, in the opinion of the natives, is never due to a natural cause. It is always the result either of a crime or of sorcery, and is followed by the poison ordeal, which has to be undergone by an innocent person whom the fetish-man ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and the seed less scattered, the principal churches are all beautiful. And yet I went into the Annunziata the other day and sat there for half-an-hour because, forsooth, the gildings and the marbles and the frescoed dome and the great rococo shrine near the door, with its little black jewelled fetish, reminded me so poignantly of Rome. Such is the city properly styled eternal— since it is eternal, at least, as regards the consciousness of the individual. One loves it in its sophistications—though for that matter isn't it all rich and ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... only the prosperity of a class. Yet such is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press, and of the avenues and highways of public influence, do not find it at all difficult ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... is the benefit of society at large," Miss Ogle explained; "and our obstacles so far have been, in chief, the fetish of proprietary rights and the ubiquity ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... and superstitious, fostered, we may believe, by the peace they were enjoying and their relief from a foreign sovereignty, as well as by their formal observance of the institutions which the Book prescribed. What had been founded to rally and to guide a spiritual faith they turned into a fetish and even to an "indulgence" for their wickedness. The House, in which Isaiah had bent beneath the seraphs' adoration of the Divine Holiness, and, confessing his own and his people's sin, had received from its altar the sacrament of pardon and of cleansing, was by this ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... minds. The difference is that while one may talk only with his contemporaries and neighbours one may read the words of a writer far distant both in time and space. It is no wonder, perhaps, that the printed word has become a fetish, but fetishes of any kind are not in accordance with the spirit of the age, and their veneration should be discouraged. Reading in which the contact of minds is of secondary importance, or even cuts no figure at all, is meaningless ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... whose primary consideration is the child and who sees in the child the object and focus of all her activities, never makes a fetish of the book. It has its use, to be sure, but it is subordinate in the scheme of education. It is not a necessity, but a mere convenience. She could dispense with it entirely and not do violence to the child's interests. No book is large enough to compass all that she teaches, for ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... seen that the NGARONG may assume the form of some curious natural object, or of some one animal distinguished from its fellows by some slight peculiarity, which receives the attentions of some one man only. In such cases the NGARONG is hardly distinguishable from a fetish. In other cases the man, being unable to distinguish the particular animal which he believes to be animated by his NGARONG, extends his regard and gratitude to the whole species. In such a case it seems difficult to deny the name "individual totem" to ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... his image," said the man in black; "better reject his words than his image: no religion can exist long which rejects a good bodily image. Why, the very negro barbarians of High Barbary could give you a lesson on that point; they have their fetish images, to which they look for help in their afflictions; they have likewise a ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... the full public avowal of this principle, but he was driven to the wall and was forced to own it or lie. He boldly gave his position, and declared that marriage was a fetish, and that its basis on a union for life without regard to the feelings of the parties was a fountain of corruption, and was the source of the monopolistic instincts that now cursed ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... easy matter, and I waited a long time in a big canoe, manned by twenty paddlers kneeling forward, before the old negro in the stern decided the attempt to be possible. He never stopped invoking every fetish under the sun, and sprinkling the sea out of a brandy bottle, keeping his eye the while on the waves as they came rolling in. Then all at once he gave a great shout, loudly responded to by the twenty paddlers, who yelled in cadence, while ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... citation the exercise of a charity that is unquestionably born of fetish-worship, which, whether it be obeah generally, or restricted to a mere human skin, can be so powerful an agent in the formation and retention of beliefs. Hence we see that our philosopher relies here, in the domain ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... different systems of physic, the representatives of the various priesthoods, but in their too credulous—or shall we say, too faithful patients? —the representatives of all sects. There is, for example, the superstitious vulgar in medicine,—the gross worshipper of the Fetish, who believes in the efficacy of charm, and spell, and incantation, of mere ceremonial and opus operatum; then there is the polytheist, who will adore any thing in the shape of a drug, and who is continually quacking himself with ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... to keep her feet still; as if one were to lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious gauds, a clay idol, fetish of humbug and havoc, whose feet are soaking in muddy gore and salt tears; yet in the privacy of my own study I might sadly admit that the Millennium is remote, that the Parliament of Nations exists but in the dreams ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... in some primitive instinct of taboo; of a superstition of fetish-worship fencing off sacred things as unmentionable, and reinforced by the bad Puritan notion that holy things are by no means ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... that was appalling: many seemed indeed to have difficulty in selecting words expressive enough for their purpose. "Bloody," "savage," "crafty," "cruel," "treacherous," "sensual," "devilish," "thievish," "cannibals," "fetish-worshippers," "murderers," were a few of the epithets applied to them by men accustomed to observe closely and to ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... down the cracked concrete walk, passed the big plate-glass windows of Murphy's General Store which were a kind of fetish in Glen Oaks. But Doctor Spechaug wasn't concerned with the cultural significance of the windows. He was concerned with ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... Professor Bury observes, accustomed 'to take little and to give much'. They built up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It is not anything ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... circumstances which has led you almost to lay aside the principles which now seem prejudices to you. I myself willingly immolate on the altar of new ideas that pride of nobility which delights in the study of old parchments, and makes a kind of fetish of scutcheons carved on the walls of an ancient castle. I condemn as a foolish error, the airs of superiority affected by old nobles in respect to merit sprung from the people; and if, in the opinion ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... centre was a figure intended to represent a human being, with an enormous cock's head. Master Cudjoe, if he was the artist, had contrived to produce as hideous-looking a monster as could well be imagined. 'That's the fetish,' whispered Rob; 'they worship it as ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... having seen her since the birth of the third baby, by the further alteration in her. How thin she was! And quiet! With that dullness which, in his judgment, too much domesticity always brought to women. Like most ultra-modern men, while secretly making a fetish of the softer virtues in woman, he wanted them expressed somehow in an up-to-the-minute setting. Yet he understood dimly the struggle of twentieth-century woman in trying to make herself at once as new as to-day ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... put my hand inside my tunic and stroked Dinky and said to him, "For God's sake, Dink, see me through this time." I meant it too. I was actually praying,—to my mascot. I realize that this was plain, unadulterated, heathenish fetish worship, but it shows what a man reverts to in the barbaric ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... to rifle and bayonet, which were to be kept free of obstruction and rust. The reserve ammunition and bombs, some of which were open to the air, had also to be wiped free of verdigris and dust so that they would not jam or clog when required for use. This daily cleaning up had become almost a fetish in the army, but it undoubtedly engendered habits of orderliness—thereby promoting efficiency, and also had a material effect on the health of the individual by keeping down the flies, which would swarm around any tins or ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... you differently,' said Nina. 'When you do mischief you mean mischief. Now I became so—so—what shall I call it, intriguee about this little "fetish" of yours, that I remember well the night you first left off ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... they want. There are no tragedies, of the negative kind, in their lives. Their tragedies have come and gone already; and their power remains. Why should good women leave power to such as they? Why should good women's lives be wrecked for a convention? Why in the blind following of some society fetish should life lose its charm, its possibilities? Why should love eat its heart out, in vain? The time will come when women will not be afraid to speak to men, as they should speak, as free and equal. Surely if a woman is to ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... the sticks from her medicine bag, and hands them to one of the Old Men. To each of the others who will dance with her (two or three) she gives a fetish from her bag. They have already put on appropriate headdresses and are prepared for dancing. She motions the rattles to begin. Behind her are the Old Men, with the drums and rattles; on each side, the Fighting Men seated on the ground. The dance begins, the CHISERA singing. The Old Men keep ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... possible in the darkness of the secluded streets outside the house, in the garden below, or in the house itself. But she did not despair. It was easier to win money by keeping within the law than by breaking it. The Beg was a rogue, but money was his fetish, and ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... stretched her grey hands over the sunlit city. Even the lightest-hearted felt a thrill of apprehension at the thought of the horrors that were to come. In a day or two all this was to be changed. People went about then counting the Russian millions; the steamroller fetish was to be evolved. The most peaceful stockbroker or shopkeeper, who had never even been to a review in his life, could make calculations of man power with a stump of pencil on the back of an old envelope, which would convince the greatest pessimist that Germany and Austria ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drawing-rooms, in the soft music of hidden instruments. God! how I tortured myself! You were never out of mind for an hour. My days were given to you, and I used to pray that my dreams might hold nothing but you. You have been my fetish from the first day I met you, and my worship has grown blinder every hour, Mildred. You were always out of my reach, but I have kept my eyes raised toward you just the same, and I have never looked aside, never faltered." He paused to feast his eyes upon her, and then in a half-whisper ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... State. White were their parasols and in front they waved a Red Cross flag. On a gooseberry bush in the midst of the farm they also left a white flag, where it still flew to protect a few fat pigs, turkeys, and other fowl. The white flag is becoming a kind of fetish. To-day all our white tents were smeared with reddish mud to make them less visible. Beyond Range Post the enemy set up a new gun commanding the Maritzburg road as it crossed that point of hill. The Irish Fusiliers ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... ousted from the command of their own units, or to be excluded from staff appointments, merely because they are not Regulars or because they fail to comply with needlessly drastic and therefore non-essential codes of discipline. Discipline is, in fact, degraded into servitude when it becomes a mere fetish. How fallaciously it may be construed could often be seen in the tendency among powerful martinets to "drive a coach and four" through the law and procedure which regulate trials by Court Martial. The need for the "standardisation" of all infantry units in France was quite genuine; ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... groups and incidentally, they learned to distinguish the fetish in each. They read Greek mythology side by side with Judean mythology and noted similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe was to give these boys a scientific education. Science is only classified commonsense. To be truly scientific is to know differences—to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... the roll of Rehoboth communicants since the establishment of the Church. Laying the former aside, he took up the latter with a tenderness and devoutness becoming one who was touching the sacred books of some fetish of the East. It was, indeed, to him a book to be reverenced; and as he slowly and sadly turned over its time-stained pages, his eye rested on many names entered in his own small handwriting—names which carried him back to companionship with lives for ever ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... and fresh-coloured, he was good to look on in the eyes of his companion, and yet, perhaps, there was a ruffle in her soul that called for some answering disturbance on the part of that superbly tranquil young man, and certainly called in vain. Cicely had set up for herself a fetish of onyx with eyes of jade, and doubtless hungered at times with an unreasonable but perfectly natural hunger for something of flesh and blood. It was the religion of her life to know exactly what she ...
— When William Came • Saki
... from West Africa. I rather forget the facts, but Jeekie, my negro servant, knows them all, for as a lad my uncle saved him from sacrifice, or something, in a place where they worship these things, and he has been with us ever since. It is a fetish with magical powers and all the rest of it. I believe they call it the Swimming Head and other names. If you look at it, you will see that it seems to swim between the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling over a stone or buried branch, and I looked often to reassure myself that ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... nomes thus formed, namely, the ninth and sixteenth nomes of the Delta in the Pharaonic lists, remained faithful to him, and here he reigned without rival, at Busiris as at Mendes. His most famous idol-form was the Didu, whether naked or clothed, the fetish, formed of four superimposed columns, which had given its ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... reason that will never be understood until all souls are judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull, everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street after street, through district after district, looking at the backs of ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... with a scent of the Boulevard Montparnasse that was irresistible. The sand of Lavenue's crumbled under my heel; and the bouquet of the old Fleury came back to me, and I remembered the day when I found a twenty franc piece under my fetish. Have you that fetish still? and has it brought you luck? I remembered, too, my first sight of you in a frock coat and a smoking-cap, when we passed the evening at the Cafe de Medicis; and my last when we sat and talked in the Parc Monceau; and all these things made me feel a little young ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... denunciation await that man who stands unawed before it, seeing in it but an ugly little idol. And I guess what will be dealt out to him who not only refuses to bow the head, but openly scoffs. And yet I am going to scoff and say ugly words about this fetish of ours. I am going to say that it represents ignorance, hides and causes hypocrisy, stands in the way of progress, drags low the standard of individual excellence, perpetuates ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... my heart might have ventured to intimate its distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony and joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my small bedroom at Mrs. King's lodgings, and they two should have been my household gods, from which my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the tender and the mighty, should never, either by softness or strength, have severed me. But this was not all; the antipathy ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by far the most important matter. The mere dead letter of a creed, however carefully preserved and reverently cherished, may be of no more spiritual or moral efficacy than an African fetish or an Indian medicine-bag. What we want is, orthodoxy in practice,—the dry bones clothed with warm, generous, holy life. It is one thing to hold fast the robust faith of our fathers,—the creed of the freedom-loving Puritan and Huguenot,—and quite another to set up the five points of Calvinism, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... disrespect in Americans," answered Brother Copas dryly. "But we'll credit it to them if you will; and there at once you have a capital reason why our little Miss Bull should worship the House of Lords as a fetish—whereas, it appears, she doesn't." ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... for two hundred years.... These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the popular cry. He, and he only, knows the world. The world of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down. The odds are that the whole question is ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... increase production. Various minor restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing that has reached to the roots of the matter—probably because of the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England, the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of alcoholism and have taken real measures to combat it. Absinthe has been abolished. For the army—and that includes ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... self-sufficiency, I suppose. Also the fetish of equality that still persists. We are the greatest nation on earth, of course, but it isn't democratic for any one of us to be greater than ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... at the ramparts, or was supposed to be there; but his wife, his children, his bonne, and his kitchen wench issued forth, oblivious alike of dull care and of bombarding Prussians, to enjoy themselves after their wont by gossiping and lolling in the sun. The Strasburg fetish had its usual crowd of admirers. Every bench in the Champs Elysees was occupied. Guitars twanged, organs were ground, merry-go-rounds were in full swing, and had it not been that here and there some regiment was drilling, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... a crease down the trouser legs if those garments are but of well-bleached blue dungaree? The spotless shirt, how paltry a detail when a light singlet is the only wear? Of what trifling worth dapper boots to feet made leathery by contact with the clean, crisp, oatmeal-coloured sand. Here is no fetish about clothes; little concern for what we shall eat or what we shall drink. The man who has to observe the least of the ordinances of style knows not liberty. He is a slave; his dress betrayeth him and proclaims him base. There may be degrees of baseness. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... to a small point of inquiry, and you call it the advance to a new time. "The crusade is on," you say. Coronation rites for the commoners and destruction to superstition. I put my hand out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain that there is no joy also deference to a fetish. Your creed thunders "Thou shalt not." Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the young thought preaching ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... pursuits. They have an odd idea about imbibing the precepts of the Koran; and, to do so, they get some learned man to write texts from it with black chalk on pieces of board. These are then washed, when the water is drunk. They evidently consider it a fetish or ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... idea that bag-limit laws can save the game is to-day the curse of all our game birds, mammals and fishes! It is a fraud, a delusion and a snare. That miserable fetish has been worshipped much too long. Our game is being exterminated, everywhere, by blind insistence upon "open seasons," and solemn reliance upon "legal bag-limits." If a majority of the people of America feel that so long as there is any ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... ships in the stress of hungry war demand will be true of scores of articles for trade afterward. The old rule-of-thumb traditions that hampered expansion have gone into the discard, along with voluntary military service and the fetish of free trade. ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... at every turn; it mocks at my best efforts; it swathes me like the bandages of a mummy,—and I am growing weary of its restraint. This is a question of self interest, too. Perhaps, if I can persuade our good Kosnovians to adopt some more up-to-date fetish, they may drop the hereditary habit of carving their chosen rulers into mincemeat whenever a change of Government ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Census under the denominational rubric of "Animists" and numbering about 8-1/2 millions, have survived to the present day in remote hills and jungles without being absorbed into the Hindu social system, and have preserved their primitive beliefs, in which fetish worship, and magic are the dominant elements. Low as is their social status, it is but little lower than that of the Panchamas who have obtained a footing on the nethermost rung of the social ladder of Hinduism without being ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... susceptible in part of sometime being used to the advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real that they were unreal became ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... others. When the war opened, Germany had much to say about her unconquerable army; her generals were supposed to be superior in a military way to any others. The war showed that other soldiers were just as brave, other generals just as able. The fetish of German ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... in framing a class of objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a divinity. The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish. ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... and Rodier appropriating as trophies several spears and bows and arrows, and also some of the fetish charms hung at the entrance to the huts. The crew, having satisfied their hunger, hunted through the village for loot, and grumbled when they found nothing that they considered worthy the consideration of British ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, aesthetic circles, of which the balladist ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... no kill pore black darkie. Iss, Caesar tell um," he whispered now, with his lips so close that the lad felt the hot breath hiss into his ear. "Dat Obeah, massa. Dat black man's Obeah. Come along now Caesar know. Find fetish. Plenty many black ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... Wren, Jane Austen and Mozart are highly civilized artists, and that the creators of the Gothic cathedrals and the author of the Chanson de Roland, Villon, Webster, Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Whitman, Turner, Wagner and the Congolese fetish-makers are not. But, whatever we may mean, assuredly we do not mean that one set is superior to the other. They differ widely; but they differ in the means by which they compass the same end. It is absurd to ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... secure than the artificial niche into which some one may thrust him. The masses who are most helpfully reached by the Tuskegee Institute are coming to realize that education in its truest sense is no longer to be regarded as an emotional impulse, a fetish made up of loosely joined information, to be worshiped for its mere possession, but as a practical means to a definite end. They are being taught that mind-training is the logical helpmeet of hand-training, and that both, supplemented and sweetened by heart-training, ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... indisputable. It is the glory of Judaism and of Christianity to have proclaimed this truth, through all their aberrations. But the worship of a God who needs forgiveness and help, and deserves pity every hour of his existence, is no better than that of any other voluntarily selected fetish. The Emperor Julian's project was hopeful in comparison with the prospects ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... plenty slipped past beneath them. This, he knew, had been the home of Wanderer. In what past age or at how great a distance it was from his own world, he could only imagine. But that the big man who called himself Wanderer loved this country there was not the slightest doubt. It was a fetish with him, a past he was in duty bound to revisit time and again, and to ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... the cart before the horse. 'Fetish' is really the Portuguese word feitico, artificial, made-up, factitious (Latin factitius), applied to ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... been visited by one before. Though from difference in language their intercourse was limited, they understood each other sufficiently to discover, to their mutual delight, that they had a common faith. The general character of a community formed of a rude people, emerging from fetish and demon worship, can be readily supposed. I suspect the converts made by the monk Augustine and his companions had not a little in their character and conduct to show the pit from which they had been taken; and yet that was the dawning of ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... You, the woman, are of vastly more importance than your surroundings. If you feel yourself becoming a mere drudge, if your family is growing away from you mentally, if your nerves are weakening under a fetish of cleanliness, get ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... said; "she is, however, more excusable than these grown men, whose prejudices against an article of dress are as heathen in character as her fetish superstition." ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... recreative, sitting in comfortable attitudes and at peace with themselves and each other, and now and again, perhaps three or four times in an hour, making a worthy and memorable remark, they are all haggard and intent upon keeping this fetish flow agoing. A fortuitous score of cows in a field are a thousand times happier than a score of people deliberately assembled for the purposes of happiness. These conversationalists say the most shallow and needless ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... reverting, was hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? or—and a subtler thought—was she mastered by some vaster, profounder superstition, a fetish-worship of which the Alpha and the Omega ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeks after his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than that of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become a sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentiment what Charles Peguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Peguy nor Brooke had the opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as it seemed for the moment, obscurely. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... warriors followed Timour in the invasion of India. His armies latterly appear to have consisted chiefly of Turcomans and Persians. It was to obtain popularity amongst these soldiery that he abandoned his old religion, a kind of fetish, or ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... of his conception, then, was his revolutionary substitution of the primitive Elizabethan and early seventeenth century method for the fetish of the single line. For some time it is true the established battle order had been blown upon from various quarters, but no one as yet had been able to devise any system convincing enough to dethrone it. It will be remembered that at least as early as 1759 an ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... replied. "He must not know, or the plans of the Naya may be thwarted. Our enemies have arranged to strike their blow three moons from now, but ere that we shall be back in Mo, and they will find that they go only to their graves. Kouaga has made fetish for the son of his royal mistress, and has come to him ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... cotton leading-rope which is passed over the headstall, and such a rope is carried by every Indian groom. I asked my groom one day to tie up with his leading rope a dog that would not follow. He absolutely refused, and I discovered that the rope was the fetish of his caste and was formerly adored and propitiated in the course of an annual caste festival. To touch a dog with it would ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell |
