"Hypnotic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... surprise died out, and into her eyes crept a strange look of repulsion and even fear. She had no words to offer. She made no move. It was almost as if she sat fascinated like some harmless bird held by the hypnotic stare of a python. So long did she remain silent that Buck at last turned and looked into her face. And something like alarm caught and held him when he beheld her gray look of horror as she faced the gloomy crags mounting up ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... demanded the tutti. Gruening, violently tremoloing, swore, helplessly. The men stared. Wildly, once more, Ivan indicated full orchestra. So there came one, furious, discordant crash, as all the instruments, obeying, in their customary, hypnotic manner, the motion of their leader, came in, each with his first notes, no matter how far ahead of the present measure they might be. The noise was, truly, something hideous! The men themselves grew panic-stricken; and each group ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... in thrall. He could not have moved a muscle if his life, as he believed it did, depended on his escape. The hideous head began to sway rhythmically in a sort of dance. Still Jack could not take his eyes from that swaying head and darting red tongue. A species of hypnotic spell fell over him. He heard nothing and saw ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... astonishment of the men looking on, this mule made a flying leap nearly out of his harness, and then pulled as steadily as a well-trained horse; and the rest of the team followed his example. Life seemed to have some hypnotic power over a horse, and it appeared that he had the same influence over the mules. The men tugged at the rope, and the wagon was hauled out ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... saw her as a woman, queenly and distressed and very proud. He was physically anguished for her, and the man who loved her was the very brother of his bones. There were some words the effect of which were almost hypnotic on him—The Isle of the Blest, The Little Dark Rose, The Poor Old Woman and Caitlin the Daughter of Holohan. The mere repetition of these phrases lifted him to an ecstasy; they had hidden, magical meanings which pricked deeply to his heartstrings and thrilled him to a tempest of ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... young lady is excessively addicted to the—wine cup?' asked Merton gravely. 'In melancholy cases of that kind Mr. Hall Caine, in a romance, has recommended hypnotic treatment, but we ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of either sex ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... before the door, according to order, or rather, according to hypnotic suggestion; for it seems that it is the chauffeur who alone knows anything of the way, and who, while appearing to be non-committal, is virtually planning the tour. "Valescure might be a good stopping-place for ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... The hypnotic effect of the German newspapers on the German is not apprehended either in Great Britain or in the United States. Those papers, all directed from the Foreign Office in the Wilhelmstrasse, can manipulate the thoughts of these docile people, and turn their attention ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... with appetite. I had thought him thin and pale, at first sight, but his color had come back now, and his eyes were bright. He told me of the fierce attacks of the pain, and how he had been given hypodermic injections which he amusingly termed "hypnotic injunctions" and "the sub-cutaneous." From Mr. and Mrs. Allen I learned how slender had been his chances, and how uncertain were the days ahead. Mr. Allen had already engaged passage home for ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the skin all over his body seemed to creep in disgust. He had been bending over as he hauled up the rope and the squid's tentacles around his arms held him poised half out of the boat, his head not more than a foot and a half from the surface of the water, looking straight into the hypnotic, black, unwinking ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... her chair. Her face was of an ivory pallor and she seemed to have fallen back into the characteristic hypnotic trance. As for Bellward, he had dropped on to a sofa, a loose mass, exhausted but missing nothing of what was going forward, though, for the moment, he seemed too spent to take any active part in the proceedings. ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... just above race by with dizzy and uniform speed; the country below slowly unrolls, and the steady drone of the Engine is almost hypnotic in effect. "Sleep, sleep, sleep," it insidiously suggests. "Listen to me and watch the clouds; there's nothing else to do. Dream, dream, dream of speeding through space for ever, and ever, and ever; and rest, rest, rest to the sound ...
— The Aeroplane Speaks - Fifth Edition • H. Barber
... Just so: the Germans are heated too, and they no longer see clearly. And we must never forget that they have had long training in obedience to government. There are not wanting English politicians who would like to see similar training introduced here. It leads however to the hypnotic response of which Colonel Maude has written interestingly in his "War and the World's Life." The Government in Germany called for the defence of the Fatherland, the Government declared the invasion of Belgium as ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... well as Freud, both of whom have made their life's aim the perfection of psychoanalysis, and who for that reason now concern themselves exclusively with it, appreciate all forms of verbal treatment, as well with hypnotism as without it. Hypnotic suggestion and suggestion given when awake was used at an earlier period by both of them with good results, and they still are not averse to using this method where quick comprehension and the immediate subdual of a troublesome symptom ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... but a new personal force in literature. That he stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything said; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... great distrust of the Czarina and the Monk Rasputin. The latter was a serf in Siberia, and now has a malignant, hypnotic influence in the Russian Court. If he is refused anything, he falls on the floor in a fit and froths at the mouth until he gets what he wants. The Court ladies have to lick his dirty fingers clean, for he refuses to use a finger-bowl at table. Take this for what it's worth. At any rate, there ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... often amount merely to speaking out, laughing, weeping, smacking, throwing oneself about and so on, or occasionally to complicated actions, which begin with leaving the bed. Further comparison shows the night wandering as symptomatically similar to hysterical and hypnotic somnambulism. This interpretation might be objected to upon the ground that unfortunately we know nothing of the origin of the motor phenomena of the dream and that understanding of the hysterical and hypnotic somnambulism is deplorably lacking. Still ...
— Sleep Walking and Moon Walking - A Medico-Literary Study • Isidor Isaak Sadger
... Deeps of Space Jerry Foster Hurtles to the Moon—Only to be Trapped by a Barbaric Race and Offered as a Living Sacrifice to Oong, their Loathsome, Hypnotic ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... me—you will laugh"—she did not laugh—"that some day, somewhere else, if not here, I'd have to make that beginning, to be something myself. Remember that old Hindu fellow with a red turban who sat on your front lawn, beneath the palms, and had the women gathered around him in a kind of hypnotic state? He said something like that—I thought him an old fakir at the time. He used a lot of flowery language, but I guess, boiled down, it meant start at the bottom of the ladder. Build yourself ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... still for fear of frightening them off; he liked the warmth and friendliness of their little bodies pressed close to him; there was something pleasantly hypnotic in the feeling of small hands tugging at him. Suddenly he became conscious of a change in the children's faces; the gladness was fading out and in its place was creeping ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... was indeed very beautiful, with wonderful eyes and a perfect complexion. There was grace in every movement, save when at times she held herself rigid, with fixed blank eyes as though fascinated, or gripped by some invisible power. More than once I had wondered whether she were under hypnotic influence, but that theory had been completely ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... air I don't know. Time seemed nothing, or an eternity. We were suspended in a sphere. Lights or stars rushed at us or receded or whirled about. Time and distance became mere words without meaning and I had fallen into a state resembling hypnotic sleep when suddenly roused by Jack. 'There are the lines,' he shouted, and as far as the eye could see, to left and right, out of the darkness beneath us were the constant flashes of the never silent guns of the Flanders front. Every now and then we got a sudden 'bump' as a ...
— Night Bombing with the Bedouins • Robert Henry Reece
... applause; and Trimmer's people, seeing the crowd had taken Hector's point, sprang to their feet and began to cheer. At a tense moment, such as this, cheering is often hypnotic, and good managers know how to make use of it on the floor. The noise grew thunderous, and when it subsided Hector was master of the convention. Then, for the first time, I saw how far he would go—and why. I had laughed at him all my life, but ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the ...
— The Adventure of the Red Circle • Arthur Conan Doyle
... doctor should have been willing to accept this invitation, and still more surprising that his wife should have consented to accompany him to Syria. But the East was still 'a-calling,' and the almost hypnotic influence which her ladyship exercised over her dependants seems to have lost none of its efficacy. Accordingly, as soon as the Meryons could arrange their affairs, they embarked at Marseilles, landing at Beyrout on July 1, 1837. Here the doctor received a letter from Lady Hester, recommending ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... and kill though carved by scores of mortal wounds. Men with bullets in the heart or brain fight on, though already clinically dead. Death seemed an inescapable part of this kind of strength. But there was another type that could easily be brought about in any deep trance—hypnotic rigidity. The strength that enables someone in a trance to hold his body stiff and unsupported except at two points, the head and heels. This is physically impossible when conscious. Working with this as a clue, Brion had developed a self-hypnotic ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... gifted in taking to pieces the spiritual machinery of unimpeachable ladies and gentlemen"; and really you have made of the author one of the good people of his own book! That is a malicious revenge for his "tedious accuracy," is it not? And you dare to speak of his "hypnotic power of illusion which is so essentially a freak element in his mode of expression that even in portraying the tubby, good-natured, elderly gentleman in this story he refines upon his vitals and sensibilities until the wretched victim becomes a sort of cataleptic." Now that is a "human ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... for both, so I wrapped it tightly round his head and body. He was doubled up with his chin on his knees. This small exertion was quite sufficient to make me lose the tug-of-war in which I was pulling against nature. Just like the subject who, under hypnotic influence, feels his own will and power suddenly going from him, so I felt the entire hopelessness of further struggle against the supernatural forces I was contending with. Falling backwards on the snow, I made a last desperate effort to gaze at the ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... hue of her complexion had vanished, and she looked a different being. The only trouble complained of was sleeplessness, but it did not interfere with the satisfactory progress of the case, and no hypnotic was given. After the first few days we had no return of the nerve-crises which in the country had formed so characteristic a part of her illness. Her hands and feet also, at first of a remarkable deadly coldness, soon became ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... moments both stood still, and again Browning felt that strange spell stealing upon him, as if hypnotic eyes were peering out from the shadows and looking down into his soul. He shook himself, he even looked around in search of those eyes; but he saw nothing save the dark, gloomy woods and the ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water. And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some night ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... no such refuge. Occasionally he can work his plot by means of a vision; and the hypnotic trance has served, as in the case of The Polish Jew; but his ghosts have to be strictly objective. In fact, using a technical term frivolously, his ghosts expect the ghost to walk regularly on Fridays. There is no humbug ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... eased himself back to a sitting posture, resting his elbows on his knees, as all sensible good rifle shots do when they have the chance. Simba, his eyes glowing fiercely, staring with almost hypnotic intensity over his master's shoulder, quivered like an ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... him looking at me frequently in a peculiar manner. Last night he stared at me with his burning eyes until I could feel his hypnotic influence. I hope—I trust you will believe I have not ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Fixing a hypnotic gaze upon a bland, blue-eyed bystander who had just joined the charmed circle, he murmured, invitingly: "Better try your luck, Olaf. It's Danish dice—three chances to win and ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... legend have a particular affinity for water. Hogg, the friend of Shelley, was wont to tell how the bright eyes of his comrade would dilate at the sight of even a puddle by the roadside. Has water a hypnotic attraction for certain minds? Be that as it may, there has crystallized round the great waterways of the world a traditionary lore which preserves the thought and feeling of the past, and retains many a circumstance of wonder ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... to answer him. Even supposing that he forced me, by the wicked, and unconscionable exercise of what, I presumed, were the hypnotic powers with which nature had to such a dangerous degree endowed him, to carry the adventure to a certain stage, since he could hardly, at an instant's notice, endow me with the knack of picking locks, should the drawer he alluded ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... has a choice of two methods to reach the enemy one is aiming at. The first and least used is this: the magician employs a voyant, a woman who is known in that world as 'a flying spirit'; she is a somnambulist, who, put into a hypnotic state, can betake herself, in spirit, wherever one wishes her to go. It is then possible to have her transmit the magic poisons to a person whom one designates, hundreds of leagues away. Those who are stricken in this manner have seen no one, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... easily or completely attained. St. Augustine, even at the period when he wrote his Confessions, mentions, as a matter of course, that sexual dreams "not merely arouse pleasure, but gain the consent of the will." (X. 41.) Not infrequently there is a struggle in sleep, just as the hypnotic subject may resist suggestions; thus, a lady of thirty-five dreamed a sexual dream, and awoke without excitement; again she fell asleep, and had another dream of sexual character, but resisted the tendency to excitement, and again awoke; finally, she fell asleep and had a third sexual ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... men of genius. Says Lombroso: "I have been able to observe men of genius when they had scarce reached the age of puberty; they did not manifest the deep aversions of moral insanity, but I have noticed among all a strange apathy for everything which does not concern them; as though, plunged in the hypnotic condition, they did not perceive the troubles of others, or even the most pressing needs of those who were dearest to them; if they observed them, they grew tender, at once hastening to attend them; ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... explained his mutism, refusal to swallow, his filthiness and general negativism as all occasioned by delusions. He was commanded by God to act thus, the attendants were devils, and so on. He spoke, too, of being under hypnotic influence. In addition there were other delusions such as that he had killed his brother. The attack came on with the belief that he was going to die, otherwise none of the ideas were typical of the stupors ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... all events, is a vera causa, the theory of Survival and Revival seems adequate. Yet there are two circumstances which suggest that all is not such plain sailing. The first is the constantly alleged occurrence of 'spontaneous' and sporadic abnormal phenomena, whether clairvoyance in or out of hypnotic trance, of effects on the mind and the senses apparently produced by some action of a distant mind, of hallucinations coincident with remote events, of physical prodigies that contradict the law of gravitation, or of inexplicable sounds, lights, and ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... speaking of the first Titan building of the earth. Mount Dunstan staring at his delicate, insistent, elderly face, tried to laugh again—and failed because the effort seemed actually irreverent. It was a singular hypnotic moment, indeed. He himself was hypnotised. A flashlight of new vision blazed before him and left him dumb. He took up his pipe hurriedly, and with still unsteady fingers began to refill it. When it was filled he lighted it, and then without ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... should see the high prairies then, when all the world is a-shimmer with green velvet brocaded brightly in blue and pink and yellow flower-patterns; when the heat waves go quivering up to meet the sun, so that the far horizons wave like painted drop-scenes stirred by a breeze; when a hypnotic spell of peace and bright promises is woven over the rangeland—you should see it then, if you would love it with a sweet unreason that will last you through ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... whether they consider their calling a trade, a profession, a science, or a religion. Sometimes it is all four. Sometimes it goes beyond them and becomes a kind of mesmerism in which the salesman uses a sort of hypnotic process (which is simply the result of being over-anxious to sell) to persuade the prospect that he cannot wait another day before buying the particular article that the salesman is distributing. The article may be stocks and bonds, wash cloths, soap, or hair nets. ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... scheme of Japanese decorations for the doors of the chalet which her husband thought might be made to produce a lot of money if they were nearer London. One of the panels had a woman yawning over a fire in the early morning, and the hypnotic effect of it kept the family and their guests yawning their heads off, so that Mrs. Stevenson decided the sleepy lady would be better for ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... that I had become the victim of the hypnotic power of Tushegoun Lama; but I preferred this to seeing an innocent Mongolian die, for I had not believed that Tushegoun Lama, after slashing open the bodies of his victims, could ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... hysterical symptoms could be transferred by the aid of the magnet from one patient to another. He took two subjects: one a dumb woman afflicted with hysteria, and the other a female who was in a state of hypnotic trance. A screen was placed between the two, and the hysterical woman was then put under the influence of a strong magnet. After a few moments she was rendered dumb, while speech was suddenly restored to the other. Luckily for his healthier patients, however, ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... delicate incongruity about it all. And watching her own grey eyes, as they faced her in the mirror, she half comprehended why she continued to live so, even after her father died and took away the reason for her old solitude. She had been under the hypnotic suggestion of an event, an impression. That moment on Montgomery street, when she found her father lying drunk, when tragedy and responsibility came together—that moment had stretched itself out to six years. She had lived by it; was living by ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... only by the turning of Miss Gallifer's pages. It might have been three o'clock. Once more Barbara was lost in the unaccustomed hush, her eyes fixed on the white face on the pillow, in almost hypnotic restfulness. The pushing open of the door behind was so soft that she didn't notice. Miss Gallifer turned ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... experience of the sham and cheap fraud behind the tawdry canvas flap, stops a moment, laughs, and passes on. Then Temptation, in a panic, seeing his audience drifting away, summons from inside the tent his bespangled and bewitching partner, Mlle. Psychological Moment, the Hypnotic Charmer. She leaps to the platform, bows, pirouettes. The crowd surges toward the ticket-window, ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... exquisite poems or senseless rhapsodies, as a child might play with gems or straws or sunbeams indifferently. He was a gentle, kindly, most unworldly little man, with extraordinary eyes, which seem even in the lifeless portraits to reflect some unusual hypnotic power. He died obscurely, smiling at a vision of Paradise, in 1827. That was nearly a century ago, yet he still remains one of the most incomprehensible figures ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... spite of an air of forced gayety which she strove hard to maintain. Somehow the inherent and masterful depression of her hostess was weighing her down. Outside the sun had settled in clouds, and a somber twilight stole in through the window. The voice opposite droned on, engrossing, dominating, hypnotic. Annie realized that unless she roused herself she would relapse into permanent silence, and so, in a lucky pause, as her eyes fell upon a strange object hanging above the mantelpiece, she grew aggressive for the moment, and ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... would do no good. All witnesses in Brotherhood court actions were examined under psychoprobe, and a hypnotic was of no value against a lie detector that could extract the deepest buried truth. And he would be examined too. The truth would out—and nothing would be gained. In fact—everything would be lost. The attempt at trickery would prejudice ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... room. Janet watched her. She stood in front of the bureau, just as Janet herself had done, her hands at her throat. At last she let them fall, her head turning slowly, as though drawn, by some irresistible, hypnotic power, and their eyes met. Lise's were filmed, like those of a dog whose head is being stroked, expressing a luxuriant dreaminess ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pictures, even those of Saints or Holy Families, had given enormous pleasure. But why? Not because the crowds that flocked to the galleries really cared for them, but because gifted writers had for centuries been setting up hypnotic suggestions that in this way was pleasure to be obtained. He had often seen men and women standing before a canvas of REMBRANDT, hating the grubby muddle of it in their hearts, but adoring it in their heads—all because ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... quoted the latest authority on hypnotism that no person even in hypnotic sleep could be influenced by another to do what was antagonistic to ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... tone was gentle, almost hypnotic—"of course you know who the woman is that Mr. Warren was planning to ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... hear the rest of that in the morning. Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic subject before me in the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at large for the present, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... countries, who has followed the Fenwicks from England to Australia. Margrave declares that he needs an accomplice to secure an "elixir of life" which his own failing strength demands. His mysterious mesmeric or hypnotic influence over Mrs. Fenwick had in former days been marked; and on the basis of this undeniable fact, he has endeavored to show that his own welfare and Mrs. Fenwick's are, in some occult fashion, knit together, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... had not been hypnotized in any degree, but had been pretending throughout—a statement always denied by his mother and his brother Orion. This dispute was never settled, and never could be. Sam Clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely "showing off" and having his fun. He could follow the dictates of a vivid imagination and could be as outrageous ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... connect with a flatfoot's jaw while he was trying to make hypnotic passes at me. He's coming ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... at it too long or closely," said Phadrig, putting his hand down inside his waistcoat and drawing out a wash-leather bag. "As I have told you, it possesses certain qualities which are not to be trifled with. You are, of course, aware that many Eastern gems are credited with hypnotic powers. This one ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... diplomat, was always sounding his greatness, both with tongue and pen. Abram S. Hewitt was an equally enthusiastic friend and admirer. Both of these gentlemen, the latter especially, were, I think, abler than Mr. Tilden, but did not have his hypnotic power. ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... clairvoyante. Her brain was not, therefore, under normal control. I determined instantly to tell him on the first opportunity that if he did not wish to see the girl permanently injured, he would have to curtail his hypnotic influence. ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... news" since Bergstein did not put in an appearance to officially announce it. His mismanagement of the commissary department was laid at Thayor's door. The men's grumbling had been of some weeks' duration; their opinions wavering, swaying and settling under Bergstein's hypnotic popularity as easily as a weather-vane in April. Nowhere had they earned as good wages as at Big Shanty. They, too, looked at Thayor's purchase as a gold mine. Morrison had done a thriving business with the stout little tumblers with bottoms half an inch thick. Bergstein ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... abstraction—he has a Balliol accent too—with literary tastes and artistic rooms, where gambling takes place. He is invariably a coward, but dreadfully fascinating all the same; though he scorns women he has an hypnotic influence over them; something in his polished Oxford manner is irresistible. Throughout a career of crime his wonderful execution on the piano, his knowledge of Italian painting, and his Oxford manner ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... and in the hypnotic power of a virile expressman—had already vanished. It would arrive at its destination ahead of her. Perhaps there was no room there. In that case it would be sent away. Dreadful picture! False economy not to take a cab! Win supposed that a taxi would be no dearer than the horse ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... or cantillations, the result might be more entertaining. That would not, however, improve the actual dancing, in which I was disappointed. In Japan, on the other hand, I succumbed completely to the odd, hypnotic mechanism of the Geisha, the accompaniments to which are more varied, or more acceptable to my ear, than the Indian music. But I shall always remember the sounds of the distant, approaching or receding, snake- charmers' piping, heard through the heat, as it so often is on Sundays ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... virtue of mere proximity, and when the woman who bore it was entirely passive. If this girl had been looking at him the matter would have been easy to understand, for an eye-glance is often downright hypnotic; but she was looking at the work in her hands, and, so far as could be judged, she had altogether forgotten his presence; yet the mysterious spell, the potent enchantment, breathed from her like a vapor, and he could not be insensible to it. It was ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... such workaday elements as the hypnotic fascinations of a sleek music-master, the follies of a runaway schoolgirl and the well-disciplined affections of a most superior young gentleman, Mr. W.E. NORRIS has contrived to create yet another new story, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... the most successful tale that has ever dealt with hypnotism—and the success of the dramatic version of Trilby presented a few days ago by Mr. Tree, invite one to apply the test. Clearly there are large numbers of people who enjoy hypnotic fiction, or whose prejudices have been effectively subdued by Mr. du Maurier's tact and talent. Must we then confess that our instinct has been unjust and unreasonable, and give it up? Or—since we must like Trilby, and there is no help for it—shall we enjoy the tale under protest ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hypnotic to-and-fro of those swaying, poised, alert human figures, he encountered Marise, coming on her suddenly, and ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... couldn't—" There was something hypnotic in the persistence of the nurse in charge of ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... excitement that he must cure, and as there are many remedies for insomnia, he tried those which, it seemed to him, were suitable to his case; but bromide of potassium, in spite of its hypnotic properties, produced no more effect than the over-working of the brain and body. When he realized this he replaced it with chloral; but chloral, which should create a desire to sleep, after several days had no more effect than the bromide. Then ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... something in the expression of his face, or whether from Carthoris of Helium in a far chamber of the palace came a more powerful suggestion, who may say? But something there was that suddenly dispelled the strange, hypnotic influence of ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her hypnotic power, or my adaptability, that in the atmosphere of Runnymede I became a Conservative of the good old type, and actually enjoyed the communion of soul necessarily subsisting between a pedigreed lady and a pedigreed gentleman. We habitually ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Red Lodge had been sufficient to penetrate that stupor. She was sitting bolt upright, a ghastly, trembling specter. Slowly a smile seemed to creep over the cruel face of the mystic. Was it not a recognition of his hypnotic power? ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... some things were terribly real. My love for Gertrude Forrest was real; my walk and talk with her that day were real. Ay, and the hateful glitter of Voltaire's eyes was real too; his talk with Kaffar behind the shrubs the night before was real. The biological or hypnotic power that I had felt that very night was real, and, above all, a feeling of dread that had gripped my being was real. I could not explain it, and I could not throw it off, but ever since I had awoke out of my mesmeric sleep, or whatever the reader may ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible jest? Most of our triumphant display ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... came out of his half-hypnotic daze—a daze which had endured but a few seconds. And once more his rallying will-power and senses made him acutely alive to the hideous peril in which ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... still at his feet, kneeling, alone with her heartbreak, fixing her dry eyes on the cross with a gaze of hypnotic tenacity. . . . There was her son near her knees, lying stretched out as she had so often watched him when sleeping in his cradle! . . . The father's sobs were wringing her heart, too, but with an unbearable depression, without his wrathful ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... lessen the interest in the details of to-day; consequently I may have missed a great many interesting happenings alongside of me which I would have wanted to note under other circumstances. One gets into a strange psychological, almost hypnotic, state of mind while on the firing line which probably prevents the mind's eye from observing and noticing things in a normal way. This accounts, perhaps, for some blank spaces in my memory. Besides, I went out completely resigned to my fate, without much ...
— Four Weeks in the Trenches - The War Story of a Violinist • Fritz Kreisler
... elected to a seat in the Legislature from Lowndes County as a Democrat, must be endowed with some strange and hidden power through the exercise of which he could direct the movements and control the actions of those who might be brought in contact with him or subjected to his hypnotic influence; hence the anxiety and curiosity to hear the maiden speech of this strange and remarkable man. The voice in the House of a Democrat from the county of Lowndes was of so strange, so sudden, so unexpected and so remarkable that it was difficult for ...
— The Facts of Reconstruction • John R. Lynch
... themselves to be "magnetized" or influenced psychically by persons of whom they know nothing. Otherwise, the medium not only places himself under subjection to the mentality and emotionality of strangers and undesirable persons, just as would a hypnotic subject if he placed himself under the control of such persons. Moreover, in the case of the medium, there is a danger of his being so influenced in this way that thereafter he may attract to himself a class of undesirable spirit influences who would otherwise ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... no sort of miracle-working, no interference with the order of nature. The influence of mind upon mind, even without the intervention of words or other symbols, is a part of the order of nature which no one to-day dreams of questioning. Hypnotic suggestion is a department of orthodox medical practice, and telepathy is more and more widely admitted, if only as a refuge from the hypothesis of survival after death. If, then, we have a divine mind applying itself to the problems of humanity, and capable of ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... whirled as though she were answering the dominant spirit of his eyes even through the back of her head, and, looking over to the bed, he saw his own little kinswoman answering that same masterful spirit in a way that seemed hardly less hypnotic. Even Gray's clear eyes, fixed at first on the little mountain girl, had turned to Jason, but they were undaunted and smiling, and when Jason, seeing Steve's face at the window and his mother edging out through the front door, seemed to hesitate in his dance, and Mavis, thinking ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... long, however, as the monotonous sounds exerted a hypnotic effect on his senses. Once or twice as he was almost falling asleep, he felt himself clinging desperately to Caradoc's hand, his grip weakening, the fearsome void gaping under him, then he would awake with a start that sent a knife of pain through his bruised ribs. ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... catch me!" observed the Sage, brightly. "I brought my truth-compeller with me—a little, patent, electrical hypnotic arrangement, in the shape of this ring"—he showed it as he spoke. "I have only to turn it on my finger, and it obliges anyone who may be addressing me instantly ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... But however powerful this hypnotic influence may be, it is not the chief nor the most pernicious activity of the Church. The chief and most pernicious work of the Church is that which is directed to the deception of children—these very children of whom ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... theme—that the round or the whirling have such attraction for us? What is the secret of the fascination of the circle? Why is it that the turning of anything, be it but a barrel-organ or a phrase, holds one as with an hypnotic power? I confess that I can never genuinely pity a knife-grinder, however needy. Think of the pleasure of driving that wheel all day, the merry chirp of the knife on the stone, and the crisp, bright spray of the flying sparks! Why, he does 'what some men dream of all their lives'! Wheels ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... loved each other dearly, yet here was one moment where self-interest must prevail. Charles fixed the doorkeeper with his hypnotic smile, and he was chosen. Almost without hearing the injunction to report at seven o'clock, Charles ran back to the store, well-nigh breathless with expectancy over the coming event. With that family feeling which has marked the Frohmans throughout their whole ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... carefully in his hat[1]. We have it from no less an authority than Professor Sznuysko that the Car Conductor usually performed these literary feats in public, writing between fares on the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car. Smith's devotion to his Musa Sanctissima was often so hypnotic, I am told, that he neglected to let passengers on and off - nay, it is even held by some critics that he occasionally forgot to collect a fare. But be it said to his undying honor that his Employers never suffered ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... too busy with the clock to take heed of her, paused for a moment or so, as if undecided what to do next, and then slowly began to veer round. But the faint echo of a voice below, calling her by name, broke the hypnotic spell that bound Diana to the floor, and with a frantic spring she cleared the threshold of the room. She then tore madly downstairs, never halting till she reached the dining-room, where she sank on a sofa, and, more dead than alive, panted out ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... Tries a Retired Life; is also an Investigator of New Thought, Christian Science, Hypnotic ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that she herself might have come partially under the influence of hypnotic suggestion. The large kindliness of the new prophet, the steady sobriety and childlikeness of his demeanour, the absence of any appearance of policy or premeditation, were not in harmony with fraud or madness. Her gentle intelligence was puzzled, as all the candid historians ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the hypnotic condition, the rest was simple enough. I had only to suggest to your mind the three objects on the table, and you saw them. The bank-note, the revolver—they were as immaterial as the gardenia that ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... not, in a few disjointed phrases describe to you the strange emotions of my friend. It would take pages and pages to make you understand the tenderness, both present and at the same time retrospective, for the dead through the living; the hypnotic condition of the soul which does not know where dreams and memories end and present feeling begins; the daily commingling of the most unreal thing in the world, the phantom of a lost love, with the freshest, the most actual, the most irresistibly naive ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... sloping. From the straggling yellow hair it slanted down to brows that overhung deep-sunk and cavernous eyes.... And when Danny O'Rourke's own curious eyes met those of the stranger, they were held in a grip that was almost hypnotic. ...
— The Hammer of Thor • Charles Willard Diffin
... few references to the originals of the characters in the novel, and to the hypnotic experiments in which Du Maurier was interested in his youth, the book will doubtless be bought. But he must be a dull person who does not find another charm in Mr. Moscheles's artless narrative, mostly about nothing at all, or about the nothings that make ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... hear me through in silence, Enoch. I remember my father telling me that Seaton believed that you had been made the victim of almost hypnotic suggestion by that beast, Luigi. Not that Luigi knew anything about auto-suggestion or anything of the sort! He simply wanted to enslave a boy who was a clever gambler. And so he planted the vicious suggestion ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... certainly have been non-suited, if his case had been carried into court. We are permitted to suppose that Zenobia, in order to clear her path of a successful rival, assists the mountebank, Westervelt, to entrap Priscilla, over whom he possesses a kind hypnotic power, and to carry her off for the benefit of his mountebank exhibitions; but it remains a supposition and nothing more. We cannot but feel rejoiced, when Hollingsworth steps onto the platform and releases Priscilla from the psychological net-work in which she is involved, and from ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... cheek. 'On my honour, I simply can't believe that His Highness, as you call him, ever really went to the other world by any of the orthodox routes. If you could imagine an absolute suspension of all the vital functions induced by the influence of something—some drug or hypnotic process unknown to modern science, brought into action on a human being in the very prime of his vital strength—then, so far as I can see, the results of that influence would be exactly ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... always a trial. The silence, the bodily inactivity while the mind is strained to be keenly alert, have a sort of hypnotic influence. An untrained man will certainly fancy he hears and sees things, and even a trained man has to light hard against the desire to sleep. There comes a longing for something, anything, to happen. ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... occupation; she sits for hours and hours, with not even a book for an apology, staring down into the black old roaring pot. It has a sort of hypnotic effect after a time. And you'd be surprised how quickly one gets used to the noise. To me it's even less distracting than sheer silence. You don't know, after all, what on earth sheer silence means—even ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... it had been fitly said that he had a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. Something serpentine, hypnotic, was in his very presence. Smith drew one sharp breath, and was silent. Together, chained to the wall, two mediaeval captives, living mockeries of our boasted modern security, we crouched before ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... slowly, "you did not actually scare me, Doctor; but you managed to give me such a thrill of horror and disgust as I have not experienced for many a long day. But, I say, do you really mean to tell me, in sober earnest, that that abominable experience was due to hypnotic ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... of the Key that has prompted me to speak, Deacon. Madame has some sort of power—hypnotic power. She employed it on me once, to my cost! Paul Harley, of Chancery Lane, can tell you more about her. The house she's living in temporarily used to belong to a notorious Eurasian, Zani Chada. To make a clean breast of it I daren't ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... The thing was hypnotic. It was big. It is absurd to sit writing of it now in such majestic terms but you have to go back to the newspapers of that day to realise how the imagination of men was caught ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... remedial; restorative &c. 660; corrective, palliative, healing; sanatory[obs3], sanative; prophylactic, preventative, immunizing; salutiferous &c. (salutary) 656[obs3]; medical, medicinal; therapeutic, chirurgical[Med], epulotic|, paregoric, tonic, corroborant, analeptic[obs3], balsamic, anodyne, hypnotic, neurotic, narcotic, sedative, lenitive, demulcent|, emollient; depuratory[obs3]; detersive[obs3], detergent; abstersive[obs3], disinfectant, febrifugal[obs3], alterative; traumatic, vulnerary. allopathic[obs3], heteropathic[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... sound of the striking of a clock, there appears to be wanting that simple process of reaction by which, in a waking condition of the attention, a sense-impression is instantly discriminated and classed. In sleep, as in the artificially induced hypnotic condition, the slighter differences of quality among sensations are not clearly recognized. The activity of the higher centres, which are concerned in the finer processes of discrimination and classification, being greatly reduced, the impression may be said to come before consciousness as ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... streamers suddenly drifted toward him on an unfelt current. Cully was held, entranced. They flowed before him, their colors dazzling, hypnotic. ...
— Cully • Jack Egan
... Janet, Professor of Philosophy in the Havre Lycee, and Monsieur Gibert, a physician, selected as a subject for their observation a certain woman, a native of Brittany. She was fifty years old, robust, and moderately sensitive to hypnotic influences. On October 10, 1885, they ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... was quick to appreciate the kindliness of this sturdy, pioneering type of man and he felt drawn to him by that strange, attractive sub-conscious essence which flows from all who are born to lead, an hypnotic current which is one of the first essentials of all men who can ever hope successfully to carry out any good or big undertaking for, or with, their fellow men; the ability with the triple qualities—to interest, to ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... sensitive and hypnotised subjects that metals and other substances produce very marked effects in contact with the human body. Those experiments showed, too, that the same substance affected different patients in diverse manner. The hypnotic experiments of Dr. Charcot, the well-known French biologist, also demonstrate the rapport existing between the sensitive patient and foreign bodies when in proximity or contact; as for example, when a bottle containing a poison was taken at random from among a number of others of exactly ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise—and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves—Stoicism is self-tyranny—Nature will also ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... genius and a lifetime; and the appealing humanity he infused into his touch, gave his listeners a delight that bordered on the supernatural. So the accounts, critical, professional and personal read. There must have been a hypnotic quality in his performances that transported his audience wherever the poet willed. Indeed the stories told wear an air of enthusiasm that borders on the exaggerated, on the fantastic. Crystalline pearls falling on red hot velvet-or did Scudo write this of Liszt?— infinite nuance and the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... point further in these pages. Like all men of genius, Wagner had exceptional sincerity, exceptional respect for facts, exceptional freedom from the hypnotic influence of sensational popular movements, exceptional sense of the realities of political power as distinguished from the presences and idolatries behind which the real masters of modern States pull their wires and train their guns. When he scored ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... hypnotic powers, and through his success in sending people to sleep in his native Siberian village (in the neighbourhood of Tomsk), he earned the reputation of being a "holy man." As they had never heard of either ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... about. We entered a bare, brick-floored dining-room, and partook of tropical fruits quite new to us—papayes, mangoes, custard apples, pawpaws, and the small red eating bananas too delicate for export. Overhead the punkahs swung back and forth in lazy hypnotic rhythm. We could see the two blacks at the ends of the punkah cords outside on the veranda, their bodies swaying lithely in alternation as they threw their weight against the light ropes. Other blacks, in the long white robes and exquisitely worked white skull caps of the Swahili, glided ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... to a new method of raising blisters by hypnotic suggestion. This is said to be an improvement on the old East End system of developing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... final in the Martian's tone made the Professor desist, and after watching his visitor sway up the stairs with an almost hypnotic softly jogging movement, he rejoined his wife in the study, saying wonderingly, "Who'd have thought it, by George! Function taboos as strict as ...
— What's He Doing in There? • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... a long wrangle which ended in a discourse by the "father," a strange thing happened. Larmy and It were contending as to whether It was merely a hypnotic influence on the boy, of someone living whom they did not know, or what It claimed to be, a disembodied spirit. By way of diversion, the reporter had just run a binder's needle under one of the boy's finger-nails to see whether he would flinch. Then the Voice that was coming from David's mouth spoke ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... No man ever dared break down under me. My baton will beat avay all dese faces and fancies. Out with your violin! [He taps his umbrella imperiously on the table.] Keinen Mut verlieren! [DAVID takes out his violin from its case and puts it to his shoulder, PAPPELMEISTER keeping up a hypnotic torrent of encouraging German cries.] Also! Fertig! Anfangen! [He raises and waves his umbrella like a baton.] Von, dwo, ...
— The Melting-Pot • Israel Zangwill
... there was in his hatred a something hypnotic that grew imperceptibly and imperceptibly communicated itself to the men at table. He gloated over the eating fat man as if he had dwelt much in imagination on the sight and was in no hurry to curtail his joy at the reality. The men began to ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... miserable. And this is what we call natural conduct. Nothing could well be less natural. That such a convention should have been established shews that the indissolubility of marriage creates such intolerable situations that only by beglamoring the human imagination with a hypnotic suggestion of wholly unnatural feelings can it be ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... and the slow interview with two purposes, by visual, oral and written tests determining the amount of suggestibility to hypnotic conditioning plus the quicker giving of a card to denote a ...
— Take the Reason Prisoner • John Joseph McGuire
... the morning, a kind of hypnotic phenomenon took place, of which old Tom was not even conscious. His eves, which were fixed too long on a luminous point of the binnacle, suddenly lost the power of vision, and he fell into ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... dazzling points of light that gradually came nearer, nearer. A peacefulness came over him, and he wondered why he had been so terrified a moment before. Slowly a numbness crept up his limbs; a giddiness attacked him. On came the hypnotic, icy lights, until they were within a few feet of ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... consistent without any reference to them.(4) It is true that, in order to accept the action on what we may call the realistic level, we must suppose Solness to possess and to exercise, sometimes unconsciously, a considerable measure of hypnotic power. But time is surely past when we could reckon hypnotism among "supernatural" phenomena. Whether the particular forms of hypnotic influence attributed to Solness do actually exist is a question we need not determine. The poet does not demand our absolute credence, as ...
— The Master Builder • Henrik Ibsen
... as only a sister of infinite love and infinite tact could know. But she never had dreamed that he could be enmeshed by the wiles of the wife of his friend. The crux of the whole matter lay in the possibility of saving him, not only from Eva's hypnotic charm, but from the less intricate and more thinly concealed machinations of Mr. Moore. Winifred felt her first smart of anger revive toward Mrs. Latimer as she recalled how ingenuously Charlie had been led to the juggernaut ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... state, the story was a grim one, and he could not help asking himself whether there were not a connecting link between these two cases, in the person of Karswell. It was a difficult concession for a scientific man, but it could be eased by the phrase 'hypnotic suggestion'. In the end he decided that his answer tonight should be guarded; he would talk the situation over with his wife. So he said that he had known Harrington at Cambridge, and believed he had died suddenly in 1889, adding ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... fascination about a ship's concert, something hypnotic that draws you, very much against your ...
— Ship-Bored • Julian Street
... witty. I therefore turned over in my mind the people I could ask to write a "journal intime." While I was in bed, experiencing the mental state that Sir Walter Scott used to call "simmering," i.e., thinking about my work in a half- hypnotic condition, I remember that the idea occurred to me. The man to do what I wanted was, I suddenly felt, the wisest and wittiest of my Balliol contemporaries, Dean Beeching. But he was not then a Dean, or even a Canon or a Reader ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... was positively benumbing, and which was reminiscent of the blue petrifying waters of the Ural Lakes; a magnetism that was paralysing, that held in complete obeisance both mind and limb, and was comparable to nothing so nearly as the hypnotic influence of the tiger or snake, but which differed from the latter inasmuch as its inspirations were just as delightful as those of the tiger and snake are ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... language of the circus-poster. If you had taken up a certain play, you considered it the greatest play that had ever made its bow to Broadway; and you actually persuaded yourself to believe it—at least those who made the real successes were men who possessed that hypnotic power. ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... herself, and had been the living counterfeit of Sioned Penrhyn; but that was no reason why he should have called a woman who had belonged to his grandmother's time by her first name. Could Weir, thoroughly imbued with the character she was unconsciously representing, have exercised her hypnotic power from the moment she entered the gallery, and left him without power to think or feel except through her own altered perceptions? He thrust out his foot against the fender, almost overturning it, and, throwing ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of certain religious experiences and treats them as the substance and occupation of the highest life. We are disposed to describe these experiences as trances or visions, names which generally mean something morbid or hypnotic. But in India their validity is unquestioned and they are not considered morbid. The sensual scheming life of the world is sick and ailing; the rapture of contemplation is the true and healthy life of the soul. More than that it is the type and foretaste ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... even the contemplation of the remarkable sacred pictures that adorned its walls, had the interest they might have held earlier in the day, and the dirty cruet-stand on the dirtier tablecloth was endued with an almost hypnotic fascination in its suggestion of coming sustenance. At the end of the first hour a stupor verging on indifference had set in; it was far on in the second when the dish of fried mutton chops, the hard potatoes, and the tepid whiskies and ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... study of spiritism was a lady who, like myself, was a convinced believer in the reality of the phenomena, but skeptical as to the value and personal origin of the communications made in the "circles." Her daughter, a child of seven, was in fact a hypnotic clairvoyant of singular lucidity, and my brother, Dr. Jacob Stillman, obtained from the mother permission to have a private seance, only the mother and child, the doctor, and myself being present. I hypnotized the girl Fanny, and when she ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... almost! It is in their return upon themselves, their weighty reiterance, that their force and significance become revealed; and if, as Nietzsche says, they end by hypnotising us, well, all art is a kind of hypnotic process, a cunning absorption of ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... the stakes—wins dead easy, and world without end. The man who puts his doubloons on the negative either never saw a woman until after she was dead, or didn't know what ailed him when under her hypnotic influence. Perhaps he imagined that he had a chronic case of yellow jaundice, was threatened with paresis or had been inadvertently struck by lightning. Perhaps he's under the mystic spell of some "wily Vivien" ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... sometimes called cohoba. This powder, says Mr. Safford, is a narcotic snuff "inhaled through the nostrils by means of a bifurcated tube." "All writers unite in declaring that it induced a kind of intoxication or hypnotic state, accompanied by visions which were regarded by the natives as supernatural. While under its influence the necromancers, or priests, were supposed to hold communication with unseen powers, and their incoherent ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... yourself as true as you are fine, by revolting in the end against the most powerful force known to man, the force of suggestion implanted in hypnotism. You couldn't know that it was hypnotic not natural sleep you passed into last night, when Victor tricked you with that damned crystal, or that, while you slept, he willed you to do here to-night what, when it came to the final test, your nature would not let ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... went by, but he sat rigid, with hands clinched before him, and eyes fixed in a kind of hypnotic stare on the cluster of lights, taking no account of time or place. Throughout the house there was the stillness of midnight, broken only by the rumble of a carriage or the clatter of a motor in the street. The silence was the more ghostly owing to the circumstance that throughout the empty ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... sleep. Seldom do we seek rest so tired physically that we drop off to sleep from the irresistible force of sheer exhaustion. Yet as soon as the healthy man whose mind is at peace, whose nerves are not on edge, finds himself in bed, his eyes close almost with the force of a hypnotic suggestion, and he drops off to sleep. With some of us the suggestion is only powerful in our own bed, that on which it has acted on unnumbered nights. We cannot, as we say, sleep in a strange bed. It is suggestion, not direct ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... disturbed by dreams of a wildly grotesque nature. Figures increasingly horrible and menacing crowded upon me; but that which proved the culminating horror and which finally awakened me, bathed in cold perspiration, was a dream of two huge green eyes regarding me with a fixed stare, fascinating and hypnotic, against which evil power I fought in my dream with all ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... go, I'll make a trip to that hypnotic clinic of Dr. Platerbridge's; and if I can learn the trick, I will open ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... characteristics, and at the same time the trend they are to take. Contagion is a phenomenon of which it is easy to establish the presence, but that it is not easy to explain. It must be classed among those phenomena of a hypnotic order, which we shall shortly study. In a crowd every sentiment and act is contagious, and contagious to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest. This is an aptitude ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... affairs association plays a very curious part. When a man is shouting for joy he can scatter largesse with a free hand, but he cannot loosen his purse-strings while he is holding his breath; and even when it is only being held for him by a sort of hypnotic suggestion, his nature is still undergoing ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... with the sharpest steel, slowly descending, its arc of vibration increasing as the terrible edge almost imperceptibly approaches the prisoner. We find ourselves bound with him, suffering from the slow torture. We would escape into the upper air if we could, but Poe's hypnotic power holds us as helpless as a child while that terrible ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... in which fraud is not supposable. The fact that phenomena can be counterfeited is no reason for concluding they do not exist. In experiments with magnetism and hypnotic suggestion, many delusions beset the experimenters, and there is more or less intentional foolery on the part of the subjects. Thus have I seen, at the prison-hospital of Salpetriere and elsewhere, young women outrageously deceiving ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... standardized. A few First Level paratimers would transpose to a selected time-line and abduct an upper-priest of Yat-Zar, preferably the high priest of the temple at Yoldav or Zurb. He would be drugged and transposed to the First Level, where he would receive hypnotic indoctrination and, while unconscious, have an operation performed on his ears which would enable him to hear sounds well above the normal audible range. He would be able to hear the shrill sonar-cries of bats, for instance, and, more important, he would be able to hear voices when the ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... Strange to say, the hypnotic influence must have stolen up from her ladyship's room on the floor below, and along the corridor to mine, for I found myself thinking: "She rather likes me, and can be useful, if she dominates the two girls in this way. I must do my best to ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... vegetables—they arrived at an innocent little door in a high blank wall. After some whispered parley with an old Chinaman, the pair were admitted and ushered into a large, low saloon, where scores of gamblers were engrossed in the hypnotic pleasures of "Fan Tan," or the "36 animal lottery," ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... God of the Christians," said Koda Bux, very slowly, and approaching him with an almost hypnotic stare in his eyes, "in that book it is written that the chief God of the Christians will visit the sins of the fathers upon the children. This woman bore you a daughter; your lawful wife bore you a son. The woman who was once the wife of Maxwell Sahib was a drunkard, and ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... land ballot, or something; but most of them were tired, or at tea—or in the pubs—and the corners were deserted. Observe how fate makes time and things fit when she wants to do a good turn—or play a practical joke. Harry Chatswood, for instance, didn't know anything about the hypnotic business. ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson |
