"Mental attitude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... knightliness of heart, and Celestina, who had never before been the recipient of such courtesies, found herself inexpressibly touched by the trifling attentions. Often she speculated as to whether this mental attitude toward all womanhood was one Willie himself had evolved or whether it was the result of standards instilled into his sensitive consciousness by the women who had been his companions through life,—his mother, his aunt, his sister. Whichever the case there was no question that the old man's bearing ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... is taken as an opportunity to better health, not to more illness, our mental attitude will put complaint out of the question; and as the practice spreads it will as surely decrease the tendency to illness in others as it will shorten its ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... speaking upon occasions when votes are to be cast, where reforms are to be instituted, where changes are to be inaugurated, you have not finished when you have turned the mental attitude, and done no more. You must arouse the will to act. Votes must be cast for the measure you approve. The reform you urge must be financed at once. The change must be registered. To accomplish such a purpose you must do more than merely prove; ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... movement. But the essence of the demand for freedom is the need of conditions which will enable an individual to make his own special contribution to a group interest, and to partake of its activities in such ways that social guidance shall be a matter of his own mental attitude, and not a mere authoritative dictation of his acts. Because what is often called discipline and "government" has to do with the external side of conduct alone, a similar meaning is attached, by reaction, ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... Mrs. Forest's mental attitude resembled that of her brother's, but with Blanch and Bessie it was different. The strangeness and novelty of the situation so different from anything they had hitherto experienced, began to interest them in spite of their previous ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... must be protected by honesty, industry and perseverance. If these are lacking in various degrees, as they often are, little progress will be made. If the student is studying merely for "society purposes," not much can be expected until that mental attitude is changed. Students always want to sing well, but they are not always willing to make the sacrifice of time and effort; consequently they lack concentration and slight their practice. Sometimes the thought uppermost in the student's mind is the exaltation of the ego, in other words, ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... expressing themselves on the subject of women in the trades is the measure of their own sense of incompetence to handle it. The mingled apathy and impatience with which numbers of union men listen to any proposal to organize the girls with whom they work arises from the same mental attitude. "These girls have come into our shop. We can't help it. We didn't ask them. They should be at home. Let ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... with the countries, so with their civilizations. Europe is the home of class, America of democracy. By democracy I do not mean a mere form of government—in that respect, of course, America is less democratic than England: I mean the mental attitude that implies and engenders Indistinction. Indistinction, I say, rather than equality, for the word equality is misleading, and might seem to imply, for example, a social and economic parity of conditions, which no more exists in America than it does in Europe. Politically, as well ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... cognizable rather as bad taste. But such reaction was effective only because an age had come—the age of a negative, or agnostic philosophy—in which men's minds must needs be limited to the superficialities of things, with a kind of narrowness amounting to a positive gift. What that mental attitude was capable of, in the way of an elegant, yet plain-spoken, and life-like delineation of men's moods and manners, as also in the way of determining those moods and manners themselves to all that was lively, unaffected, and harmonious, can be seen nowhere better ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... indicated, though only in the roughest outlines, what a trained student, possessed of full astral vision, would see in the immensely wider world to which that vision introduced him; but I have said nothing of the stupendous change in his mental attitude which comes from the experiential certainty as to the existence of the soul, its survival after death, the action of the law of karma, and other points of equally paramount importance. The difference between even the profoundest intellectual conviction and the precise ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... did not like me; perhaps it was because I failed to appreciate a certain something that was the key note to their mental attitude. However that may have been, I always felt wretched in their company, and my attempts at saying something out of the ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... History of the Reformation; less valuable perhaps as a record of facts set forth with a strong bias than as a revelation of the mental attitude of the great Reformer ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... He was a quiet patient, and lay all day with wide-open, dreaming eyes. He seemed to be waiting for something. This, indeed, was his mental attitude as presented to his neighbours, and perhaps to the few friends he possessed in Dantzig. He had waited through the years during which Desiree had grown to womanhood. He waited on doggedly through the first month of the siege, without ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Dale's mind was like a country pup walking stiff-legged into a crowd of city dogs, its hair belligerently on end and the tip of its tail wagging a friendly compromise. Not that he was at all defiant, and of course not afraid, but his whole mental attitude had become one of alert watchfulness, ready to spring this way or that, to follow this new custom or that new custom, and not intending to lag if the others made a move. So it was that when the Colonel ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... smiling lips and sinister eyes, greeted her with the suave courtesy which is so characteristic of his race and class. He typified the worst of the Spanish folk, even as the young girl did the best. To a keen student of physiognomy the mental attitude of the Duke of Alva would have been an open book. To Maria Theresa, loyal to family and countrymen, he was the symbol of her own strata in Spain—yet, beneath her gracious forgiveness of and enforced indifference to many things, there lurked ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... of the Negro in the United States' is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... almost imperceptibly, the gist of the songs changed to the sentimental, and before very long the heat and fatigue gradually overcame the men, and songs ceased altogether. As a general rule, after two o'clock the mental attitude of the troops might be described as black, ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... view in face of the solicitations of theory or prejudice. No one can read the plays in connection with the literature of the time, or of any time, without marveling at their freedom from vulgarity, pettiness, or narrowness of mental attitude. If they do not afford evidences of a profound culture in philosophy, letters, or science, they offer no trace of intellectual blindness or conceit, and they leave no doubt that their author had thought greatly and freely. Even more certain is their assurance of the range ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... beginning to be interested in less wholesome and far more complex absorptions.... He despised their straight, clean affections and quarrels and their tortuous sense of humour; the affectation that led them to take cold baths instead of hot ones: their shy, rather knightly mental attitude towards their ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... stress and strain of competition with normal individuals would react unfavorably. In the majority of cases, menstrual pain in girls is due to nerve tension, anaemia and poor circulation, improper clothing, and mental attitude. The girls who experience no pain are those who have led an active out-of-door life and ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... desperate opposition of Miss Lou to the will of her guardian, the shrinking, instinctive protest of her woman's nature, than he did the hostility of so many in the world to the tenets of his faith. His inability to understand the feelings, the mental attitude of others who did not unquestioningly accept his views and approve the action of the "powers that be" was perhaps the chief obstacle to his usefulness. He was not in the least degree intolerant or vindictive ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... simple-heartedness, had her own ideas of what a man should be, and M. de Chauxville had the misfortune to fall short of those ideas. He was too epigrammatic for her, and beneath the brilliancy of his epigram she felt at times the presence of something dark and nauseous. Her mental attitude toward him was contemptuous and perfectly polite. With the reputation of possessing a dangerous fascination—one of those reputations which can only emanate from the man himself—M. de Chauxville neither fascinated nor intimidated Miss ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... his father's misfortunes had imperilled. Ideals so homely are reckoned rare among poets, but Chaucer and Sir Walter Scott, among writers of exalted genius, vie with Shakespeare in the sobriety of their personal aims and in the sanity of their mental attitude towards life's ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... held the brains of the army, and it was quite right that the directing intelligences there should feel the loftiness of their position. I made up two lines as I was having tea, which I thought hit off the mental attitude of some of the officers present, when they saw a stranger and looked him up and down ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... perfectly pellucid lenses; to the undimmed dark of a rich brown iris; and to a pure cerulean-tinted angle of whiteness streaked with the delicate shadows of long eyelashes. Was it that Tito's face attracted or repelled according to the mental attitude of the observer? Was it a cypher with more than one key? The strong, unmistakable expression in his whole air and person was a negative one, and it was perfectly veracious; it declared the absence of any uneasy claim, any ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... explain my state of mind at that moment, to render understandable by contrast with the cold fear which had visited me so recently, the utter apathy of my mental attitude. To this day I cannot recapture the mood—and for a very good reason, though one that was not apparent to ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... of the proprietor—namely, that he may be indulged in a frantic orgie—has been gratified without any apparent intervention of the supernatural, we are left just in that proper equilibrium between scepticism and credulity which is the right mental attitude in presence of a marvellous story. Balzac, it is true, seems rather to flag in continuing his narrative. The symbolical meaning begins to part company with the facts. Stories of this kind require the congenial ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... with the idea of becoming an artist. When he became of age, in 1832, he came into possession of a comfortable fortune, returned to England, and settled down in the Temple to study law. Soon he began to dislike the profession intensely, and we have in Pendennis a reflection of his mental attitude toward the law and the young men who studied it. He soon lost his fortune, partly by gambling and speculation, partly by unsuccessful attempts at running a newspaper, and at twenty-two began for the first time to earn his own living, as an artist ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... sister Henrietta (Mrs. Surtees Cook) was unable to come up to London, so that the hoped-for pleasure of seeing this brother and sister was denied her; but Miss Arabel Barrett was close at hand in the Wimpole Street home, and the sisters were much together. Mr. Barrett had never changed his mental attitude regarding the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth, nor that of any of his children, and while this was a constant and never-forgotten grief with Mrs. Browning, there seems no necessity for prolonged allusion to it. The matter can only be relegated to the realms of non-comprehension as the idiosyncrasy ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... withdrawal of your will from its feverish attachment to things, till "they are under thee and thou not under them," that you will gradually resolve the opposition between the recollective and the active sides of your personality. By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude which the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect freedom—for these are two aspects of one thing—will become possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... well to retire to rest in a mental attitude of deliberate calm, repressing every sort of jerky movement and constraining ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... out this sweet meditation in the psalm before us, his tender longings for, and his jubilant possession of, God remain the same. It is either the work of a king in exile, or is written by some one who tries to cast himself into the mental attitude of such a person, and to reproduce his longing and his trust. It may be a question of literary interest, but it is of no sort of spiritual or religious importance whether the author is David or a singer of later date endeavouring to reproduce ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... just the discovery of convenient phrases or labels, such as "pessimist," or "socialist," or "pacifist" or "Bolshevik." When any puzzling mental attitude comes before their notice, they pin one of their labels to it, and, having labelled it, they think they understand it. The Press supplies them with these labels, and, consciously or unconsciously, they store them ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... than otherwise, to Byamee. He knows; why weary him by repetition, disturbing the rest he enjoys after his earth labours? But a prayer need not necessarily be addressed to the highest god. I think if we really understood and appreciated the mental attitude of the blacks, we should find more in their so-called incantations of the nature of invocations. When a man invokes aid on the eve of a battle, or in his hour of danger and need; when a woman croons over her baby an incantation to keep him honest and true, and that he ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... ignorant. Her right to explanation was gone. All she had to do now was to adjust herself, so that the spikes of that unwilling penance which conscience imposed should not gall her. With a sort of mental shiver, she resolutely changed her mental attitude. There had been a little pause, during which she had not turned away her eyes; and with a sudden break into a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... struck with the unique and convincing nature of these arguments that he could scarcely restrain his admiration, and he confessed to himself afterward, that unless Simpson's mental attitude could be changed he was perhaps a fitter subject for medical science than ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... She could not make out the girl's companion, beyond the fact that he was tall and wore a long, loose overcoat. Jerry was tall and wore a long, loose overcoat. Sylvia walked on, slowly now, thoroughly aroused, quite unaware of the inconsistency of her mental attitude. She felt a rising tide of heat. She had, she told herself, half a notion to step forward and announce her presence to the couple, whose pace as the Hubert house was approached became slower ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... between sets and cliques; but I am not mistaken about the tone of the English youth of my own day nor am I mistaken about the tone of the American youths, of the corresponding class, with whom I have come in intimate contact in the United States. Their language about, their whole mental attitude towards, woman was during my first years in America an amazement and a shock to me. It has never ceased ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... valued it so lightly. How Horace Endicott had raved over this whited sepulcher five years ago, believed in her, sworn by her virtue and truth! And to-day he regarded her without feeling, neither love nor hate, perfect indifference only marking his mental attitude in her regard. Somehow one liked to feel that love is unchangeable, as with the mother, the father; as with God also, for whom sin does not ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... visit to young Dunn at the latter's office. Malcolm had surrendered, perhaps not gracefully or unconditionally, but he had surrendered, and the condition—secrecy—was one which the captain himself had suggested. Captain Elisha's mental attitude toward the son of the late Tammany leader had been a sort of good-natured but alert tolerance. He judged the young man to be a product of rearing and environment. He had known spoiled youths at the Cape and, in their surroundings, they behaved ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... both in the scientific study of psychology and in individual progress and evolution, is the mental attitude of the individual; his point of view; his open-mindedness and utter refusal to prejudge anything. He will often say, "I do not know." He will sometimes say, "I do not care." That phase or presentation does not appeal to, nor ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... consented to Hugh's entering the Civil Service, but he continued to hope that his son might ultimately decide to take orders; he had cherished that hope from Hugh's earliest years, and seeing Hugh's fondness for the externals of religion, while he knew nothing of his mental attitude, he still believed and prayed that Hugh might be led to enter the service of the Church. Hugh realised that this was still his father's deep preoccupation, and perceived that he avoided any direct expression of his wishes, exercising only a transparent diplomacy which was infinitely ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... brother's organ, was not surprising; but it was monstrous that she, Hilda, the secretary, the priestess, should share this uncivil apathy; and it was unjust to mark the newspaper, as somehow she had been doing, with the stigma of her mother's death. She actually began to characterize her recent mental attitude to her past ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... there may be underlying this theory will, I think, be best explained upon a different hypothesis. Let us in the first place endeavour, so far as may be possible after the lapse of nearly three centuries, to realize the mental attitude of the author in approaching the composition of his play. In order to do this a closer analysis of the piece will ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... questions of sufficient importance to excite curiosity, but I confess that when I listen to an address intended to be thoughtful, I enjoy it more or at any rate endure it better, if I have some knowledge of the mental attitude of the speaker toward his general subject. Thinking that possibly those who hear me this evening may have the same feeling, I begin by saying that I earnestly favor a just distribution of comfort. I suppose that if ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... rise to the work, that we can derive all the enjoyment and benefit from it which it is able to bestow. If we cannot enter into the Spirit of it, the book, the picture, the music, are meaningless to us: to appreciate them we must share the mental attitude of their creator. This is a universal principle; if we do not enter into the Spirit of a thing, it is dead so far as we are concerned; but if we do enter into it we reproduce in ourselves the same quality of life which ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... it is profoundly untrue when we take society in its higher developments. If we take the lowest existing savage race we find that its attitude towards life, what it does, and what it refrains from doing, is the product of a certain mental attitude, which is itself the outcome of a number of inherited ideas and customs. A number of white people, placed in exactly the same material environment and faced with exactly the same external circumstances, bring a different psychological inheritance into play, and ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... exercise and creep, then sit up and move backward again. These will take a month to perfect. Begin by exercising five minutes and gradually work up to half an hour, rest between, always. The patient must have the right mental attitude, must think that she is trying to replace the uterus by lifting it to its natural position. The exercises must not ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann's Tractate de Lamiis, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read him Keats's poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old diplomatist towards a child's woolly lamb. For him literature had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he left me at Constantinople, ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... such a case the accompanist has been working continuously, whereas the director has had an opportunity of resting during the solo number, ought also to be taken into consideration; and it may not be unreasonable for the organist to wish for a moment's pause in order that he may adjust his mental attitude from that demanded by the preceding number to that which is appropriate to the number to follow. All this is especially to be noted in performances of sacred music, in which no time is taken between the numbers for applause. In any case, the ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... children getting ready for school that morning. They had both slept on their troubles, but were very differently prepared to meet the day. Ada Singer's mental attitude was, "I'll never give in, and Lucy ...
— Jewel's Story Book • Clara Louise Burnham
... is to be found, it is hardly necessary to say, almost exclusively among country people remote from towns, and whose mental attitude and community feeling reproduce, in a way, the conditions under which the English and Scotch ballads were originally composed. The Roumanian peasants sing their songs upon every occasion of domestic or local interest; and sowing and harvesting, birth, christening, marriage, the burial, ...
— The Book of Old English Ballads • George Wharton Edwards
... We did speak about the emotions which the plot of the play stirs up. We discussed the feelings in which we sympathize with the characters of the scene, in which we share their suffering and their joy; and we also spoke about that other group of emotions by which we take a mental attitude toward the behaviour of the persons in the play. But there is surely a third group of feelings and emotions which we have not yet considered, namely, those of our joy in the play, our esthetic satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We have omitted them intentionally, because the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... mists of childish superstition, was prodigiously to the taste of youths of eighteen and twenty. How, to be sure, we did turn up our noses at the homely teachings in the college chapel on Sundays! Well do I remember attending my father's church when at home on vacation, and endeavoring to assume the mental attitude of a curious traveler in a Buddhist temple. Together with the intellectual vanity which it fostered, our new faith was commended to us by its flavor of the secret, the hazardous, and the forbidden. We were delightfully conscious of being concerned in a species of conspiracy, ...
— A Positive Romance - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... bank shadowed the mud-smeared rocks. He rode slowly, preoccupied in studying the country. The sun showed close to the rim of the world when he finally realized that, if he meant to get anywhere, he had better be about it. Dobe promptly caught the change of his rider's mental attitude and stepped out briskly. Bartley patted ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... was, perhaps, so named in remembrance of the time when its owner had "sat down by the wayside like a man under enchantment." It characterized well, too, his mental attitude in maturity; though the spell that held him now was charged with happiness. The house itself was small, but the proprietor might have carved on his lintel the legend over Ariosto's door, Parva, sed apta mihi. In October, 1852, he wrote to Bridge that he intended ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... misadventures in my life either ridiculous or lamentable, I am not very certain which. It matters very little. Anyhow misadventures. Observe that I say 'femininity,' a privilege—not 'feminism,' an attitude. I am not a feminist. It was Fyne who on certain solemn grounds had adopted that mental attitude; but it was enough to glance at him sitting on one side, to see that he was purely masculine to his finger-tips, masculine solidly, ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... phenomena and laws of Nature will not argue with him. He must come as a learner, and the true man of science is content to learn, is content to lay his results before his fellows, and is willing to profit by their criticisms. In so far as he permits himself to assume the mental attitude of one who defends a position, in so far does he reveal a grave disqualification for the most useful scientific work. Scientific truth needs no man's defense, but our individual statements of what we believe to be truth frequently ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... do is to change the mental attitude in regard to the whole matter of sex; to hold it in thought as sacred, holy, consecrated to the highest of all functions, that of procreation. Recognize that, conserved and controlled, it becomes a source of energy to the individual. ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... perfectly well,—but I understood the mental attitude which induced him to prefer that the information should seem ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... take Tom a whole long page to get to Maggie after she has heard his "quick footstep on the stairs." Furthermore, this expedient tends to destroy the illusion of reality by forcing the reader into a mental attitude which he seldom assumes in looking on at actual life. During actual occurrences people almost never pause to analyze each other and seldom even analyze themselves. They act, and watch other people act, without a microscopic insight into motives. ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... settled, not for the benefit of the men who won and settled them, but for the benefit of the merchants and traders who stayed at home. It was this that rendered the Revolution inevitable; the struggle was a revolt against the whole mental attitude of Britain in regard to America, rather than against any one special act or set of acts. The sins and shortcomings of the colonists had been many, and it would be easy to make out a formidable catalogue of grievances against them, on behalf of the mother ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... Her own inordinate happiness and fortune had robbed this unoffending young couple. She wished that it had not been so, and vaguely reproached herself without reasoning the matter out to a conclusion. At all events, she was remorsefully sympathetic in her mental attitude towards Mrs. Osborn, and being sure that she was frightened of her husband's august relative, felt nervous herself because Lord Walderhurst bore himself with undated courtesy and kept his monocle fixed in his eye throughout the interview. If he had let it drop ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... awe-inspiring than those of a locomotive. But I have been reading Professor William James and acquired from him the idea (I hope I do not malign him) that the accomplishment of a thing depends largely upon one's mental attitude, and this was mine all ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... give up hope yet. The latter, with all her experience, was puzzled. She speedily became conscious of the absence of a certain warmth and genuineness in Bart's manner and words. The thermometer is not so sensitive to heat and cold as the intuition of a girl like Miss Hargrove to the mental attitude of an admirer, but no one could better hide her thoughts and feelings than she when ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... not deleterious. Her nature was at once stimulated and steadied by Lewes's boundless faith in her powers, and boundless admiration for their manifestation. Nor was it a case of sitting like an idol to be praised and incensed. Her own mental attitude towards Lewes was one of warm admiration. She thought most highly of his scientific attainments, whether well foundedly or mistakenly I cannot pretend to gauge with accuracy. But she also admired and enjoyed the sparkling brightness of his talk, ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... C. Bose spoke of two different ways of gaining knowledge, the lesser way is by dwelling on superficial differences, the mental attitude which makes some say 'Thank God I am not like others:' The other way is to realise an essential unity in spite of deceptive appearance to the contrary. He had recently been on a visit to the western Presidency, he went there as a stranger, but he has come back with a pang at parting from kindreds. ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... students and tell them the error of their ways. To me, that course of action savors too much of conceit of our own virtues. The best we can do is to be perfectly honorable about the examinations. Our mental attitude toward dishonorable proceedings ought to have its influence without our going about making ourselves ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... Earth's Core, not so much because of the probability of the tale as of a great and abiding wonder that people should be paid real money for writing such impossible trash. You will pardon my candor, but it is necessary that you understand my mental attitude toward this particular story—that you may ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... she did when he saw Linda and Peter together and heard their manner of speaking to each other, and made mental note of the many points of interest which seemed to exist between them. He returned to San Francisco with a good deal of a "See-the-conquering-hero-comes" mental attitude. He went directly to his office, pausing on the way for a box of candy and a bunch of Parma violets. His first act on reaching the office was to send for Miss Thorne. Marian came almost immediately, a worried look in her eyes. She ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... caused this disintegration in a usually fairly fluent prattler with the sex was her whole mental attitude. I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... Old Man so long as you are explaining in undertone and whisper, by gesture and suggestion, by thought and mental attitude, that he is a curmudgeon and his system dead wrong. You are not necessarily menacing him by stirring up discontent and warming envy into strife, 5 but you are doing this: You are getting yourself upon a well-greased ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... by the rude impact of the thought of those people upon his reorganized condition of mind, how sharp the change had been. He would have preferred to stay away. He expected that now he should hear nothing except sentiments which would be a reproach to him in his changed mental attitude, and he rather wished he might be excused. And yet he didn't quite want to say that, he didn't want to show how he did feel, or show any disinclination to go, and so he forced himself to go along with Barrow, privately purposing to take an ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Burke. He was therefore not altogether inconsistent when, after the outrages, he condemned the revolution, however much the facts which he describes may tend to explain the inevitableness of the catastrophe. At any rate, his views are worth notice by the indications which they give of the mental attitude ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... Burleigh. She made up her mind instantly. She would fight as long as she could, for she passionately desired to live her life alone with the idea of this man; but if she were not strong enough, she would marry and bury herself in the West. Nothing but an irrevocable step would affect a permanent mental attitude, and Burleigh would give ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... snipped a piece of cloth. "How can I pay you wages, if you stand there doing nothing?" "This is my day for doing nothing," Charley answered pleasantly, for the tailor-man amused him, and the whimsical mental attitude of his past life was being brought to the surface by this odd figure, with big spectacles pushed up on a yellow forehead, and shrunken hands viciously clutching ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... of both sides of the question, Bok decided upon a negative answer. He felt that American women were not ready to exercise the privilege intelligently and that their mental attitude was against it. ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... sailor-life which had enabled him to see the world, must have confirmed in him this mental attitude. The deck officer who watches the vessel's course may do nothing which could distract his attention; but while ever ready to act and always unoccupied, he thinks, he dreams, he listens to the voices of the sea; and everything about him is of interest to him, the shape of the clouds, the aspect ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... idea. His, also, the amplifying apparatus. The mental attitude was Miss Clarke's, modified by Dr. Malloy. The lead bracelets were Mme. Le Fabre's suggestion; they work fine. Sir Henry was the one who pointed out the advantage of the microphone I am using. If my hands become paralysed I can easily call ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... readily understand what a change the advent of the horse must have worked in the minds of a people like the Blackfeet, and how this changed mental attitude would react on the Blackfoot way of living. At first, there were but few horses among them, but they knew that their neighbors to the west and south—across the mountains and on the great plains beyond ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... Miss Bramble's figure if possible more erect. A feeble flame flickered in Mr. Partridge's cheeks; Mr. Soper began feeling nervously in his pocket for the box of bon-bons, his talisman of success; while Mr. Spinks appeared as if endeavouring to assume a mental attitude not properly his own. Miss Bishop searched, double-chinned, for any crumbs that might have lodged in the bosom of her blouse; and Flossie, oh, Flossie became more demure, more correct, more absolutely the model ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... convert, which reposed in St. Andrew's Monastery. The adventures that overtook the relics and their illegal guardian during the journey back to Flanders make up a medieval romance of much interest and throw a curious light on the mental attitude of the religious, as regards the rights of property, ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... in this bit of description lies in the few words expressive of the mental attitude of the onlookers. And it is a nice distinction which Hardy makes when he says that 'imaginative inhabitants who would have felt an unpleasantness at the discovery of a comparatively modern skeleton in their gardens were quite unmoved by these hoary shapes. They had lived so long ago, their ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... to grasp the mental attitude of the range dwellers, was further mystified by a sheriff who spoke of humoring the ladies in a matter ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... we fear will surely come upon us. By a wrong mental attitude we have set in motion a train of events that ends in disaster. People who die in middle life from disease, almost without exception, are those who have been preparing for death. The acute tragic condition is simply the result of a chronic state of mind—a culmination ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard |
