"Motif" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... terre, il falloit gouverner vers le sud-ouest." L'inspiration d'Alonzo etoit moins mysteriuse qu'elle peut le paraitre au premier abord. Pinzon avoit vu dans la soiree passer des perroquets, et il savoit que ces oiseaux n'alloient pas sans motif du cote du sud. Jamais vol d'oiseau n'a ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... Shiraz, rose, gold, and that rare old Persian blue. To mention symbols for a moment, apropos of our archaeological readings together, Boots has an antique Asia Minor rug in which I discovered not only the Swastika, but also a fire-altar, a Rhodian lily border, and a Mongolian motif which appears to resemble the cloud-band. It was quite an Anatshair jumble in fact, very characteristic. We must capture Nina some day and she and you and I will pay a visit to Boots's rugs and study these old dyes and mystic symbols ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... never completely one." Something drove him to write, perhaps one of those shapeless hungers—a need for self-expression? a wish to find a more authentic kind of experience?—that would become a recurrent motif in his fiction. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... sufficient to say that fine Point d'Angleterre is simply Brussels of the best period when the glorious Renaissance was at its height. It is absolutely indistinguishable from Brussels of the same period. The specimen lappet, illustrated, shows the "figure" motif which appears in "Point de France" and the old "Venetian Point," and which at once ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... no physical decay. The singing planets of the human body merely part to combine in other songs, recurring again in the end to their old disposal and song, exchanging other worlds for their own once more, and recurring to the first motif of the symphony. I was sad this afternoon for the will failed me in my work. Sitting on the sand this morning the singing dunes had attained to the harmony of silence. All at once a little wisp of seaweed—hardly more than a thread—started to beat ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... contending that Brentano's RheinmAerchen,[41] which, though written before 1823, were not published until 1846, must have given Heine the hair-combing motif, Thorn says: "Also kann nur Brentano das Vorbild geliefert haben." This cannot be correct. What is, on the contrary, at least possible is that Heine influenced Brentano.[42] The RheinmAerchen were finished, in first form, in 1816. And Guido GOerres, to whom Brentano willed them, and who first ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... developed an excessive modesty in regard to bodily exposure which is in striking contrast to people who live on the warm sands of the South Seas. Inca sculptors and potters rarely employed the human body as a motif. Tiahuanaco is pre-Inca, yet even here the images are clothed. They were not represented as clothed in order to make easier the work of the sculptor. His carving shows he had great skill, was observant, and had true artistic feeling. ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... [119] Motif des etudes qui ont ete faites apres Lecons Preliminaires, p. 67. Lejeune prince connoissoit deja le systeme des operations de son ame, il comprenoit la generation de ses idees, il voyoit l'origine et le progres des habitudes qu'il avoit contractees, et il concevoit comment il pouvoit substituer des ...
— Practical Education, Volume I • Maria Edgeworth
... too cold in tone; but I consider this its highest merit, since it was evidently made so to emphasize by contrast the impassioned fervor of the hasp. The highlights in this part of the work are cleverly managed, the MOTIF is admirably subordinated to the ground tints, and the technique is very fine. The brass nail-heads are in the purest style of the early Renaissance. The strokes, here, are very firm and bold—every ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... empty spaces between the infinite number of spherical worlds which he assumed. There his gods lived in bliss like ideal Epicureans. Lucretius, the only poet of this school, extolled them in splendid verse whose motif he borrowed from Homer's description of Olympus. In this way Epicurus also managed to uphold public worship itself. It could not, of course, have any practical aim, but it was justified as an expression of the respect man owed to beings whose existence expressed ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... performance of the Ataboi, a dance descriptive of the growth and blossoming of the alova flower. This was performed by seven beautiful girls to an accompaniment of song and clapping. The plaintive love-motif was unmistakably introduced by a deep-chested dame who played on the bazoola, a primitive instrument fashioned from the stalk of the figwort (Scrophulariaceae). It may interest music lovers to know that the Filbertines employ the diatetic scale exclusively, ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... marbles of Nineveh is represented the pectoral worn by Sardanapalus. It is an exact miniature of a Kurdish rug of modern times. The Tree of Life, the motif of most of the Persian rug designs, is in the centre, and the border is ornamented ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... miles, yet we can fairly hear the drip of cool drops falling from thick moss to pools below. First an octave of two notes of purest silver, then a varying strain of eight or ten notes, so sweet and powerful, so individual and meaningful that it might stand for some wonderful motif in a great opera. I shut my eyes, and I was deaf to all other sounds while the wren sang. And as it dwelt on the last note of its phrase, a cicada took it up on the exact tone, and blended the two final notes into a slow vibration, beginning gently and rising with the crescendo of which ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... sometimes if that were a characteristic of all men, if that were the big motif in the lives of such men as Paul Abbey and Jack Fyfe, for instance; if everything else, save the struggle of getting and keeping money, resolved itself into purely incidental phases of their existence? For herself she considered that wealth, or the getting of wealth, was only a means ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... that extreme care should be taken in the collection and mounting of the animals inhabiting the district, and that no opportunity be lost of making this latter as complete as possible; that anything for which the locality is famed, be it fossils or antiquities, be the chief motif of any provincial museum; that, failing this, some groups or forms be collected to establish a monograph, such as Norwich is doing with its Accipitres; that, where practicable, bones and complete skeletons of animals should be collected, ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... thought of the companions now so far away. Having heard the tune in a minor key, these came in as chords of some ampler variation, making a kind of symphony of sentiment, where I was brought back ever and anon to the simple motif. And the teahouse maidens entered and went out again like mutes ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... scientific. We know the secondary objective of the spheres. It's the same as man's or any other living creature. The spheres are alive and their objective is to keep on living, but that isn't their primary motif. The primary objective is the difference between a good man and a bad one. Whatever is more important to a man than life itself is his ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... several correspondents of Notes and Queries, upon which I should like to say a word—a question as to The Veiled Queen and the use therein of the phrase 'The Renascence of Wonder'—a phrase which has been said to 'express the artistic motif of the book.' The motif of the book, however, is one of emotion primarily, or it ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... hushed, and at once the strain abandoned the woods-note and took another motif. At first it played softly in the higher notes, a tinkling, lightsome little melody that stirred a kindly surface-smile over a full heart. Then suddenly, without transition, it dropped to the lower register, and began to sob and ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... attempt on the theatre was the prose farce of "Mr. H——," in which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts. The piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and damned. The eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a sensation at Bath, as he is ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... removed it. No wonder the infant Jesus was pleased to descend from the breast of Mary and take rest for several hours in the arms of Saint Giangiuseppe, who, on being disturbed by some priestly visitor, exclaimed, "O how I have enjoyed holding the Holy Babe in my arms!" This is an old and favourite motif; it occurs, for example, in the Fioretti of Saint Francis; there are precedents, in fact, for all ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... asleep; the woman who tended him had stopped her spiritual ministrations. A child, propped up in one of the rear seats, had awakened to cry, fallen asleep, awakened and wept again. She had in her voice a thick, mucous note, which became to Eleanor the motif in that symphony of misery. Otherwise, no one seemed to be making sound except the two physicians. Her own doctor came up once, pressed a syringe again into the bare arm, whispered that it was ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... visit is due from his Aunt Selina, an elderly lady having ideas about things quite apart from the Bohemian set in which her nephew is a shining light. The way in which matters are temporarily adjusted forms the motif of the story. ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... repetition. Since it takes two to keep an argument going, Thompson's beginning was but the beginning of a monologue which presently died weakly of inattention. When he gave over trying to inject a theological motif into the conversation, he found MacLeod responsive enough. The factor touched upon native customs, upon the fur trade, upon the vast and unexploited resources of the North, all of which was more or less ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... There were two or three large editions issued, but I never got a penny more. I was told that nothing could be made out of shilling editions; but that book was well reviewed and now and then I have met elderly people who read the cheap edition and liked it. The motif of the book was the jealousy which husbands are apt to feel of their wives' relations. As if the most desirable wife was an amiable orphan—if an heiress, so much the better. But the domestic virtues which make a happy ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... as a standard geometric figure, a familiar symbol, an emblem, or a motif, or another shape, pattern, or configuration which has become standard, common, ...
— Copyright Law of the United States of America and Related Laws Contained in Title 17 of the United States Code, Circular 92 • Library of Congress. Copyright Office. |
