"Passive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for she had felt the tingling of a new strange force in Brandon's touch. A man, not a worm, but a real man, with all the irresistible infinite attractions that a man may have for a woman—the subtle drawing of the lodestone for the passive iron—had come into her life. Doubly sweet it was to her intense, young virgin soul, in that it first revealed the dawning of that two-edged bliss which makes a heaven or a hell of earth—of earth, which owes its very existence ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... usurped prerogatives of the King for the money of the people. This is the agent by which modern nations will recover their rights. I sincerely wish that, in this country, they may be contented with a peaceable and passive opposition. At this moment we are not sure of this; though as yet it is difficult to say what form the opposition will take. It is a comfortable circumstance, that their neighboring enemy is under the administration of a minister ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... the nobler activities—the mental and spiritual forces—through the minds and works of men. I would find such attrition more helpful than this phase of creation which thou callest 'nature,' whose unfolding is more passive, depending on its ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... take them away and dispose of them at his pleasure. How was it possible that Jehoiada should waive his divine right and suffer such a sacrilegious invasion of sacred privileges? how was it possible that he should be blamed for his (at first) passive resistance of the illegal invasion; how was it possible at all that the priest in his own proper department should be called to account by the king? Chronicles knows better than that. The wicked Athaliah had wasted and plundered the temple; Joash determined to restore it, and for this ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... of all other people—expressed in a collective and belligerent way. It is not, as said before, that all men at the South are of this filibustering cast; but the bold, enterprising, and leading class of the population are so, and the remainder are passive in their hands. Virtually and practically, therefore, the South are a nation of people having far more relationship in thought and purpose with the old Romans during the period of the republic and the empire, or with the more modern Goths and Vandals and Huns, than ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... cost him pain to mask his face; pain worse than that he endured when there still remained an object for him to open his heart to in proportion; and he always reposed upon the Spartan comfort of bearing pain and being passive. "Do nothing," said the devil he nursed; which meant in his case, "Take me into you and don't cast me out." Excellent and sane is the outburst of wrath to men, when it stops short of slaughter. For who that locks it up to eat in solitary, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... persist in maintaining a neutral, passive, selfish part, she will have to expiate it. A European transformation is inevitable. When it shall take place, when the struggle shall burst forth at twenty places at once, when the old combat between fact and right is decided, the peoples ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... that had taken place that night, the peculiar semi-trance-like state in which the King had seemed to be plunged. There was the draught, too, that had been taken, and its effects before he had grasped the King's wrist and had led him, a passive instrument in his hands, to where the cabinet stood in the obscurity of the gallery, and had him standing there, participator of that which had followed, but in a ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... answer, except to move his lips in whispered grayer. Had it not been for this sign they might have thought him changed to stone, so motionless and so patient did he stand. How long the baiting lasted no one knew; it may have been an hour, then Joseph's passive silence roused the anger of the overlord, who became demoniac in his rage. His followers joined in harrying the victim, until the place became a babel. Finally Elzemah stepped forward, torch in hand, and spat upon the ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... because there is no organic disturbance: it is, or claims to be, a temporary enhancement, not a partial disintegration, of the mental faculties. Lastly, it differs from poetical inspiration, because the imagination is passive. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... her name. He led her passive, obedient, through the press to the side street, and then he paused and looked into ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... blow up at once, their whole Church Government, and oblige all Priests, on pain of High Treason, to take out all their Titles from the King, or Protestant Bishops only, it may make them more cautious and moderate in their mighty Zeal. A Priest in Ireland, shou'd be as quiet, and as passive, as a Protestant Minister in France; and if once they are so, we shall soon find our Charter Schools more crowded than their Mass Houses, and their Parents, as manageable as ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... Annie was going to do a great deal of good, to be a comfort and blessing, not only to her people, but to multitudes besides. She was, please God, to help to lessen the great crushing mass of pain and misery in the world, not by passive, sentimental sympathy, not by little fitful, desultory doles of practical aid, but by the constant daily work of her life. Young as Rose was, and enamoured of art in her way, she was able to comprehend that if Annie could do that ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... were not going right out to sea and how long it would be before we should drop into open water and be swallowed up. My faculties were too benumbed to care much, and it was just a calculation in which I had no particular but only a passive interest. ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... in a sort, delighted; and Fleda was in too passive a mood of body and mind to have any care on the subject. The agitation of the past days had given way to an absolute quiet, that seemed as if nothing could ever ruffle it again, and this feeling was seconded ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... actually forced himself into service, while the former, who had been told to come, was not to be seen. The raja began giving orders about the prahus and behaved as if he were at home. As I remained passive he finally said that he wanted to know whether he could go; if I preferred Lidju he would remain behind. Not wanting a scene, and as he was so intent on going, I gave the desired permission. Though, like the others, he was nude except ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... driving before it a host of melancholy snow-laden clouds. Threateningly they swept over white ground and sullen wood, and the earth seemed awaiting another fold of its winding-sheet; cypress, spruce and fir, close side by side and motionless, were passive in their attitude of uncomplaining endurance. The stumps above the snow were like floating wreckage on a dreary sea. In all the landscape there was naught that spoke of a spring to come—of warmth and growth; rather did it seem a shard of some ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... make in these matters is that women, as a rule, are more passive and less reserved, while men resist more violently the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... bend or bow. Here again, to their great discredit be it spoken, the editors of Shakspeare (Second Part of Hen. IV., Act I. Sc. 1.) are at fault for an example. Mr. Halliwell gives one in his Dictionary of the passive participle, which see. In Shakspeare it ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... their political opinions, like Sir John Eliot, or lying in prison, crushed under enormous fines, like Prynne; with the courts subservient to the royal will; with court preachers declaring the duty of passive obedience to the government; with Laud guiding the policy of the king in all ecclesiastical matters,—the state of the Puritans might well seem hopeless, and they might well look towards some distant land as a place for the establishment of ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... "laying-to," as the sailors say, I would point it by a reference to R. L. Stevenson. For there is a wise way of "laying-to" that does not imply inaction, but discreet, well-directed effort, against contrary winds and rough seas, that is, amid obstacles and drawbacks, and even ill-health, where passive and active may balance and give effect to each other. Stevenson was by native instinct and temperament a rover—a lover of adventure, of strange by-ways, errant tracts (as seen in his Inland Voyage and Travels with a ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Miraculous gifts indeed they had, and miraculous gifts they imparted; but in both instances others shared these powers with them. It was no apostle who laid his hands on the blinded Saul in that house in Damascus and said, 'Receive the Holy Ghost.' An apostle stood by passive and wondering when the Holy Ghost fell on Cornelius and his comrades. In reality apostolic succession is absurd, because there is nothing to succeed to, except what cannot be transmitted, personal ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the river, they were buried. There would be no more fitting place for the marriage of their daughter to be solemnized. Margie neither opposed nor approved the plan. She did not oppose anything. She was passive, almost apathetic. ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... who are the victims of preventable misfortunes, show a vast passive indifference to the excitement of the foreigners; they wait for it to go off, like the effervescence of soda-water. And gradually strange hesitations creep into the mind of the bewildered traveller; after a period of indignation, he begins to doubt ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... necessity, his work was largely controversial, but he wrote from the standpoint of defense, and rarely departed from a broad and kindly spirit. In the "Seven Articles" Robinson admits the royal supremacy in so far as to countenance a passive obedience. His teaching had the greatest influence in shaping the religious life of the first and second ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... most for active service, some for passive kindness. Some are won by tender expressions, some convinced by solid proofs of regard; others of a yet nobler kind, and of this sort was Lady Davenant, are apt to be best pleased, most touched, by proofs that their own character has been thoroughly understood, and that they have justly appreciated ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... the basis of a policy of wage settlement in the United States. They would represent the effort to develop standards by which conflicting claims could be resolved. It is not desired to signify agreement by this admission with those who believe that all principles of wage settlement must be purely passive, with those who argue that wage settlement must perforce be nothing more than a recurrent use of expedients produced on the spur of the occasion out of the magical hat of the arbitrator. All that is meant is that no policy of wage settlement will succeed if ...
— The Settlement of Wage Disputes • Herbert Feis
... part upon the surface of the earth, this being reserved for the last part. Our intention in here mentioning it, is only to dispose the mind to look for active powers or efficient causes, in that part of the earth which has been commonly considered as passive and inert, but which will be found extremely active, and the source of mighty revolutions ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... years, and the sense of individual responsibility which it brings, caused all of them to rebel against the continued exercise of parental domination. In the case of Charles and Florence, the effect was a broad separation. William had sinister ends to gain in yielding a passive obedience to his mother's will. When the bulk of her property was transferred to him, those ends were gained, and he felt no longer disposed to suffer any encroachment upon his freedom. In one act of obedience he had fulfilled all obligations of filial duty, ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... been to her as a mother in her bereavement,—the Sea-flower. She could see that the death of a loved one had wrought a good work upon the heart of her friend, as it may with us all, if we will lie passive in ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... trembled violently; she appeared fascinated, terrified into a passive obedience by Rainham's imperious eyes, which burnt in his white face like the eyes of a dying man. She followed, half unconsciously, his beckoning hand. But Eve confronted her before ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... her passive hands. They trembled in his, but she offered not to withdraw them. Indeed, she hardly noticed the act in the tide of emotion which was surging in her bosom. Her heart moved with a wild yearning to tell him that he had found the treasure he sought,—that a love as strong ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... after a pause, "It's a fatality," dropped the Chevalier's passive hand, and said in ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... rare crew. Every man of them was marked for courage and stamina and wild daring. Yet even so in their passive moments they hated each other with a hate that passed the understanding of ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... contrasted my present situation with my wretched and forlorn condition when an inmate in the tents of the Turcomans. 'In short, I am somebody now,' said I to myself; 'formerly I was one of the beaten, now I am one of the beaters. I should just do for an example of the active and passive participle, with which my old master, the mollah at Ispahan, used to puzzle me, when endeavouring to instil a little Arabic into my mind. Please Heaven that my good dispositions towards my fellow-creatures may soon have an opportunity of ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... your ignorant eyes,' pursued my father, 'they command respect. Yet what are they but pebbles, passive to the tool, cold as death? Ingrate!' he cried. 'Each one of these—miracles of nature's patience, conceived out of the dust in centuries of microscopical activity, each one is, for you and me, a ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... Ursula stitched and Gudrun went on with her sketch. The sisters were women, Ursula twenty-six, and Gudrun twenty-five. But both had the remote, virgin look of modern girls, sisters of Artemis rather than of Hebe. Gudrun was very beautiful, passive, soft-skinned, soft-limbed. She wore a dress of dark-blue silky stuff, with ruches of blue and green linen lace in the neck and sleeves; and she had emerald-green stockings. Her look of confidence and diffidence contrasted with Ursula's sensitive expectancy. The provincial people, intimidated ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... characteristics, it must not be forgotten that in the contact with these it is his mastery over them which constitutes progress, and this involves the activity of his will-power. Man is not a slave to his environment. He is not a passive creature acted upon by sun and storm and subjected to the powers of the elements. True, that there are set about him limitations within which he must ever act. Yet from generation to generation he forces back ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... immediately be uproariously popular. This element of inadequate martyrdom is not true only of the Suffragettes; it is true of many movements I respect and some that I agree with. It was true, for instance, of the Passive Resisters, who had pieces of their furniture sold up. The assumption is that if you show your ordinary sincerity (or even your political ambition) by being a nuisance to yourself as well as to other people, you will have the strength of the great ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... it is known often to be the case, had fallen on her slumbering ear, and disturbed and troubled, without fully awakening her. But whatever the cause of the strange foreboding, the effect soon became too strong and exciting to permit her longer to remain passive. And she arose to examine the apartment, and see what precautions could be taken to render it more safe against the intrusion of enemies, whether they should come in the shape of men or wild beasts. On approaching the entrance, she discovered, standing by the side of it against the wall ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... and absorbing was the spell produced by his presence and his mien, that, in all that crowd of fierce and excited spirits, there was not one so bold as to presume to brave his anger Sailors and marines stood alike, passive, humbled and obedient, as faulty children, when arraigned before an authority from which they feel, in every fibre, that escape is impossible. Perceiving that no voice answered, no limb moved, nor even an eye among them ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... by pulling on a sheet or long towel tied to the foot of the bed, or by holding the hand of the nurse. A support for her feet frequently aids the woman. Pressing low on her back relieves her to some extent. In the intervals between the pains she should rest, do nothing, and be perfectly passive. It is now that an anesthetic may be used to relieve the suffering. She should not be put completely under its influence for that is not only unnecessary, but injurious. Chloroform when used should be given ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... in the passive monotone of a despairing Indian girl: "Just like I have to stop and think before I do it. If I drown the blue dress and the black shoes and stockings and the red dress and the brown shoes and stockings, I can write to Hannah Straight Tree, for she will not let me speak ...
— Big and Little Sisters • Theodora R. Jenness
... I know is a little man, slightly bent, who walks with a stick in his garden or sits passive in his library. Other friends have boasted of travels in the Orient, of mornings spent on the Athenian Acropolis, of visiting the Theatre of Dionysius, and of hallooing to the empty seats that re-echoed. They warn me of this and that hotel, and ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... Sir Walter Scott) is perfectly true. But what provocation will excuse such things as the following, all taken from one book, the Spirit of the Age? He speaks of Scott's "zeal to restore the spirit of loyalty, of passive obedience, and of non-resistance," as an acknowledgment for his having been "created a baronet by a prince of the House of Brunswick." Alas for dates and circumstances, for times and seasons, when they stand in the way of a fling of Hazlitt's! In the character of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... sat motionless, he caught her hands and drew her forward, and sat down again with her passive body resting upon his knees. She was ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... mankind. Feudalism has had a sufficient trial, and, on the whole, has done its work well. After the dismemberment of the Roman Empire, we do not see how it was possible for society to have assumed any other form than that of kings and princes for rulers, and the people for passive and more or less obedient subjects. It was a great problem to be resolved how society should exist at all, and history gives us the solution of it. Despotism in politics and authority in religion was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... water, he would cry like a child; whatever power he had of endurance would leave him, and he would sit over the fire whining the names of Flannelly and Keegan, and slobbering over his wrongs and persecutions, till he had again drank himself into silence and passive tolerance. ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... with merely passive or negative views, Burke was led to attempt a solution of the problem. He had never been under any illusion as to the possibility of limiting colonial constitutional pretensions. A free government ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... or two, but, like most of his countrymen, he had a good deal of common sense and self-command, which made him remain passive after a bit; when, throwing myself on my back, I floated, dragging his head across my body, so that he might rest awhile and recover himself before trying to ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... aversion to Storri, and she could not have told you why. The mystery of it, however, put no question to her; she yielded with folded hands, passive to its influence. She did not hate Storri, she shrunk from him; his nearness chilled her like the nearness of a reptile. Kipling, the matchless, tells how a Russian does not become alarming until he tucks ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... was not equally atrocious; but it must have been exquisitely diverting to a scoffer. Never were principles so loudly professed, and so shamelessly abandoned. The Royal prerogative had been magnified to the skies in theological works. The doctrine of passive obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits. The University of Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate constitutionalists to the flames. The accession of a Catholic King, the frightful cruelties committed in the west of England, never shook ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... as the open violation of the law, they committed in holding the Indians in slavery. His arguments fell upon deaf ears, nor did a single Spaniard accept his admonitions or entertain for a moment the idea of liberating his slaves. Nor did their resistance confine itself to a passive form, for within a short time, the colonists openly refused him obedience and withheld his lawful tithes, declaring that they would not receive him as their Bishop, and occasioning him every annoyance and discomfort they could invent. The refusal of his tithes caused the Bishop serious embarrassment, ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... a speckled appearance. This high temperature never causes true inflection; on the contrary, the tentacles commonly become reflexed, though to a less degree than when immersed in boiling water; and this apparently is due to their passive power of elasticity. After exposure to a temperature of 150o Fahr., the protoplasm, if subsequently subjected to carbonate of ammonia, instead of undergoing aggregation, is converted into disintegrated or pulpy discoloured matter. ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... chronic in the Stephenson household, and, like a Minister of Finance, he was compelled to develop considerable energy in order to diminish the financial demands of the opposition or render them void by having recourse to passive resistance. This constant worry gradually exhausted Mr. Stephenson, however, and the check-book, which, to save his face, he always carried with him, was nothing more than a piece ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... tardy enough, owing solely to lack of receptivity in its only known medium, namely, the human subject. But—and here is the old-man fact of the ages— Light is inherently dynamic, not static; active, not passive: aggressive, not defensive. Therefore, as twice one is two, the momentum of Light, having overborne the Conservatism of the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and other unpronounceable ages, has, in this 19th century, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of Madam's daughters, despite her sister's passive obedience, had been the mother's favourite. Her obedience was by no means passive. She inherited all her mother's self-will, and more than her mother's impulsiveness. Much the handsomer of the two, she was dressed up, flattered, indulged, and petted in every way. Nothing ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... popular, our poetical and prosaic speech, our thoughts and feelings, bears witness to the fact that that which is without sensation is also a preparatory step to sensation, and feeling both active and passive springs from it. However, a preparatory step, as such, is not necessarily the cause; and the fact and the acknowledgment of a correlation is not on ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... preferment of men whose chief merit was their family connections or borough interest, he retired into the country; and, not knowing what to do with himself—married. In his family, to regain his lost consequence, he determined to keep up the same passive obedience, as in the vessels in which he had commanded. His orders were not to be disputed; and the whole house was expected to fly, at the word of command, as if to man the shrouds, or mount aloft in an ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... the spirit receives the clearness which is God Himself, without intermediary, and becomes without interruption this clearness which it receives. See; this dark clearness, in which we contemplate all that we desire, while the spirit is passive,—this clearness is so great than the loving contemplative, in the depth where he reposes, sees and experiences nothing save an incomprehensible light, and according to the simple nudity which envelopes all things, he ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... much to his misery, because it robbed him of the comfort of pitying himself. He could do nothing now but pity his mother. As he saw it now, the crime of lying to her about that Sunday's frolic loomed blacker than the passive part he had played in the tragedy of the night. He had lied to her and thought it a joke. He had taken a car worth more than five thousand dollars—more than his young hide was worth, he told himself now—and he had driven it recklessly in the pursuit of fun that nauseated ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... a fact by the present writer, and has not been contradicted by the Rev. Mr. Byrne. But it is right to add that a very respectable gentleman, a witness of that day's proceedings, has distinctly contradicted it. He added that the Rev. Mr. Byrne remained a passive spectator; and he defended the conduct of those who really influenced the people, on the ground that the preparations seemed of their very nature to preclude the possibility of success; and that it was the sacred duty of every ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... of the world must be put to work, although this is a conclusion that might readily be misunderstood. We do not expect to harness the powers of childhood to the world's tasks, or expect industry to become fine art, but we do expect art and play to be something more than passive and unproductive states. We expect them to sustain and to create the energies by which the world's work is to be carried on. We would utilize them to give more power to life at every point, and to make all activities of the practical life more free and creative. ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... till he felt the warm blood rushing through his veins and his breath came short But though he might move one of the captain's colossal legs, which seemed to his disordered fancy to be the size of the Monument, he could do no more. The captain sat passive, encouraging him by every kindly phrase he could think of. But it was of no use, and after ten minutes' violent struggling Josiah threw himself ...
— Tales from Many Sources - Vol. V • Various
... seemed a chance of a reconciliation between Louis XVI and his people. On 14th September he accepted the new democratic constitution, a step which filled France with rejoicing and furnished the desired excuse for Leopold to remain passive. Kaunitz, who had consistently opposed intervention in France, now asserted that Louis had voluntarily accepted the constitution. The action of Louis and Marie Antoinette was in reality forced. Amidst the Queen's expressions of contempt ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... is found most acute and most uneasy in the morning. Uneasiness is, indeed, a species of sagacity—a passive sagacity. Fools are ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... things;" a casual writer for dreamy readers, yet always giving the reader so much more than he seemed to propose. There is something of the follower of George Fox about him, and the Quaker's belief in the inward light coming to one passive, to the mere wayfarer, who will be sure at all events to lose no light which falls by the way—glimpses, suggestions, delightful half-apprehensions, profound thoughts of old philosophers, hints of the innermost reason in things, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... He inspires love, but cannot return it; he feels, he admires, but he shrinks from any step demanding resolution or self-devotion. Hence, instead of conferring happiness, he makes victims,—victims not of an active, but of a merely passive and negative egotism. A conjunction of circumstances brings him to a sudden and vivid realization of his condition and its results. Instead of escaping by suicide, as might be expected,—and as would probably have been the case if Werther had not forestalled him,—he breaks loose from his thraldom ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the forefinger of his right hand. At this sign, the widow quickly raised the deadly fruit to her lips, and, had it not been for a movement still more rapid on the part of the Caribbean she would perhaps have given this fatal proof of passive obedience to the slightest caprice of her master. A movement of affright as fugitive as lightning, contracted the impassive features of the Caribbean as the widow lifted the apple to her lips; but he quickly recovered his ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... specifically the same with those we met on the Missouri, are by no means so ferocious; probably because the scarcity of game and the habit of living on roots may have weaned them from the practices of attacking and devouring animals. Still, however, they are not so passive as the common black bear, which is also to be found here; for they have already fought with our hunters, though with less fury than those on the ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... thought that people might be turning an evil eye on us; we cared nothing for the indignation of the mammas sitting passive and motionless; we hardly felt the couples that we jostled.[553] Thanks to the cradling of the rhythm, to the intoxication of our rapid and regular movement, there fell on us something like a great calm. Drunk with one ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... It may be observed that the influence of the three elements just considered is to strengthen the tendency, produced by the sufferings considered first, to regard the tragic persons as passive rather than ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Amor a little later in the same year, still at George Fox's side, but this time not as a passive spectator, nor even merely as a resourceful comrade. He was now himself to be a sufferer for the Truth. He still lives for us through his share in a strange but wonderful scene of George Fox's life. ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... As for Mrs Morgan, even this interesting statement had no effect upon her. She looked up suddenly at one moment as if intending to dart a reproachful glance at her husband, but bethought herself in time, and remained passive as before; not the less, however, was she moved by what she had just heard. It was not Mr Wentworth she was thinking of, except in a very secondary degree. What occupied her, and made her reflections bitter, was the thought that ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... the project of this memorable expedition, the result of which did not correspond with the grand views in which it had been conceived. Neither had the Directory any positive control over Bonaparte's departure or return. It was merely the passive instrument of the General's wishes, which it converted into decrees, as the law required. He was no more ordered to undertake the conquest of Egypt than he was instructed as to the plan of its execution. Bonaparte organised the army of the East, raised money, and collected ships; and it was he ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... timid skipper, whose characteristics seemed to harmonise so poorly with the demands, active and passive, of his rigorous calling. He wondered what it is that permanently holds a man like that to his marriage ties and all the duties of his life. Then he arose to wander ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... men have been going for months, crouching, creeping on all fours, starving, carrying their own death as mothers carry their children; since suffering and waiting and the passive acceptance of danger and pain have reversed the sexes, the women have felt strong, and even in their sensuality there has been a little glimmer of the new passion ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... into the tent, where he was followed by his escort. As they did so, Gonzague, coming slowly down the avenue, watched them thoughtfully. It was strange, indeed, to see his wife in such a place and in such company. It was strange to feel that her passive hostility through all these years was now turned ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... he remained a long time in this attitude, no longer thinking, overwhelmed and passive beneath the hand of the demon. At length some strength returned to him; it occurred to him to take refuge in his tower beside his faithful Quasimodo. He rose; and, as he was afraid, he took the lamp from the breviary to light ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... recurred in all its old virulence, at a mere glimpse of Sophie. The floodgates of memory loosed bitter waters upon him, to make his heart heavy and spoil his days of passive content. It angered him to be so hopelessly troubled. But he could ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... will deliver myself into your hands absolutely; nay, more, I will give you my most solemn word of honour that not only will I make no attempt at escape, but that I will not allow any one to help me to do so. I will be a passive and willing prisoner if you, on the other hand, will effect Mademoiselle ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... sane, so that he must be held to be accountable for his words and thoughts. Trevelyan did nothing, and attempted to do nothing, that could injure his wife and child. He submitted himself to medical advice. He did not throw away his money. He had no Bozzle now waiting at his heels. He was generally passive in his wife's hands as to all outward things. He was not violent in rebuke, nor did he often allude to their past unhappiness. But he still maintained, by a word spoken every now and then, that he had been right throughout in his contest with his wife,—and that his wife ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... my hand!" (A start of quick surprise.) "How could you dare?" (A flash of angry eyes.) And yet her hand in mine all passive lies. ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... own work, untiring in his literary activity, he was equally eager to toil in the great vineyard, to do something for God and for man, to make his faith active and not passive. This was his attitude through life; he would always have 'tholed his paiks' that the poor might 'enjoy their play,' the imprisoned go free; and the position which he took up in regard to Samoan troubles was a practical proof that he was, as he called himself, 'a ready soldier,' willing ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Margaret Moyes Black
... his departing footsteps had ceased to echo along the corridor without, Mademoiselle Stephanie drew a long, quivering breath and moved to a chair by the window. She sank into it with the abandonment of a woman at the end of her strength, and sat passive ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... sort by an ebullition of moral indignation, or by an attack, often of a very personal character, which transfers the discussion to a new and quite different field. His chief weapons in the petty war which I am obliged to wage with him, as often as the interests which we represent diverge, are: (1) Passive resistance, i.e., a dilatory treatment of the affair, by which he forces upon me the role of a tiresome dun, and not infrequently, by reason of the nature of the affair, that of a paltry dun. (2) In case ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... whom he sought, high up in the city, in a luxurious, sunlit room overlooking the harbour and the wide bay, was as unlike him as one man could be unlike another—white, fair-haired, delicate, with soft blue eyes and silken lashes, and a passive hand that accepted the pressure of Taquisara's rather than returned it—the pale survival of another once ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... endeavored to shift a part of his force from right to left. Meantime the English, under Lord Raglan, were subjected to so fierce a fire from the Russian main position that they could make no headway. They lay passive upon the ground waiting for the French under Canrobert and Louis Napoleon to begin the attack in front, and thus divert the attention of Menzikov. Weary of their long delay, Lord Raglan took matters into his own hands. The English infantry ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... charge: many of them will be seen under the proper words that describe their condition: such as the word debruised, where the lion is confined by the fess passing over it; demi-lion or half lion; but the examples here given will be sufficient to explain their positions, active or passive. If no mention is made of the tincture it is always supposed that they are proper, that is, to be coloured like nature: they are introduced in arms of every metal and tincture known ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... clothes, Nils, and call the names of the children as usual," said the teacher. Those were no dainty little ones, accustomed to be dressed like passive dolls by careful nurses or over-fond mammas. They had but to receive their garments in the daily orderly way, and to put them on as they well knew how. There might sometimes be an obstinate string or button, but Nils was sure to be ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... submit, and that in reality they were still quite independent. But in the peculiar eye of the Barnacle gander, who was leading, an observer with sufficient fancy might have deciphered a mild revolt against this triumph of the absurd, the accidental, and the futile; a passive yet Promethean spiritual defiance ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... its Dagon Capital, finds that difficult. However, there 's the secret of him; that I respect in him. His admiration of an enemy or oppressor doing great deeds, wins him entirely. He is an active spirit, not your negative passive letter-of-Scripture Insensible. And his faults, short ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... ever the case in the rebellion of slaves, the rise was not universal; a sufficient number of these wretched dependants remained passive and inert to satisfy the ordinary wants of their masters, and to assist in the rebuilding of the town. Still the Spartans were greatly enfeebled, crippled, and embarrassed by the loss of the rest: and the siege of Ithome sufficed to absorb their attention, and to make them regard ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... when o'er hill and lea The sun's strong wooing glow hath patiently Shed o'er the earth long days his golden dower, And then, by force of his own loving power, Drawn the hard frost, and left it passive, free To give forth all its sweets untiringly, Shall not the day rise fair for thee and me, And all life seem but as an ...
— Poems • Sophia M. Almon
... forward, his left arm drawn back, his right flung across his chest, and, so long as we fought, I watched that great fist and knotted forearm, for, though he struck oftener with his left, it was in that passive right that I ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... he, "concerning the active principle of virtue and obedience to God's commands are applicable to passive submission or resignation to his will, which is another essential part of a right character, connected with the former, and very much in our power to form ourselves to." This, then, is the view which we think should be entertained with respect to the natural evils of this life: they are ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... candor than compliment. He said it wanted flowers, and he meant to sow some. I suggested that, sown at that period of the summer, they would not flower this season. He said they would. (They did.) None of my suggestions met with favor, so I became gratefully passive, and watched the lucky fingers from a distance, fluttering small papers, and making mystic deposits here and there, through the length and breadth of the garden. I only begged him to avoid my labels. The seeds he sowed ranged from three (rather old) seeds of bottle gourd to a packet of ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... principal objects of worship in the East from the earliest times; the sun being considered as the vivifying power of universal nature, the moon, represented as a female, deriving her light from the sun, as the passive principle of production. The abstruse doctrines on the origin of things, thus shadowed out by the ancient seers, generated the grossest ideas, expressed in the phallic emblems, the lewdness and obscenities mixed up in the popular worship ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... remarking at the time my serenity of mind. The customary pain of the jacket was in my body, but my mind was so passive that I was no more aware of the pain than was I aware of the floor beneath me or the walls around me. Never was a man in better mental and spiritual condition for such an experiment. Of course, this was largely due to my extreme weakness. ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... occupied an armchair on the other side of the table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think she found these among her happy times. On such occasions she was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like most young ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... once again at precarious happiness. Far off, in her aspirations, love was desired as synonymous with peace and contentment; but in her heart Jenny had no such pretence. She knew that it was otherwise. She knew that passive domestic enjoyment would not bring her nature peace, and that such was not the love she needed. Keith alone could give her true love. And she was in Keith's arms, puzzled and lethargic with something that ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... tested by verification; the most powerful instrument is the deductive method, which Bacon can hardly be said to have recognized. The power of framing hypothesis points to another want in the Baconian doctrine. If that power form part of the true method, then the mind is not wholly passive or recipient; it anticipates nature, and moulds the experience received by it in accordance with its own constructive ideas or conceptions; and yet further, the minds of various investigators can never be reduced to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... hid his face in his hands. The lawyers were silent. A minute later he raised his head and looked at them almost vacantly. His face now expressed complete, hopeless despair, and he sat mute and passive as though hardly conscious of what was happening. In the meantime they had to finish what they were about. They had immediately to begin examining the witnesses. It was by now eight o'clock in the morning. The lights had been ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... do what he thought right. Though she took no part, and never declared herself, it is evident that she, in her heart, sided with the King on that occasion. It is difficult to attribute to timidity that command over herself and passive obedience which she showed in her whole conduct up to the moment when she learnt that she was Queen; and from that instant, as if inspired with the genius and the spirit of Sixtus V., she at once ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... I have neither malice nor vindictiveness to gratify, but only a resolute purpose to defend my reputation effectually against a malicious libel, and not to permit the libeller to set up a plausible claim that, by silence and passive submission, I "tacitly confess the justice of an official condemnation by Harvard University of my 'philosophical pretensions.'" Except for that one phrase, "professional warning," in Dr. Royce's attack, this appeal would never have been written, ...
— A Public Appeal for Redress to the Corporation and Overseers of Harvard University - Professor Royce's Libel • Francis Ellingwood Abbot
... only passive praise Thou owest! not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks, and silent ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs! all join ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... child to lead him from the room. He seemed passive in her hands. I noticed that he thrust his fingers nervously into his pocket, and that a troubled look went over his face as they were withdrawn. His last sixpence was in the till of ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... matrimony Opened a wider view of the world to him, and a colder Serene presumption The Pilgrim's Scrip remarks that: Young men take joy in nothing Threats of prayer, however, that harp upon their sincerity To be passive in calamity is the province of no woman Unaccustomed to have his will thwarted Women are swift at coming to ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... but Boccaccio frequently uses amoroso, vago, and other adjectives, which are now understood in an active or transitive sense only, in their ancient passive or intransitive sense of ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... self-denial—Oh, it was a severe trial to my independent spirit to submit to it. Yet, submit I must, for I had learned, even then, that my newly appointed guardians were not to be trifled with. Henceforth, OBEDIENCE must be my motto. To every command, however cruel and unjust, I must yield a blind, passive, and ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... ignores the fact that the Chancellor had previously sought to bribe England to condone in advance the invasion of Belgium by Germany, and that Germany had also coerced Luxemburg into a passive acquiescence in a similar invasion, and there is as yet no pretense that Luxemburg had failed in its ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... case, could consent to measure its demonstrations of indignation and abhorrence by the narrow rules of a self-interested caution. But that early experience of peril and adversity which had formed the mind of this princess to penetration, wariness, and passive courage, and given her a perfect command of the whole art of simulation and dissimulation, had at the same time robbed her of some of the noblest impulses of our nature; of generosity, of ardor, of enterprise, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... silence, Neale frankly very tired, looking rather haggard and grim, giving himself a moment's respite in his chair before standing up to go; Marise passive, drawing long quiet breaths, her hands folded on her knees; Agnes, her back to the other two, hanging about the sideboard, opening and shutting the drawers, and shifting their contents aimlessly from one to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... woman shrank before the energy of a passion so vital. No strength was in her to fight. But she could and did offer the passive resistance of obstinate silence. ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... her resolute stillness from time to time. Philip, who did not see the averted face, nor understand the real danger in which he was placing his wife, felt as though he must have one word, one responsive touch of the hand which lay passive in his, which was not even drawn away from the kisses with which he covered it, any more than if it had been an impassive stone. The nurse had fairly to take him by the shoulders, and turn him out of ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... takes,' without one spot of red in the cheek, one perturbation or flush of anger in the heart; and to do that might task us all to the utmost. But that is not all that Christ's ethics require of us. It is not sufficient to exercise the passive virtue of meekness; there must be the active one of mercifulness. And to call for that is to lay an additional weight upon our consciences, and to strain and stretch still further the obligation under which we come. We have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it. Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium—unless German—with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance, persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by Belgian waiters were dining. Who were our little party? What were we doing there and ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... the composing influences of daily routine. A desultory, very desultory correspondence, dragged on between Sally Hall and Darton, who, not quite knowing how to take her petulant words on the night of her brother's death, had continued passive thus long. Helena and her children remained at the dairy-house, almost of necessity, and Darton therefore deemed ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... phenomenon, which led to the invention of the telescope, and proved the beginning of the modern science of astronomy. Discoveries such as these could never have been made by a negligent observer, or by a mere passive listener. ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... out his watch as if to look at the time, "it is just upon midnight; you know the governor's orders, so you must go." The men, habituated like all Russians to passive obedience, went without a murmur, and Gregory found himself alone with Ivan and the two other slaves ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - VANINKA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... whereas if our object be negative our general plan will be preventive, and we may bide our time for our counter-attack. To this extent our action must always tend to the offensive. For counter-attack is the soul of defence. Defence is not a passive attitude, for that is the negation of war. Rightly conceived, it is an attitude of alert expectation. We wait for the moment when the enemy shall expose himself to a counter-stroke, the success of which will so far cripple him ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... of the word, all men may be said to think; that is, a succession of ideas, notions, passes through their minds from morning to night; but in as far as this succession is passive, undirected, or governed only by accident and outward impulse, it has little more claim to dignity than the experience of the brute, who receives, with like passiveness, sensations from abroad through his waking hours. Such thought, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... breath that is more miserable. Thou art a slave, whom Fortune's tender arm With favour never clasp'd, but bred a dog. Hadst thou, like us from our first swath, proceeded The sweet degrees that this brief world affords To such as may the passive drugs of it Freely command, thou wouldst have plung'd thyself In general riot; melted down thy youth In different beds of lust; and never learn'd The icy precepts of respect, but follow'd The sugar'd game before thee. ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... Mountdean's heiress remained undiscovered. Months grew into years, and the same mystery prevailed. The earl was desperate at first—his anguish and sorrow were pitiful to witness; but after a time he grew passive in his despair. He never relaxed in his efforts. Every six months the advertisements with the offers of reward were renewed; every six months the story was retold in the papers. It had become one of the common topics of the ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... in the instances of passive courage or endurance of sufferings, patience under affronts ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... he met the appeal of her look was hard and cruel. "She persecutes me," he thought within himself, "and she comes to me with the air of a martyr!" "You look very ill, my child," she said. "I don't like to see you look in that way." And she tottered to a sofa, still holding one of his passive hands in her thin ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... next? was the question that I asked myself. As for Lucy, she would fain have submitted to the doom that lay upon her. Her gentleness and piety, under the pressure of so horrible a life, seemed over-passive to me. She never complained. Mrs. Clarke complained more than ever. As for me, I was more in love with the real Lucy than ever; but I shrunk from the false similitude with an intensity proportioned to my ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... one except Sulpice. He was listened to with delight. The sentimental exterior of this man concealed a jester's nature, and the sober appearance of this Castilian wore all the characteristics of a polished lounger. The least smile that animated his passive countenance became at once attractive. Marianne thought him most delightful, or rather, she found him just what she had formerly believed him to be, a refined, delicate and very simple man in spite of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Fund" was an admirable institution which has achieved great results. There can be little doubt that throughout the world's history man has exhibited a lamentable apathy in his passive submission to the depredations of the insect tribe, whereas by a system of organisation he would at the least have mitigated the scourge which has in many instances resulted in absolute famine. At one ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... most singular and significant stroke in the delineation, that sleep seems to loosen the fetters of his soul, and lift him above himself: then indeed, and then only, "the muddy vesture of decay" doth not so "grossly close him in," but that some proper spirit-notices come upon him; as if in his passive state the voice of truth and good vibrated down to his soul, and stopped there, being unable to kindle any answering tones within: so that in his waking hours they are to him but as the memory ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... blessing; but it carries with it this evil in its train, that any villain who will bawl out, "The Church is in danger!" may get a place and a good pension; and that any administration who will do the same thing may bring a set of men into power who, at a moment of stationary and passive piety, would be hooted by the very boys in the streets. But it is not all religion; it is, in great part, the narrow and exclusive spirit which delights to keep the common blessings of sun and air and freedom from other human beings. "Your religion ...
— English Satires • Various
... Secretary of State was when a plan of landing troops at or near Alexandretta was on the tapis in December 1914. There was a good deal to be said for such an enterprise at that particular juncture. Military opinion invariably favours active in preference to passive defence, so long as active defence can be regarded as reasonably feasible and the troops needed for the purpose are available. The Turks were mustering for an attack upon Egypt across the Isthmus of Sinai at that time. It was an axiom in our military ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... "other-worldliness" (Jenseitigkeit) was obliterated little by little by "this-worldliness" (Diesseitigkeit); and this in spite of Kant, who wished to save it, but by destroying it. To its earthly vocation and passive trust in God is due the religious coarseness of Lutheranism, which was almost at the point of expiring in the age of the Enlightenment, of the Aufklaerung, and which pietism, infusing into it something of the ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... form, rituals and ceremonies attracts the passive who are willing to let the priest or pastor or prelate take charge of the religious work while they, the attendants or worshippers, sit quietly by and say amen and ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... failed to recognize, and in which, therefore, as by "right of discovery," they have a sort of proprietary interest. This, at least, is evident: our preference is not determined altogether by the intrinsic worth of the song; the mind is active, not passive, and gives to the music something from itself,—"the consecration and the ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... Burdon's name was mentioned she was sitting relaxed and rather dispirited, as you sometimes see a yacht becalmed, riding the water without life or interest. But as soon as it appeared that Burdon was about to enter, a breeze suddenly seemed to fill Helen's sails. Her beauty, passive before, became active. Her bunting fluttered. Her flags began ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... wish, and whatever they did made no objection. Though many a tear that day and the following paid its faithful tribute to the memory of what she had lost, no one knew it; she was never seen to weep; and the very grave composure of her face and her passive unconcern as to what was done or doing around her alone gave her friends reason to suspect that the mind was not as quiet as the body. Mr. Carleton was the only one who saw deeper; the only one that guessed why the little hand ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... to me that the passive system of defence which the Spaniards adopted in Callao, would render it a difficult matter to get at them without more effective means than the guns of the ships, which were greatly inferior in number to those of the enemy's fortress and shipping ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... action, but likewise an inclination and tendency towards it, where it is not entirely disagreeable, and can never be the object of inclination. And this is the reason why custom encreases all active habits, but diminishes passive, according to the observation of a late eminent philosopher. The facility takes off from the force of the passive habits by rendering the motion of the spirits faint and languid. But as in the active, the spirits are sufficiently ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... been more of his employment. He seems to have proceeded on his way, with the view of finding something at every turn, on which to exercise his powers of argument or of raillery. His mind is scarcely ever passive to the objects it encounters, but shapes them to his own moods. After we lay down his book, little impression is left of the places through which he has passed, and a strong one of his own character. With his fellow-traveller, though kindness sometimes made ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... Scott married Catie. To put the case more accurately, albeit in less lovely phrase, Scott was married by Catie. From start to finish, Catie was the active force in whatever wooing achieved itself, the active force which swept down on and annexed a passive principle. ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... as with suffering, and let him act his part. And the confident lover did not dream that those eyes, red with grief and surrounded by dark circles, saw through all his hypocritical professions, or that the cold, passive little hand, abandoned through the apathy of despair to his caresses, would have been thrust into the fire, before ever he would have been allowed ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... activities—to its life. The north pole is a significant element in the environment of an arctic explorer, whether he succeeds in reaching it or not, because it defines his activities, makes them what they distinctively are. Just because life signifies not bare passive existence (supposing there is such a thing), but a way of acting, environment or medium signifies what enters into this activity as ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... was, after all, but the active, objective aspect of the matter. The passive and subjective aspect showed danger also. In her extremity Katherine's soul cried out for God—for the sure resting-place only to be found by conscious union of the individual with the eternal will. But such repose was denied her. For her anger against God, even while ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and passive sorrow was more touching than their worst agony had been. They seemed like two wounded birds bleeding ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... disputants have suffered. The ever-memorable majority of 1906 was won, not wholly by Tariff Reform or Chinese Labour, but to a great extent by the righteous indignation of Nonconformity at the injury which had been inflicted on it by the Tory Education Acts. There were Passive Resisters in those days, as there are Conscientious Objectors now; and they made their grievance felt when the time for voting came. The Liberal Government, in spite of its immense victory at the polls, scored a fourfold failure in its attempts to redress that grievance, and it remains ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... I think the force of music can no further go than Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach has knocked out that underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say, helplessly, "What shall I admire and be a la mode?" But if it is so disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the agonies of the dramatis personae? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie, Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them for their spretae injuria formae? What can ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... instincts point, and for it nature has specially qualified her. Her proper sphere is home, and her proper function is the care of the household, to manage a family, to take care of children, and attend to their early training. For this she is endowed with patience, endurance, passive courage, quick sensibilities, a sympathetic nature, and great executive and administrative ability. She was born to be a queen in her own household, and make home cheerful, bright, and happy. There it is that she is really great, noble, ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... have no idea of the extraordinary events of the past night; evidently, notwithstanding the fact that you played a passive part in them!" ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre |
