"Purposeful" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and more perfect form. Wholesome consideration of the realities of life now took the place of fanciful dreams. Her mind, wonderfully fertilised, teemed again—not with vain imaginings, however, as heretofore, but with something more substantial. Purposeful thought was where the mere froth of sensuous seeing had been; and it was thought that now clamoured for expression instead of the verses and stories—fireworks of the brain, pleasant, transient, futile distractions with nothing more nourishing in them than the interest ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... intelligently. To foresee a terminus of an act is to have a basis upon which to observe, to select, and to order objects and our own capacities. To do these things means to have a mind—for mind is precisely intentional purposeful activity controlled by perception of facts and their relationships to one another. To have a mind to do a thing is to foresee a future possibility; it is to have a plan for its accomplishment; it is to note the means which make the plan capable of execution and the obstructions ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... in violent but apparently purposeful motion inside the lock ... and it was also apparent now that it was a more complexly constructed creature than the long worm-body and heavy head had indicated. The skin, to a distance of some eight feet back of the head, had spread out into a wide, flexible frill. From beneath ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... mountains against the cold blue sky, and lands covered by ice-sheets of inconceivable extent; a vision of long-vanished glacial times; the triumph of the living over the stiffened realm of death. There is a ring of steeled, purposeful human will — through icy ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... and picked up his bag of stun-pistols. His air was purposeful and his manner furious. The retainers of Don Loris were in an extremely apologetic frame of mind. The Lady Fani had been carried off into the night by a raiding party undoubtedly led by Lord Ghek. The ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... (what was the same thing to him) of dignity. He would not encourage them in their vulgarity; they should have nothing from him that was not literature. Still Dickens was literature after all; not literature of a high order, of course, not thoughtful or purposeful literature, but literature quite fitted for ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... to myself, and found hope in them. Events changed, crises came and went, portents loomed thick, despair seemed omnipotent, failure and disgrace inevitable—but the motto of Alleghenia remained the same. Steadfast, purposeful, and commanding, it has endured through the trivial changes of political significance which have been as impotent to sully the actuality of her fair fame as are sun-spots to dim the radiance of the sun. It is only natural, perhaps, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... soft undulations around our feet. Its tenacious grip plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into it it was as if some malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene depths, so grim and purposeful was the clutch in which it held us. Once only we saw a trace that someone had passed that perilous way before us. From amid a tuft of cotton grass which bore it up out of the slime some dark thing was projecting. Holmes sank to his waist as he stepped from the path to ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... wonderful than the hands, is the Face, which Miss Nettleton has kept averted throughout her entire idea. That's the way the Face appears to me. The disciples and the multitudes must have seen it so, except on rare, purposeful occasions.... He must have been slight and not tall, and delicate as you see Him. It was not that He lacked physical endurance, but He was worn, as those about Him did not understand, with constant inner ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... with the fastening of her umbrella, and it seemed to me that her silence was purposeful. I ventured some remark about the ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... relief to me, Comrade Brady," said Smith, "to find that you can see us. I had expected to find that Comrade Fisher's purposeful wallops had completely closed ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... looking straight in front, with his head well up, and Barbara got a hint of purposeful activity. Barbara liked him much, but she had, as a rule, quietly baffled his efforts to know her better. She waited, rather hoping he would pass, until he looked round and advanced to ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... me through the glare of a sudden release from some emergency in which she stood. One thing was sure; if that was the way I must go, I had at least been taught how to tread it; and all through the dizzy, blurred day that followed, I saw, as I sat at my work, repeated visions of that stealthy, purposeful figure stealing down the stairs and entering with uplifted pistol into the unconscious presence of my employer. I even found myself a dozen times that day turning my eyes upon the door through which it was to come, wondering how long it would be before my actual form would ...
— The Leavenworth Case • Anna Katharine Green
... his age and position," ruminated Mr. Gryce; but after catching another glimpse of the face lying upturned at his feet he was conscious of a doubt as to whether the owner of that countenance could have possessed an instinct which was in any wise childish, so strong and purposeful were his sharply cut features. Indeed, the face was one to make an impression under any circumstances. In the present instance, and with such an expression stamped upon it, it exerted a fascination ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... Wesley," and delighted all his life in being so called. No one ever called John Wesley the brother of Charles. John had a will like a rope of silk—it slackened, but never broke. He was resourceful, purposeful, courageous, direct, healthy, handsome, wise, witty, happy; and he rode on horseback, blazing the way for many from darkness into light. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... galloping—what a jolly, friendly commotion we've made! But we can get into the road again this way. Indeed, we must get into the road soon because it is hungry work out in the air, and two inches to the north-west is written a word full of meaning—the most purposeful word that can be written upon a map. "Inn," So now for a steady climb. We have dropped down to "200" by the farmhouse, and the inn is marked "500." But it is only two miles—well, barely that. ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... the progress of the individual and the world alike depends upon the quickening of ideas. All civilisation, all law, all order, all controlled and purposeful life, will be seen to depend on these ideas and emotions. The growing conception of the right of every individual to live in some degree of comfort and security is nothing but the taking shape of these ideas and ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... men and six dogs to haul the beast home after he had been finally dispatched. The man fired several shots at him, but did not hit a vital spot. One bullet only remained to him, and the bear was coming at him in a very purposeful manner. "Now or never," thought the fisherman, and fired. The creature fell dead almost at his feet. When they skinned him they found bullets in his legs and flank, but searched and searched in vain for the fatal one which had been the end ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... flamed. "Reluctant! Don't you believe it? He hates Father like poison." A flash of inspiration came to her. She rose, slim and tall and purposeful. "Cass Fendrick is the man you want, and he is the man I want. He robbed the express company, and he has killed my father or abducted him. I know ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... the garden with enchantment, and a shaft of silver light, striking the sundial, made a shadow that was hours wrong. He smiled as he saw it, amiably crediting the moon with an accidental error, rather than a purposeful lie. ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... this statesmanlike prose, touched with the special dryness of the jurist, lurk the romance of the poet and the purposeful vagueness of the modern evolutionist; the fantasy of the Hungarian, the dramatic self-consciousness of the literary artist, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the whole family, with the addition of a little boyfriend, gathered together in a very purposeful and alarming way in the library There was about them an undefinable air of the chase, for they were all well-booted and belted, and Peggy had a large clasp-knife dangling at her waist. "It is for the hare," she said, "when we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, January 7, 1914 • Various
... being a shrewd man, he saw that if Mr. Wilding was to be taken, an enemy would surely be the best pursuer to accomplish it. So he prevailed, and gave him the trust he sought, in Spite of Albemarle's expressed reluctance. And never did bloodhound set out more relentlessly purposeful upon a scent than did Sir Rowland follow now in what he believed to be the track of this man who stood between him and Ruth Westmacott. Until Ruth was widowed, Sir Rowland's hopes of her must lie fallow; and so it was with a zest that ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... of Elizabeth, the English nation became more and more a people of one book, and that book the Bible. As, deeply dyed with Calvinism, they read over and over its sacred pages, they became a serious, sombre, purposeful—and almost fanatic people. The faults and extravagances of the Puritan party and of the later Commonwealth do not at this time concern us. It is with their purposefulness, their determination to make the church a home of vigorous and visible righteousness, and to preserve their ecclesiastical ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... of a dead person's appearance in his house demanded an explanation. This was easily given by evolving a legend that he was a spirit, escaped from purgatory or the grave, to fulfil a definite purpose. The rarity of such purposeful ghosts in an age like ours, so rich in ghost stories, must have a cause. That cause is, probably, a dwindling ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... of a military problem are of course intimately connected, because a purposeful action, accomplished, is equivalent to an objective, attained. Furthermore, the attainment of an objective involves the ...
— Sound Military Decision • U.s. Naval War College
... plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind's eye. it does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of his social type at his years. But there was something in the tired eyes that was a challenge to Trent's penetration; an habitual expression, as he took it to be, of meditating and weighing things not present to their sight. It was a look too intelligent, too steady and purposeful, to be called dreamy. Trent thought he had seen such a look before somewhere. He went on to say: "It is a terrible business for all of you. I fear it has ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... and weeks of pain that lay deep within him, but his cousin's confidence which he had to reward by living up to it, the healing effect of busy and purposeful work, the manliness which both these things had already ripened in him, all held their own in the struggle and came out of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... sat and watched each movement of my mysterious charge as it was outlined on the telltale wall before me, and saw enough in one half-hour to convince me that something very vigorous and purposeful was going on in the room so determinedly closed against every one, even her ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... liberties. Eyes suddenly opened annoyed Old Tom, and he would set the furniture ambulating round the room in a manner at once indecorous in stable objects and calculated to bewilder the observer. Therefore, upon setting down her glass, this purposeful woman would squarely fix the bureau that stood opposite her, would for a moment keep her gaze upon it with a sternness that forbade movement, then gently would close her eyes. When Old Tom must be again interviewed she would lift the merest ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... from some hidden courtyard or terrace of the building. It was followed closely by another and then another, like a flight of birds. They shot up swiftly, circled once or twice, and moved away in different directions, straight and purposeful. One of ...
— The Chamber of Life • Green Peyton Wertenbaker
... then glancing up at the clock on the tower as if she belonged to the purposeful minority which was making its way to the grey porch. Not that she had started out with any intention of going to the service, but her girl friend had come across an admirer at the church corner, and so it became necessary to do something in self-defence. Impossible to contemplate wandering ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... making the school work function in the home than by the educative process called the project. Stevenson defines a project as a problematic act carried to completion in its natural setting, while Kilpatrick says a project is a whole- hearted purposeful activity ...
— School and Home Cooking • Carlotta C. Greer
... Hall. Her first object was to make them happy and contented, and to this end she invented and, arranged games and songs and stories, contrived little incidents and managed little surprises with never failing ingenuity. Learning as well as teaching, she gradually gave a purposeful bent to her song-and-dance diversions, making them effective lessons as well as pleasant pastimes. Health and strength for the growing babies were promoted by proper exercises, a good carriage and graceful movement of little arms and legs being duly considered. Polite ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... the people of the United States, there is evident a serious and purposeful rekindling of confidence. And I join in the hope that when my time as your President has ended, people might say this ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... purposeful. Every half-hour the bells spoke to one another ringing along the whole length of the ship. Jimmy's respiration was so rapid that it couldn't be counted, so faint that it couldn't be heard. His eyes were terrified as though he had been looking at unspeakable horrors; and by his face one could ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... expecting him to speak. Every second her hesitation seemed more purposeful. Julien, however, with an effort which was almost savage, set his teeth and walked on. She looked after him for a moment and began to laugh softly to herself. Julien walked steadily on till he had reached the ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... generally into the great distances, but in Captain Anthony's case there was—as Powell expressed it—something particular, something purposeful like the avoidance of pain or temptation. It was very marked once one had become aware of it. Before, one felt only a pronounced strangeness. Not that the captain—Powell was careful to explain—didn't see things as a shipmaster should. The proof of it was that on that very occasion ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... in the cauldron wherein fermented Mr. Evans' brew of news. His rook-like eye sparkled, his movements, even that walk for whose disabilities it may be remembered that the pantry boy had thanked his God, were alert and purposeful. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... something not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, with elected overseers, and, instead of the planter, a chaotic popular assembly. If the blood be purposeful and the soil strong, such a plantation may succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long hours of leisure. But even then I think the whip will be in the overseer's hands, and not in vain. For, when it comes to be a question of each man ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a little afraid, too, of one whom they discovered to be capable of pushing things to the point of enduring pain in silence. Much of that early time was passed at Ravensham, for he had always been Lady Casterley's favourite grandchild. She recognized in him the purposeful austerity which had somehow been omitted from the composition of her daughter. But only to Clifton, then a man of fifty with a great gravity and long black whiskers, did Eustace relieve his soul. "I tell you this, Clifton," he would say, sitting on the sideboard, or the arm of the big chair in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... room and sank into a chair. She had been upheld during the scene by the excitement and the strain; she had been strong and purposeful a few minutes ago; but now the reaction had set in and she felt weak and exhausted. It was difficult to realize that the thing was real; it was the first time in her life that anything dramatic, tragical, had touched her. She had read of such incidents in novels, and even then, ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... time and space, we are in position to draw some conclusions with regard to the outlook. Our study shows that there is plenty in the character and extent of present day immigration to make the Christian and patriot thoughtful, prayerful, and purposeful. On the surface there is enough that is appalling and threatening to excuse if not justify the use of the word "peril." The writer confesses that when he lived, years ago, in western Pennsylvania, and ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... hand, had not been impressed by the clothes; or, at any rate, he had been more impressed by something which robbed them of their oddity. His observing eyes were fixed with growing interest on the purposeful face still thrust forward, and for a moment they were startled by something uncanny, something back of a normal human enthusiasm. It was only for a moment, only for a fleeting glimpse through the dilating pupils which shot defiance out at him; but ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... is one of these people. In school he specialized in athletics and was a fine all-round player in almost every sport. When he left high school to go to work he at once entered business. His employers soon found him to be a tireless worker, steady and purposeful in everything. In addition to carrying on his duties by day, A. studied nights, carefully choosing his subjects so that they related directly to his business. Despite the fact that his work was hard and his studies exacting, A. had ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... persons were scatteringly grouped in and about the narrow road near the March residence. One was Garnet, one was Ravenel, two others John and his father, and two were strangers in Dixie. One of these was a very refined-looking man, gray, slender, and with a reticent, purposeful mouth. His traveling suit was too warm for the latitude, and his silk hat slightly neglected. The other was fat and large, and stayed in the carryall in which Garnet had driven them up from Rosemont. He was of looser stuff than ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... dry, or press clothing. He looked at the two individuals whom Fitzgerald had seen enter only fractions of a minute earlier. His jaw clenched, and Fitzgerald was close enough behind the bottle-breakers to see him take an angry, purposeful step toward them. Then he checked himself very deliberately, and put his hands in his pockets, and watched. After an instant he even grinned at the two figures who ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Like a trapped animal, he sent roving glances here and there—and took in the purposeful approach of the traffic cop. He turned ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... followed by one of inertia, just as extraordinary. He felt as if he had been mesmerized; as if he could neither move nor speak. And Kitely sat there, a hand on his victim's arm, his face sinister and purposeful, ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... other African contracts were under consideration, but he dismissed them from his thoughts and centered his forces upon this particular job. Once he had taken a definite scent his early trepidations vanished. He became obsessed by a joyous, purposeful, unceasing energy that would not let ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... had scarcely come into her head before there came a knock at her door. Florence went to open it, and Edith Franks, very neatly dressed, and looking business-like and purposeful, with bright eyes and a clear colour in her cheeks, ...
— The Time of Roses • L. T. Meade
... a just impression of it. For Diana's face had come curiously near the expression on the face of her own little child. Innocent, tender, pure,—something like that. Grave, but with no clouds at all; strong and purposeful, yet with an utter absence of self-will or self-consciousness. It had always been, to a certain degree, innocent and pure, but that was negative; and this was positive,—the refined gold that had been through the fire. And ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... was not only positively good-looking, but every line of his face, the poise of his well-proportioned, upstanding figure, the tilt of his head and the squareness of his chin, all spoke of strength; of elemental strength, and of a purposeful, resolute character. And, too, she told herself that he had nice eyes. The nice eyes never wavered in ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to the house that she was conversing with no less a person than Mr. Peter Van Degen. Mr. Popple's talk was certainly more brilliant and purposeful, and she saw him cast longing glances at her from behind Mrs. Lipscomb's shoulder; but she remembered how lightly he had been treated at the Fairford dinner, and she wanted—oh, how she wanted!—to have Ralph Marvell see ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... scanning the faces of the men about him with a purposeful eye. Especially he watched one—a lean man in red shirt and leather breeches, booted and spurred, ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... much easier to laugh and cry lightly, in the phrase of the day, "I am on my way!" She had drifted, drifted like one in a canoe trailing her fingers idly in the clear water and never noting when the little craft was caught by a steady, purposeful current. It was speeding now; but she only laughed breathlessly and drank her fill of the hour, and left to others the thoughts which carve fine lines about brow and eyes. She knew that her father was beset by some sort of financial troubles; for the first ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... imagination—always quick at similes—as though she had struck a well-aimed blow right in the centre of a huge gong hanging between them. There she was, the blow said. It was this she meant. No open avowal of hostility could have been more reverberating or purposeful, and no open avowal of hostility would have been so sinister. But Gregory, though his ears seemed to ring with the clang of it, was ready for her. He, too, with folded arms, sat leaning back and he, too, smiled genially. "That's rather crushing, you know," he made reply, "or didn't you? Karen is ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... at me fixedly before speaking—a long, purposeful, loving look which no man born of woman could misunderstand. Then she ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... after graduation from Johns Hopkins, and had been sent to Germany and Austria by his grandfather when he was twenty-seven, to work under the advanced scientists of Vienna and Berlin. At twenty-nine he came back to New York, a serious-minded, purposeful man, wrapped up in his profession and heterodoxically humane, to use the words of his grandfather. The first day after his return he confided to his grim old relative the somewhat unprofessional opinion that hopelessly ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... to nor looked at Walter, but passed out into the open square before the Cathedral, and down the old High Street, with a steady, purposeful step. The rain had ceased, but a heavy mist hung low and drearily over the city, and the wind swept across the roofs with a moaning cadence in its voice. The bitter coldness of the weather made no difference to the ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... calm. With Robert near, she was courageous. Even the perturbed baronet experienced a new sensation as his troubled glance fell before her searching eyes. His daughter had left him a joyous, heedless girl. He found her a woman, strong, self-reliant, purposeful. Yet he kept on, choosing the most straightforward means as the only honorable way of clearing a course so beset ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... very well done, and she probably saw through it. She probably knew that he was as anxious as she was herself. But his very presence was full of comfort. It somehow brought a change to the moral atmosphere—a sense of purposeful direct simplicity which was new to ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... the Jennings School was a perfect microcosm, as the scientists would say, of the human race—the serious very few, toiling more or less successfully toward a definite goal; the many, compelled to do something, and imagining themselves serious and purposeful as they toiled along toward nothing in particular but the next lesson—that is, the next day's appointed task; the utterly idle, fancying themselves busy and important when in truth they were simply a fraud and ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... of the mind that result from excitations within the body or at its surface. These cause the neurons to discharge impulses which on reaching the cerebrum cause the sensations. Sensations are necessary for intelligent and purposeful action and for acquiring all kinds of knowledge. To enable the stimuli to act to the best advantage in starting the impulses, special devices, called sense organs, are employed. These receive the terminations of the neurons, and by ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... in a very low and steady voice—a voice that could not be mistaken, a voice relentlessly resolute and purposeful. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... Massachusetts were of the sifted wheat. Under the stress of persecution and the stimulus of migration, the mass of the first settlers doubtless caught something of the spiritual exaltation which inspired the leaders. But it was not for the many to live on that high level of purposeful resolution and enduring courage. It is a significant fact that of those who came over with Winthrop and Dudley two hundred returned in the ships that brought them out; and of those who remained who shall say how many ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... blindly as the lower animals; but, thanks to his higher mental powers, this blindness soon gives way to foresight, and he is able to formulate purposeful ends and adapt his activities to their accomplishment. Possessing a larger number of instincts than the lower animals have, man finds possible a greater number of responses to a more complex environment than do they. This advantage, coupled with ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... adore business, and with increasing fervor every day, and regretted, quite aloud, that she had never paid sufficient attention to this absorbing amusement, out of which all the men, that is, those who were really strong and purposeful, seem to derive so much satisfaction! On the following Monday at Bald Hill, when Hollis Creek and Meadow Brook fraternized together, in the annual union picnic, she found occasion for the most direct tete-a-tete of all ...
— The Early Bird - A Business Man's Love Story • George Randolph Chester
... preceding period is still in evidence, more and more activity is becoming purposeful and willed. While the child continues to love activity for itself, he is more interested in what it will accomplish than formerly, but an end is not yet sufficiently attractive in itself to hold him to an unpleasant activity for its achievement. ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... ceaselessly and enormously, a pulse that seemed to shake him at its every beat. It was going knock, knock, knock! He began to have the feeling that if this frightful knocking continued it would beat its way out. Something would give way. Amidst the purposeful reverberations, his mind, like one squeezed back in the dark corner of a lair of beasts, crouched shaking and appalled. He was the father of Effie's child; he was the murderer of Effie and of her child! He was neither; ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... covering the floor of what must have once been a very handsome guest chamber and was now a very handsome private office. One had to respect the simple and solid magnificence of the mahogany furnishings, the leather-covered chairs, the big purposeful desk. Above the old-fashioned marble mantel hung a life-sized portrait in oils of Inglesby himself. The artist had done his sitter stern justice—one might call the result retribution; and one wondered if Inglesby realized how immensely revealing it was. There he sat, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Sand's apartment stood open with a purposeful air when Captain Filbert reached headquarters that evening; but in any case it is likely that she would have gone in. Mrs. Sand walked the floor, carrying a baby, a pale sticky baby with blotches, which ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... The game of Squash Tennis has known many so-called "great getters," but they invariably have succumbed to "purposeful power" and the aggressively angled shots of players with the burning desire to win, "the killer instinct" that spurs the great players to go all out for ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... through deserted streets under the glare of electricity, I with my leaden shuffle, he with the purposeful forward stoop and swinging arms that always marked his ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... strikes breaking out in their own constituencies, and riot becoming the normal accompaniment of the industrial demand for better conditions. Three strike leaders were in prison under sentence of death for having killed by purposeful accident a few over-zealous policemen; and from great working centers over a hundred miles away thousands of men were marching to demand remittance of the ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... surgeon. This military assembly under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Washington was marching out of Alexandria for points west "to the Ohio" to fight the Indians and the French, to build forts, and to defend the possessions of His Majesty. The commander of the purposeful outfit was twenty-two years old, and the surgeon, Dr. James ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... are reluctant to accept the thoroughgoing mechanical interpretation of organic phenomena, partly because these are so complex that their ultimate constituents cannot be discerned, but more often on account of the apparently purposeful nature of biological processes. Some, indeed, have gone so far as to postulate something like consciousness which controls and directs the formation of protoplasm, and the exercise of its distinctive properties in the way of growth, reproduction, and embryonic development into the adapted ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... she had that morning presented the last of the milk to a sandy cat with a purposeful eye which had dropped in through the window to take breakfast with her, when her regrets for this thriftless hospitality were ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... (Case 2) lost her resistiveness as she became more accessible, although the inactivity and apathy persisted. This tendency, which is quite common, suggests that muscular resistiveness represents a lower level of expression of opposition which patients put into words or purposeful actions when there is other evidence of some contact with the environment. Sometimes one observes both general resistiveness and specific acts. For instance, Mary G., who said, "Leave me alone," and covered her head or buried ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... a new element comes in: muscular action. With the onset of muscular action, which is mainly involuntary, even when it affects the voluntary muscles, detumescence proper begins to take place. Henceforward purposeful psychic action, except by an effort, is virtually abolished. The individual, as a separate person, tends to disappear. He has become one with another person, as nearly one as the conditions of existence ever permit; he and she are now merely an instrument in the hands of a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... recollections of certain men with whom he made acquaintance in stages and on river steamboats, make a curious and striking picture of American character. The feverish, high-strung boy was never dismayed and never a dreamer, but always confident, purposeful, good-humored. ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... a close look at the pump-man. The trick of light speech, his casual manner in speaking of serious things, was not unbecoming, but this was a more purposeful sort of person than he had reckoned; a more set man physically, a more serious man morally, than he had thought. There was more beef to him, too, than ever he guessed; and the face was less oval, the jaw ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... has put its rules into form and it knows what it can do and what it wants to do. In other words, the gang is a casual, random group that drifts about in the village or in the city, subject to every passing influence, whereas the club is a deliberate, purposeful organization with definite aims and developments. Both meet the needs of the growing boy for association; both give the social instincts and virtues ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... the scientist, the minister and the reformer, were all combined in this one purposeful man. The people believed him to be a wizard, and even credited him with power to raise the dead. Heathen, sick and curious, crowded about his wagon, but not an article was stolen. One day the chief of a savage tribe said: "I wish you would change my heart. Give me medicine ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... turned out as to the circus, with Schubert and his long kiboko ruling the riot. The other sergeants were in evidence, but quiet, imperturbable men compared to their feldwebel, plying their kibokos without wasting words, stirring the whole world within their reach into action—if not orderly and purposeful, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... bolder, of those with weak appetites and imaginations by those with stronger appetites and imaginations, has been a necessary phase in human development. With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world purposeful, I cannot but believe that. But however necessary it has been, it is necessary no longer. Strangest of saviors, there rises over the conflicts of mankind the glittering angular promise of the machine. There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not need slaves nor toilers nor ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... Hamilton was said to have died sword in hand in a final desperate charge. Tidings of the massacre were carried with great speed to Massy's outposts in the Kuram valley. The news reached Simla by telegraph early on the morning of the 5th. The authorities there rallied from the shock with fine purposeful promptitude, and within a few hours a telegram was on its way to General Massy's headquarters at Ali Khel instructing him to occupy the crest of the Shutargurdan Pass with two infantry regiments and a mountain ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... he emerged alone, and once more I followed him. He went with the directness of a purposeful man to the Fahrgasse, the street of the rich merchants, knocked at a door, and was admitted. Along the first-floor front were three lighted windows, and I saw his form pass the first two of these, but from my station in the street ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... It was impossible to judge of the effect of the shots, but both knew that the accuracy of their shooting was falling off. Clench his teeth as he would, hold his breath as steadfastly as he might, Alfred could not accomplish that steady, purposeful, unblinking pressure on the trigger so necessary to accuracy. In spite of himself, the rifle jerked ever so little to the right during the fall of the hammer. Soon he adopted the expedient of pulling it suddenly ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... dread of the Indian obsession, he could gauge what his own father must have suffered in an aggravated form, blind as he was to any point of view save his own. And there was Roy—like himself in the twenties, but how much more purposeful!—drawn irresistibly by the lure of the horizon; a lure bristling with dangers the more insidious because they sprang from the blood in ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... been dealing with what we have called natural forces. The phenomena which we have studied have not been caused by any conscious and purposeful action of the people as a whole. They have not been brought about by the power of governments nor by anything which savors of what is called collectivism. Individuals have done what they would, seeking to promote their own interests under conditions of great freedom, ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... to devote several minutes every day to breathing exercises, not merely automatic, but purposeful and under ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... this afternoon that I had no chance to thank you, but the echoes of that discharge penetrated as far as my library. Also, I have viewed the debris. What on earth did you do to poor Sterry? Watching the purposeful set of your shoulders as you strode toward the carriage house, I was filled with sudden compunction. I did not want the man murdered, merely reasoned with. I am afraid you were a ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... were swarms, literally, of fresh-faced, purposeful youths and maidens, an astonishingly large number of whom were meeting after the manner of friends long separated. Later Kate discovered how great a proportion of that enthusiasm took itself out in mere gesture and vociferation; but it all seemed completely genuine to her that ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... and obfuscates individual purpose. It immobilizes personality, yet at the same time it enormously sharpens the intention of the group and welds that group, as nothing else in a crisis can weld it, to purposeful action. It renders the mass mobile though it immobilizes personality. The symbol is the instrument by which in the short run the mass escapes from its own inertia, the inertia of indecision, or the inertia of headlong movement, and is rendered capable of being ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... all still there when Steering came in. Fresh from the hills, young, alert, deep-lunged, brown-faced, Steering was a good sort to look at as he strode into the room. He had ridden on into Canaan to the tune of high, purposeful music, after parting with Sally Madeira. His experience with her out there on the hills, his profounder impression of her fineness, had acted upon him like unbearably sweet harmonies, urgent, inspirational. He was this minute keen for something to do, something ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... to the species of Amauris, which are found flying in the same region, and it is supposed that by "mimicking" the unpalatable forms they impose upon their enemies and thereby acquire immunity from attack. The point at issue is the way in which this seemingly purposeful ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... is meant the purposeful distribution of water over soil by man by means of diverting streams or by the use of canals in the shape of ditches or troughs for conveying and directing part of a water supply, or by means of some other man-directed power to raise water to ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... till the gharry stopped and he jumped out without leave-taking, he swore to himself steadily, horribly; muttering great, purposeful, trooper oaths, to which the worst a sailor can do is like the prattle of a child. For my part I had just the strength to crawl into Schomberg's coffee-room, where I wrote at a little table a note to the mate instructing him to get everything ready ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... power. All that Kant could aspire to do was to protect the ethical from attack by the intellectual part of man, and to do this by proving that the former belongs to a world into which the latter has no access. For with his will man belongs to a world of purposeful doing, whereas the reason, as our quotations have shown, is incapable even in observing external nature, of comprehending the wholes within nature which determine natural ends. Still less can it do this in regard to man, a ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... to the influence of human thought. The action of the mere casual wandering thought upon it, causing it to burst into a cloud of rapidly-moving, evanescent forms, has already been described; we have now to note how it is affected when the human mind formulates a definite, purposeful thought or wish. The effect produced is of the most striking nature. The thought seizes upon the plastic essence, and moulds it instantly into a living being of appropriate form—a being which when once thus created ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... the most distinguished German writers on Botany, in his Natural History of Plants, speaking of the chemical explanation, says: "It does not explain the purposeful sequence of different operations in the same protoplasm without any change in the external stimuli; the thorough use made of external advantages; the resistance to injurious influences; the avoidance or encompassing of insuperable ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... incooeperant, abortive ways, keeping God's earth in chaos, when a great wisdom and great virtue like Washington's a hundred years ago would convert them into a family of nations, into a federation and fraternity, with a comprehensive law, an efficient police, and a purposeful economy. ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... strange shape. In front of our camp were two thorn trees, and from between these trees, the rays from the rising sun falling full on him, I saw a curious figure walking towards me in a slow, purposeful fashion. It was that of a man of uncertain age, for though the beard and long hair were white, the face was comparatively youthful, save for the wrinkles round the mouth, and the dark eyes were full of life ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... such favor from nature, and an environment in which the struggle is not sharp and existence is a species of mildly purposeful flanerie. You lounge a bit stoop-shoulderedly forward to success. There is nothing hard about the President. I once described him in somewhat this fashion to a banker in New York who was interested in knowing what kind of a ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... nearly seventeen, though she looked every day of twenty, both in face and figure. There was such a settled, purposeful look in the face, and so much strength and soul looking out from the eyes, that had been used to scowling fiercely, so much determination expressed in the mouth, that had caught the trick of smiling much more readily than it once had. Nor was this all of the change either; ...
— Six Girls - A Home Story • Fannie Belle Irving
... the jaded creature, did she condemn him for it. She was too much a child of the prairie to morbidly sentimentalize over the matter. The mare was a savage of the worst type, and she knew that prairie horses in their breaking often require drastic treatment. It was the stubborn, purposeful character of the man that she admired, and thought most of. He had carried out a task that the best horse-breaker in the country might reasonably have shrunk from, and all to please the ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... head against his shoulder and wept anew. It was nice to have somebody asking her not to cry. It made it easier and more purposeful ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... "There are the wheels, Watson. Quick, man, if you love me! And don't budge, whatever happens—whatever happens, do you hear? Don't speak! Don't move! Just listen with all your ears." Then in an instant his sudden access of strength departed, and his masterful, purposeful talk droned away into the low, vague ...
— The Adventure of the Dying Detective • Arthur Conan Doyle
... just beyond the knot of loiterers at the Piccadilly Tube. The improbable had happened. She was walking at what was for her a rather quick pace, purposeful and preoccupied. For an instant the recognition was not mutual; he liked the uninviting stare that she gave him ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... stood a few seconds, waiting, and nothing happened, and the empty room showed bare from corner to corner. And then, you know, I realized that the room was full of an abominable silence; can you understand that? A sort of purposeful silence, just as sickening as any of the filthy noises the Things have power to make. Do you remember what I told you about that 'Silent Garden' business? Well, this room had just that same malevolent silence—the beastly ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... been continuous and diminishing. Instead, it was kept violently fluctuating—or at least its fluctuations were aggravated—by the impositions of those in charge of me, induced sometimes, I freely admit, by deliberate and purposeful transgressions of my own. My condition during my three weeks of exile just ended, had been, if anything, one of milder excitement than that which had obtained previously during the first seven weeks of my period of elation. And my condition during ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... break of naked morn, daintily protruding a pinkest foot out of compassing clouds, copiously takes inside of him doses of what is denied to his external bat-resembling vision, but with the sharp brevity of a rotifer astir in that curative compartment of a homoeopathic globule—so I, humorously purposeful in the midst, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various
... out into the street. She had not been out for a whole month now, and the fresh, frosty air, even coming to her through the musty gauze, was very refreshing. She walked quickly. She had an object in view. Very purposeful was her careworn little face as she stepped briskly along. She had a problem to solve. It was too weighty for her young shoulders; she must get the advice of another. She meant to consult Father John—not by words; no, not even with ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... man strong and purposeful. He had waited long for such an opportunity, and he was not the one to forego his advantage without enforcing his will. If Victor wanted his share of the proceeds of the robbery he must fulfil the promise, which, in a passionate moment, he had bestowed. Davia was ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... was honest, dignified, purposeful and successful. He had landed in New York fourteen years before with ten cents in his pocket, and his income now was never less than twenty thousand dollars a year. He had received a single fee of fifty thousand dollars in ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... sweetest of tea gowns, was intent upon Dr. Ernestus Parker's book on "Purposeful Motherhood." It was the chapter dealing with the "Musical Sense in Children" which engrossed Mrs. Francis's attention. She had just begun subdivision C in the chapter, "When and How the Musical Sense Is Developed," when she thought of Danny. She fished ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung |
