"Repulsion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... points bear the greatest resemblance to one another, will present the strongest mutual attraction, but they cannot, on that account, compose an independent whole; for the degrees of this affinity imperceptibly diminish and increase, and in the midst of so many transitions there is no absolute repulsion, no total separation, even between the most discordant elements. Take which you will of these masses which have assumed an organic form according to their own inherent energy; if you do not forcibly divide them by a mechanical operation, no one will exhibit an absolutely distinct ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... of any gesture of repulsion, there exists in the soul of all women a sentiment which tends, sooner or later, to proscribe all pleasure ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... to disguise the mythology, the arts, and the literature of Greece, as well as many of the Asiatic religions, imbued as they were with an erotic spirit of subtle enticement. Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind the liveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violent dread of them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance the liberty of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses of such liberty, particularly prodigality ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero
... ill, as I have said, and was the worse tempered; and, besides, it is a peculiarity of witches, that what works in others to sympathy, works in them to repulsion. Also, Watho had a poor, helpless, rudimentary spleen of a conscience left, just enough to make her uncomfortable, and therefore more wicked. So, when she heard that Photogen was ill, she was angry. Ill, indeed! after all she had done to saturate him with ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... seemed to represent unbounded wealth, and as the news spread in Ireland the move to America, which at the first seemed hopeless exile, presented itself as a highly desirable step towards social betterment. Emigration is now the result of attraction from America rather than of repulsion from Ireland, a fact which explains the failure of more than one well-meant attempt to check the movement by action on this side ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... spite of the veil he felt the full intensity of a gaze which seemed to be seeking his very soul. How long they stood there watching each other in breathless silence Travers did not know. Nor did he know why this strange, powerless figure filled him with a sickening repulsion and held him paralyzed so that he could only wait in passive, motionless expectation. Suddenly the hand sank to her side and he shook himself as though he had been awakened from ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... disarray. Weston vacantly noticed the puffiness of his cheeks, and the bagginess beneath his eyes. The stamp of indulgence was very plain upon him, and the younger man, who had led a simple, strenuous life, was sensible of a certain repulsion ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... much as to say, we must suit the incantation to the listener, so that when he hears the words he shall not think that the enchanter is laughing at him in his sleeve. I cannot certainly conceive a method better calculated to excite hatred and repulsion than to go to some one who knows that he is small and ugly and a weakling, and to breathe in his ears the flattering tale that he is beautiful and tall and stalwart. But do you ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... immediate training of his father and his uncle, both of them good Scotch classical scholars, and one of them at least a proficient in mathematics. No doubt the human mind, especially in its best estate of juvenile vigor and frivolity, has remarkable aptitude for the repulsion of unwelcome knowledge; but it can hardly be said that even Patrick Henry's gift in that direction could have prevented his becoming, under two such masters, tolerably well grounded in Latin, if not in Greek, or that the person who ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... had lived for seventy years under the old regime. The young man was a gentleman—so had been the girl's father. Conditions were changed, but human nature was the same. Would the young man's love turn to disgust and repulsion, or would it merely sink from the level of worship to that of desire? Would the girl, denied marriage, accept anything less? Her mother had,—but conditions were changed. Yes, conditions were changed, so far as the girl ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... Risler, deeply touched, held out his hand to his friend, who hastily withdrew his. That movement of repulsion was so instinctive, so brutal, that all Risler's emotion ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... felt the rude touch of the nurse's hand, the young girl was once more seized with the same nervous trembling, only more frequently and strongly than before. And soon, whether by a sort of instinctive repulsion, magnetically excited during her swoon, or from the effect of the cold night air, Adrienne again started ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... continued to make their intercourse even after many weeks of schoolboy intimacy. Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip, being the son of a "rascal," was his natural enemy; never thoroughly overcame his repulsion to Philip's deformity. He was a boy who adhered tenaciously to impressions once received; as with all minds in which mere perception predominates over thought and emotion, the external remained to him rigidly ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... malaise of Europe. The Greek philosopher Empedocles looked on the world as the product of two all-pervading forces, love and hate, acting on blind matter: love brought cognate particles together and held them in union; hate or repulsion kept asunder the unlike or hostile elements. We may use the terms of this old cosmogony in reference to existing political conditions, and assert that these two elemental principles have drawn Europe apart into two hostile masses; with this ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... various strains and elements which met in him, and which were in these days pulling one against another in his half-formed being, at a great expense of spirit and body. Add the storms, which from time to time attacked him, of shivering repulsion from the climate and conditions of life in the city which he yet deeply and imaginatively loved; the moods of spiritual revolt against the harsh doctrines of the creed in which he had been brought up, and to which ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... trying to extract out of this an excuse for her husband's evident repulsion, as she said, with a playful smile, "You were not a steady ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... informed masses, not merely the methods of science, but also its whole position in regard to the intellectual life of men and nations." He is surely right when he insists that if we explain attraction and repulsion as exhibitions of mind, we simply throw Psyche out of the window and Psyche ceases to be Psyche;[307] and when, allowing that it is easy to say that a cell consists of minute particles, and these we call plastidules, that plastidules ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Nature? And can we explain them any more than we can explain physical laws? A psychologist can formulate the mental law of association, but he can no more explain it than Newton could explain the laws of attraction and repulsion which pervade the world of matter. We do not know, we cannot know, what the conditions of our spiritual being are. The state of mind induced by prayer may, in accordance with some mental law, be essential to certain modes of spiritual energy, specially conducive to the highest of all ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... with a movement both of decision and repulsion. "You aren't even clean. Don't touch my dress. What ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... fed than the average sane citizen, and the gallows-birds in the State's prison were brought down to a temperance which caused admirers of that species of fowl to tremble with indignation. In short, the two capitals were as much at odds as the two poles of a magnet, and the results of this repulsion were not all of them worthy of ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... repulsive sot, with feeble body and weakening mind, and reflect upon the humiliation he must endure, the poverty he must face, and the physical and mental pain he must bear in the future if he now fails to break the desire ties that bind him. This creates in him a feeling of repulsion toward the cause of it all; and if he continues to think daily upon this hideous picture of what he is slowly drifting toward—if he daily regards it all with a feeling of slight repulsion—then even within ...
— Self-Development and the Way to Power • L. W. Rogers
... of Dickens; as the "Adsum" of Thackeray; as the "Trop lourd!" of Porthos' last agony; as the longer but hardly less quintessenced malediction of Habakkuk Mucklewrath on Claverhouse. It is of Eugenie Grandet shrinking in automatic repulsion from the little bench as she reads her cousin's letter; of Henri de Marsay's cigar (his enjoyment of it, that is to say, for his words are quite commonplace) as he leaves "la Fille aux Yeux d'Or"; of the lover allowing himself to be built up in "La Grande ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... idiopathic or symptomatic affection. As the first, it may arise, where there exists a predisposition in the brain, from various injuries inflicted on the head by slight blows;—from all the general causes of inflammation—from the sudden drying up of long established discharges—the sudden repulsion of cutaneous eruptions, or the imperfect evolution of that or other sanative actions of the system, at the close of some febrile diseases, usually denominated defect of crisis. When, on the other hand, the disease is symptomatic, it may arise from a particular ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... answer, but felt a quiver of repulsion. His voice was thick, his eyes had a stupid amorous look, and he smelt of whisky. Sadie was not remarkably fastidious; she had, for several years, managed a hotel, and had used her physical charm to attract the man, but she was jarred. As yet, she made no appeal to the better side of ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... inadequate idea of the physiognomy of the Celtic races, were we not to study them under what is perhaps the most singular aspect of their development—that is to say, their ecclesiastical antiquities and their saints. Leaving on one side the temporary repulsion which Christian mildness had to conquer in the classes of society which saw their influence diminished by the new order of things, it can be truly said, that the gentleness of manners and the exquisite sensibility of the ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... a sudden huge eruption of vapor in space some two hundred miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosive had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive's gases. A cauliflowerlike shape of filmy whiteness appeared and ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... the bookroom and cried, after her first sight of him. He was a wretched, pinched morsel of humanity, though mamma and Emily detected wonderful resemblances; I never saw them, but then he inherited his mother's repulsion towards me, and roared doubly at the sight of me. My mother held that he was the victim of Selina's dissipations and mismanagement of herself and him, and gave many matronly groans at his treatment by the smart, flighty nurse, who waged one continual ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... self-exaltation in her. Highly-toned and pure as her spirit was, it shrank from any strain of self-seeking or pride. Only such a spirit could have conceived such a work of usefulness; only such an one could endure the inevitable repulsion which attends such work among ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... terrific discords with the subtle concords. Not by contrast, or as reciprocal foils do these elements act, which is the feeble conception of many, but by union. They are the sexual forces in music: "male and female created he them;" and these mighty antagonists do not put forth their hostilities by repulsion, but by deepest attraction. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... relation to one another. Abstractions grow together and again become concrete in a new and higher sense. They also admit of development from within their own spheres. Everywhere there is a movement of attraction and repulsion going on—an attraction or repulsion of ideas of which the physical phenomenon described under a similar name is a figure. Freedom and necessity, mind and matter, the continuous and the discrete, cause and effect, are perpetually being severed from one another in thought, only to be perpetually ...
— Sophist • Plato
... transports, far from assuaging, tormented her, or seemed a torment. She loved uneasily, by hot and cold fits; now melting, now dry, now fierce in demand, next passionate in refusal. To snatch of love succeeded repulsion of love. She would fling herself headlong into Richard's arms, and sob there, feverish; then, as suddenly, struggle for release, as one who longs to hide herself, and finding that refused, lie motionless like a woman of wax. Whether embraced ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... singular an apparition, she seemed likelier to find her sisterhood in poetry and picture than in real life. Let us turn away from her, lest a touch too apt should compel her stately and cold and soft and womanly grace to gleam out upon my page with a strange repulsion and unattainableness in the very spell that made her beautiful. At her side, and familiarly attentive to her, sat a gentleman of whom I remember only a hard outline of the nose and forehead, and such a monstrous portent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... Sacrificed every ill-feeling, overcame repulsion, put up with taunts and cross words, and waited on Thornton Rush's mother as if she had been her own. And this in the happy beginning of her wedded life with Hubert Lisle. And what reward had she? None in this life, save the consciousness ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... fetched twice the price of any other meat in their city. "It was bought as beef," added the Cossack, "so that anyhow we have got the best of the bargain." There was nothing, therefore, for it but to fall to with knife and fork, and with as little repulsion as possible, upon the docile friend ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... towards him in my heart as it is possible to conceive, but I could not know that he was lying unattended in his room, without offering assistance; so, after many struggles with myself to overcome my strong repulsion, I visited him often enough to give him such attentions as were necessary, but not more. I had no intention of ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... the marrying, or rather the courting, for money, that excited in her no repulsion whatever. Julie, in her own way, was a great romantic; but owing to the economic notions of marriage, especially the whole conception of the dot, prevailing in the French or Belgian minds amid whom she had passed her later ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... explain to those thoughtful men, and the millions of whom they are the flower, what the thing is that we love, which is to us as the bread we eat, and the air we breathe, but about which they know nothing and feel nothing, save a vague instinct of repulsion, then the seed of victory might be sown. This is hard indeed to do; yet if we ponder upon a chapter of ancient or mediaeval history, it seems to me some glimmer of a chance of doing so breaks in upon us. Take for example a century of the Byzantine Empire, weary yourselves ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... discord; such thoughts and feelings were the very breath of her life; she could not speak in perfect confidence and unreserve, as she then spoke, without uttering them; and her finely organized nature felt a sort of electric consciousness of repulsion and dissent. She grew abstracted, and they walked ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... then, with a great, inner relief that the situation was at last swinging around to a normal kidnapping. Still, Al Woodruff seemed unable to play his part realistically. He failed to fill her with fear and repulsion. She had to think back, to remember that he had killed men, in order to realize her own danger. Now, for instance, he merely forced her back to the campfire, pulled the saddle strings from his pocket and tied her feet together, ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... so that the gums of the teeth appeared, and his eyes were focused not on the two who approached him but on something quite close to him; his nostrils were widely expanded, as if he panted for breath, and terror incarnate and repulsion and deathly anguish ruled dreadful lines on his smooth cheeks and forehead. Then even as they looked the body sank backwards, and the ropes of ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... twisted thing with a countenance of sardonic sagacity. As he looked he began to see perverse, insidious resemblances to the physician himself. When Schulze reappeared and busied himself writing, he looked from the stone face to the face of flesh with fascinated repulsion—the man and the "familiar" were so ghastly alike. Then he suddenly understood that this was a quaint double jest of the eccentric physician's—his grim fling at his lack of physical charm, his ironic jeer at ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... on her companion. The tears sprang to Marcia's eyes. Yet her temperament did not tend to easy weeping; and at the root of her mind in this very moment were feelings of repulsion and of doubt, mingled with impressions of pity. But the hours at Hoddon Grey had been hours of deep and transforming emotion; they had left her a more ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... on blood and warm, almost living flesh is here presented! How cruel these creatures are to each other, is the thought that first comes to us, but a second, reminds that it is but their instinct and a necessity of natural law, and repulsion is lost in astonishment and delight at the marvellous fidelity with which the sculptor has rendered these links in the great chain of animal life. Their (as we call it) savage eagerness, their almost blind rage for their appointed food, the tenacity with which ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... her gentle, almost joyful, expression. This gentle serene joy, which was reflected also in her smile, astonished me after all I had heard of the Cossack whip and her brother's violence. Strange to say, instead of the oppressive repulsion and almost dread one usually feels in the presence of these creatures afflicted by God, I felt it almost pleasant to look at her from the first moment, and my heart was filled afterwards with pity in which there ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he was, and to have pity on her. Sated with wine, his breath blew around her nearer and nearer, and his face was there near her face. He was no longer the former kind Vinicius, almost dear to her soul; he was a drunken, wicked satyr, who filled her with repulsion and terror. But her strength deserted her more and more. In vain did she bend and turn away her face to escape his kisses. He rose to his feet, caught her in both arms, and drawing her head to his breast, began, panting, to press her ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... community of nature in the moral sensibilities, in that part of our constitution which differences one man from another in the capacities of greatness and elevation. As with their amusements, so with their graver employments; the same mutual repulsion continues to divide the two orders ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... down at the sea. The others rushed to his side, and as they gazed into the water, which was as clear as crystal for a considerable depth, they felt like echoing his exclamation of repulsion. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... forbearance, however, which such a mode of proceeding with the aborigines would require was not to be found in my master. Fierce repulsion and retaliation were the only means he would have recourse to in his mode of treating them; and the consequence was, his inspiring the natives with a hatred of him, and a desire of vengeance for his manifold cruelties towards them, which was sure, sooner or later, to end in his destruction. It ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... emotion, to bring these separate thoughts and impulses, these separate groups thereof, into more complex relations, to continue on a far vaster scale that vital contact, that trying of all things by the great trial of affinity or repulsion, of congruity or incongruity. Thus we make trial of ourselves; and by the selfsame process, by the test of affinity and congruity, the silent forces of the universe make trial of us, rejecting or accepting, allowing us, our thoughts, our feelings to live and be fruitful, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... encountered me. I stood transfixed. Before me was Chapman, the mechanic, workman, and photographer for Mr. Rutherford, in New York in the seventies, a man whom I knew well, from whom I had learned much, and whose skill helped so largely in the production of Rutherford's negatives of the Moon. My repulsion was over in an instant. I clasped him heartily. It seemed so good, so human, to embrace something in this strange world. An equal resistance met my own. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... sincere respect for the rights of others, and both inevitably decay as the fear of God dies out. When men continually act on the idea that man is his own end, and when each one is intensely engaged in seeking his own interest, what can result but jarring of interests, opposition, repulsion, disregard of law in so far as it clashes with private ends, and thus, finally, social and political disruption more or less extensive? Thus our trouble lies deeper than slavery. Remove the canker of slavery to-day, and yet the tendency to disruption and dissolution ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... it may ripen to a brighter bloom. Thou too, O Comet beautiful and fierce, Who drew the heart of this frail Universe Towards thine own; till, wrecked in that convulsion, 370 Alternating attraction and repulsion, Thine went astray and that was rent in twain; Oh, float into our azure heaven again! Be there Love's folding-star at thy return; The living Sun will feed thee from its urn 375 Of golden fire; the Moon will veil her horn In thy last smiles; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... and wrong. The time occupied in such reflection is often only infinitesimal. It has been called the psychological moment, and if the definition means that it is the instant during which the soul suggests, it is a true one. It is then that our natural repulsion for evil asserts itself; it is then that the consequences of what we are about to do rise clearly before us as in a mirror; it is then that our courage is suddenly strengthened to do the right, or deserts us and leaves us mere instruments for the accomplishment of the wrong. If humanity had ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... indicated by the institutional and linguistic lines—probably family groups, which must have been essentially, and were perhaps strictly, monogamous. It would appear that in these groups mating was either between distant members (under a law of attraction toward the remote and repulsion from the near, which is shared by mankind and the higher animals), or the result of accidental meeting between nubile members of different groups; that in the second case and sometimes in the first the conjugation produced a new monogamic family; and that sometimes in the ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... favour of Bazaine, but regarded him with distinct repulsion for surrendering at Metz. Still, an escape was an escape; and, besides, the fat old Marshal had let himself down by a rope into an ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Allingham have the place, if he can get it," she was saying to herself for the fiftieth time, as the mantel clock chimed out the half-past ten. "I am swept under by a queer psychological wave of repulsion. ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... saw were of the lower class. I felt relieved, in spite of the size of the lower class. The unkempt appearance, the shambling, slouching gait and loud talk and laughter of these people aroused in me a feeling of almost repulsion. Only one thing about them awoke a feeling of interest; that was their dialect. I had read some Negro dialect and had heard snatches of it on my journey down from Washington; but here I heard it in all of its fullness and freedom. I was particularly ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... in preventing an immediate explosion, the mere fact of a total secession, and of the formation of two Confederacies, almost equal, (in appearance at least,) will permit no one to count on the prolonged preservation of peace. What repulsion, what grievances will be found in all relations, in all questions! And from a grievance to war, from war to negro insurrections, what will be the distance, I ask? The South will be then an immense powder magazine, to which the first spark ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... saw a chance to make things right for Mother Pepper; "it all came to me, Grandpapa, all alone by myself. Oh! I hate the big display!" she declared with sudden vehemence, astonishing herself with the repulsion that now seized her. ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... predominance of whites in all the male trades but that of the barbers, in which there were counted five free negroes, one slave and no whites.[2] From such statistics two conclusions are clear: first, that the repulsion of the whites was not against manual work but against menial service; second, that the presence of the slaves in the town trades was mainly due to the presence of their fellows ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... Letters to Southey, of a certain midwife of Tavistock. One midnight, as she was getting into bed, this good woman was summoned by a strange, squint-eyed, little, ugly old fellow to follow him straightway, and attend upon his wife. In spite of her instinctive repulsion she could not resist the command; and in a moment the little man whisked her, with himself, upon a large coal-black horse with eyes of fire, which stood waiting at the door. Ere long she found herself at the door of a neat cottage; the patient was a decent-looking woman who ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... unrecognised, now commands universal respect, not less by his worth of character than by the perfection of his art. No artist has troubled so little about the public, or been more indifferent to criticism whether popular or expert. As a child he had a sort of physical repulsion for outward success: ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... small passage that divided the bed and sitting rooms—a smell of whiskey mingling with the odor of stale smoke. With a quick gesture he pushed open the bedroom door; then on the threshold he paused, a look of contempt and repulsion passing over ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... good view of them—put them away as curiosities. She listened with an attention that was surely flattering enough, but Charlton felt that he had not made much impression on her. There was a sort of attraction in this repulsion. There was an excitement in his ambition to impress this impartial and judicial mind with the truth and importance of the glorious and regenerating views he had embraced. His self-esteem was pleased at ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... whole town of Douai were hostile to the grand old man and to his attendant. The neglected state of their clothes added to this repulsion; they went about clothed like paupers who have seen better days, and who strive to keep a decent appearance and are ashamed to beg. It was probable that sooner or later Balthazar would be insulted in the streets. Pierquin, feeling how degrading to the family any public insult would ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... circulating in the minds of slaveholders, and inveterated by the hourly irritations which must assail all who use human beings as things, produce in them a permanent state of feeling toward the slave, made up of repulsion and settled ill-will. When we add to this the corrosions produced by the petty thefts of slaves, the necessity of constant watching, their reluctant service, and indifference to their master's interests, their ill concealed aversion to him, and spurning of his authority; and finally, that ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... a terrier, perhaps. I suppose I cannot help that, though,' she added, rather sadly. 'I have tried hard to cure the slander and gossip that goes with curiosity. I am sorry it results in repulsion with that girl; but I suppose I can only go on and let her find out that my bark, or my eye, is worse than ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... men like Huxley and Tyndall need not trouble us. It springs from the new conception of matter. It stands on the threshold of idealism or mysticism with the door ajar. After Tyndall had cast out the term "vital force," and reduced all visible phenomena of life to mechanical attraction and repulsion, after he had exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, a mighty mystery still hovered beyond him. He recognized that he had made no step toward its solution, and was forced to confess with the philosophers of ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... impression was one of repulsion, and the impulse was to run away. But there was fascination, too, in the hag-like visage of those grim brick walls, checkered with innumerable dirty windows and trussed up, like a paralytic old crone, with ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... strong fancy to Hester, and during the whole of his visit kept as near her as he could, much to the annoyance of Vavasor. Doubtless it was in part to keep the other from her that he himself sought her: the major did not take to Vavasor. There was a natural repulsion between them. Vavasor thought the major a most objectionable, indeed low fellow, full of brag and vulgarity, and the major thought Vavasor a supercilious idiot. It is curious how differently a man's character ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... effrontery," and as he thinks of it being done by his old professor, says, "Surely now have I more understanding than my teachers." Though nothing was further from the intention of the author, it was generally regarded as an attack upon religion, which imperatively called for repulsion; and a champion soon appeared in the person of Dr. George Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, author of a well-known commentary on the Psalms, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich. In an anonymous pamphlet, entitled "A Letter to Adam Smith, LL.D., on the Life, Death, ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... bitter cynical censure of the King, overborne and cast out by the abiding tenderness of the father, crushed by no logic of kingcraft, was that touch of nature which made him kin even to this stern and pitiless despot in spite of the repulsion wakened by the justice of the King. With these secret gifts of fatherhood before him he saw Louis in a new light, and the loyalty which had been a loyalty of cold duty took fire in that enthusiasm which is the devotion of the heart and counts life itself ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... conquer her dislike, and entice the wayward thing to her heart; but nothing would do. Sometimes she would seem to soften for a moment; but all at once, with a wriggle and a backward spasm in the arms of the person who carried her, she would manifest such a fresh access of repulsion, that, for fear of an outburst of fierce and objurgatory wailing which might upset poor Connie altogether, she would be borne off hurriedly,—sometimes, I confess, rather ungently as well. I have seen Connie cry because of the child's ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... ugly part of the matter. But believe me, if I had thought that you disliked me, or felt any repulsion to the thing, I would never have suggested it, or taken advantage of your position to persuade you to it. I have never done that to any woman in my life, and I have never told a woman a lie about my feeling for her. You may trust me that ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Italian of the North, the man of conquest, displayed towards his bride the same brutality that he had shown towards the city he had sacked? Or was it that the revelation of married life filled Benedetta with repulsion since nothing in her own heart responded to the passion of this man? On that point she never clearly explained herself; but with violence she shut the door of her room, locked it and bolted it, and refused to admit her husband. For a month Prada was maddened by her scorn. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... she must love as she had loved her own poor dear mamma—- he was so happy he could afford to be tender even to that terrible past and poor Pepita—Leam's first sensation was one of terror, her first movement one of repulsion. She flung off the hand which he had laid on her shoulder and drew back a few steps, facing him, her breath held, her tragic eyes flashing, her face struck to stone ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of, are not meant the distinctions of rank in European society, or the conventional observances by which they are guarded, for these do not constitute in fact the points of repulsion by which a stranger is apt to be encountered. Still less do they mean those mental habits of suspicion, mystery and indirectness, which may infect communities as well as individuals. For these there is neither extenuation ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... Prescott shuddered with repulsion. Instinctively he foresaw what was coming, and there was no task which he would not have preferred in its place. And he was expected, too, at such a moment, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... which he had attached pieces of metal, long and narrow, and terminating in a cylinder of glass, or other substance suitable for the purpose of isolation, and he obtained sufficient electricity by these means to demonstrate the phenomena of attraction and repulsion, as well ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... as in mathematicks, where two things, each equal to a third, are equal between themselves. You agree with Johnson as a middle quality, and you agree with me as a middle quality; but Johnson and I should not agree.' Sir John was not sufficiently flexible; so I desisted; knowing, indeed, that the repulsion was equally strong on the part of Johnson; who, I know not from what cause, unless his being a Scotchman, had formed a very erroneous opinion of Sir John. But I conceived an irresistible wish, if possible, to bring Dr. Johnson and Mr. Wilkes together. How ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... in a piercing scream, as Estrella came to herself and understood. Always the rawhide had possessed for her an occult fascination and repulsion. She had never been able to touch it without a shudder, and yet she had always been drawn to experiment with it. The terror of her doom had now added to it for her all the vague and premonitory terrors which ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... Evangelicalism had wrought a change for the better in Rebecca Linnet's person—not even Miss Pratt, the thin stiff lady in spectacles, seated opposite to her, who always had a peculiar repulsion for 'females with a gross habit of body'. Miss Pratt was an old maid; but that is a no more definite description than if I had said she was in the autumn of life. Was it autumn when the orchards are fragrant with apples, ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to be what the philosophers call the attraction of repulsion between the parties last introduced, for the tall gentlemanly-looking Mr. Sharp eyed the officer with a supercilious coldness, neither party deeming much ceremony on the occasion necessary. Mr. Grab now summoned his assistant, the attorney, from the boat, and there was a consultation ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... horseback one day, his mind more than ever possessed with the desire to lead a life of absolute devotion, when at a turn of the road he found himself face to face with a leper. The frightful malady had always inspired in him an invincible repulsion. He could not control a movement of horror, and by instinct he turned his ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... ready to thank God that it was rather the exception than the rule, she had to witness the lowest moral degradation in addition to the sharpest human suffering, and this at an age and with a nature when the feeling of extreme repulsion, amounting to positive loathing, is in danger of prevailing. It needed all her faith to do battle with this worst temptation, and force pity to conquer disgust, to recognize humbly the frailty of the best and wisest men and women, to acknowledge willingly, even thankfully, the ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... changed to loathing, to absolute, sick repulsion from all the facts of his existence. With the passing minutes the lines deepened on his haggard countenance, his expression perceptibly aged. The stubble of beard that had grown since the day before grizzled his ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... and broad-chested, evidently he possessed the strength of a Hercules; his terrific expression was softened by benignity assumed at will; but a complexion of impenetrable bronze inspired feelings of repulsion rather than attachment for ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... that flame is inflected by metallic rods, and that "when two flames are made to approach each other, there is a mutual repulsion, although their proximity increases the temperature of each, instead of diminishing it," support Mr. Dillon's theory—the inflection being occasioned by the rarefaction of the air between the rod and the flame, the latter seeking for oxygen to support ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Volume 12, No. 329, Saturday, August 30, 1828 • Various
... attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... to a poet who called her a Madonna," said Dumay, sneering, and faithful to the repulsion with which Canalis had originally ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... the whole mass of ice out together. Rollo stood looking on, shivering. He had no hat on, and only slippers upon his feet. He stood leaning a little forward, his arms hanging off from his sides as if they were driven off by electric repulsion. ...
— Rollo's Museum • Jacob Abbott
... so strong that they had no thoughts beyond the narrow life they led. The thought of those lives filled her with aversion. The idea of marriage—even in its highest form, based on mutual consideration and mutual forbearance—was repugnant to her. She thought of it with a shiver of absolute repulsion. To Aubrey it was distasteful, but to her cold, reserved temperament it was a thing of horror and disgust. That women could submit to the degrading intimacy and fettered existence of married life filled her with scornful wonder. To ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... conscious of the resolute will, the power to command, which the man possessed in common with his master. Who could refuse Napoleon anything? except a man or woman here and there with whom the repulsion was stronger than the attraction. Adelaide de Sainfoy ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... demonstrate that all the Phenomena in Nature may be explained by two simple active principles, Attraction and Repulsion, wherein the attraction of Cohesion, Gravity and Magnetism are shown to be one the same. By Gowin ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... of the gig in darkness at the door of the "Fairy," and, his great arms being about her, he carried her into the house and set her down in the fire-seat. She would have struggled to her feet if she had been able; she felt something like repulsion at his touch; but he looked at her with the mute eloquence of love, and she ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... to attract by chemical stimulus the cells stored up in the blood-forming organs ("positive chemiotaxis"). In the cases in which a diminution of the leucocytes in the blood is found, it is the result of a repulsion of the leucocytes by ...
— Histology of the Blood - Normal and Pathological • Paul Ehrlich
... brain the esthetic and moral qualities are among the first to disappear. It is the same with normal man when he descends into a lower sphere. Zoller relates (III., 68) that when Europeans arrive in Africa they find the women so ugly they can hardly look at them without a feeling of repulsion. Gradually they become habituated to their sight, and finally they are glad to accept them as companions. Stanley has an eloquent passage on the same topic (II. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the shallows of his weaker character, but the pain and hopeless sorrow grew stronger and went deeper down into the heart of Mrs. Birtwell day by day. Their action in the case was such as became wise and loving parents. What was done was done, and angry scenes, coldness and repulsion could now only prove hurtful. As soon as Blanche returned from a short bridal-tour the doors of her father's house were thrown open for her and her husband to come in. But the sensitive, high-spirited young man said, "No." He could not deceive himself in regard to ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... I had ever known of His Majesty. What in the world could be the case against me? (For I now saw that Mr. Chiffinch had not told me the whole, but only a part of the charge.) I fixed my eyes upon Mr. Hoskyns for whom I had conceived, so soon as I had set eyes on him, an extreme repulsion. ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... was broken or changed. His mind was of the same bent, but circumstances had revised his plans. There was with him always, even in his dreams, a white, horror-stricken face looking at him in the pain of accusation, repulsion, complete abhorrence, where he stood in that place ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... his affection: it might be true affection—something beyond and above the dominant whim of an imperious nature. And what a solution to all her difficulties! But it was impossible she could overcome the repulsion which the idea of marriage with any man she did not love inspired. There was to her but one in the world to whom she could hold allegiance, and he was forbidden by all sense of self-respect and modesty. How was it that, strive as she might ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... a hastened beat, not of fear, but of repulsion. This was the mood and manner which subjugated Rosalie. He had so raised his voice that two men in the distance, who might be either labourers or sportsmen, hearing its high tone, glanced ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Ayrault continued: "If apergy can annul gravitation, I do not see why it should not do more, for to annul it the repulsion of the earth that it produces must be as great as its attraction, unless we suppose gravitation for the time being to be suspended; but whether it is or not, does not affect the result in this case, for, after the apergetic repulsion is brought to the degree at which a body ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... antique conceptions were formed, and we see it in the divine forms of a Niobe, of the Apollo Belvedere, in the winged Genius of the Borghese, and in the Muse of the Barberini palace. There, where grace and dignity are united, we experience by turns attraction and repulsion; attraction as spiritual creatures, and repulsion as being ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... people a sense of repulsion arises at the idea that the ties they form on earth in one life are not to be permanent in eternity. But let us look at the question calmly for a moment. When a mother first clasps her baby-son in her arms, that one relationship seems perfect, ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... which the servant had brought him he suddenly recognized that the topmost was in Lady Newhaven's handwriting. Anger and repulsion seized him. No doubt it was the first of a series. "Why was he so altered? What had she done to offend him?" etc., etc. He knew the contents beforehand, or thought he knew them. He got up deliberately, threw the unopened note into the empty ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... at her trial. Conquering her natural repulsion for such scenes, and the crowds which usually watched them, she had forced her way into the foremost rank of the narrow gallery which overlooked the Hall of ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Stephen's most instructive work draws to its close with a dissertation on Liberalism and Dogmatism, showing how and why Utilitarianism failed in convincing or converting Englishmen to a practical assent to its principles and modes of thought. Upon many minds they produced more repulsion than attraction. Maurice earnestly protested that we were to believe in God, not in a theory about God, though the distinction, as Mr. Stephen says, is vague; he appealed to the inner light, to the conscience of mankind; he went back into the slough of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... what the impression he made, either of attraction or repulsion, his personality was a serious proposition. No man looked once only. And no man ever attempted undue familiarity or ridicule. His life to this time had been a series of tragic failures in everything he had undertaken. A study of his intense Puritan face revealed at once his fundamental character. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... had as yet scarcely confessed to herself that her whole being turned towards Gethin as the flower to the sun, and that in her breast, so long calm and unruffled as the pools in the boggy moor, was growing as strong a repulsion for one brother as love for the other. And as she lay quietly on her pillow, endeavouring not to disturb her companion's rest, a tide of sorrowful regrets swept over her, even as outside, under the shifting moonlight, the bay, yesterday so calm, was torn and tossed by the rising north-west ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... that when young men and women of sensitive and refined natures come to this knowledge all at once, when already adults, it may at first create a sense of repulsion. It does not do so for those who have learnt the facts bit by bit as they were ready for them. In that case they are accepted easily and naturally. But with the others it may well be that just because they have clean and delicate minds, they may at first experience some real distaste when ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray
... last trumpet sounds. The unhappy disagreement of two pious women at Philippi is dealt with in words which lead up to the thought of the eternal love of God for His chosen; as if the very unworthiness of the matter in hand, by a sort of repulsion, drove the inspired thought to the utmost height, without for one moment diverting it from its purpose of peace and blessing. And now, in the passage which is to follow, the thought still keeps its high and holy level. It says no more indeed of the Book of Life. But it unfolds in one sentence after ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... physiology; it is to him "mere trifling with words." He combats with equal decisiveness "the scientific necessity of extending the province of psychical processes beyond the circle of those bodies in and by which we actually see them exhibited." He further says, "If I explain attraction and repulsion as psychical phenomena, I simply throw the psyche out of the window; the psyche ceases to be a psyche." Finally he says, "I assert without any hesitation that for us the sum total of psychical phenomena is connected with certain animals only, and not with the collective mass ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... the twentieth century as Newman had taken in the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth; and men were beginning to look for the weekly article in the Modernist with the same emotion of a passionate hero-worship on the one hand, and of angry repulsion on the other, with which the Oxford of the thirties had been wont to look for each succeeding "Tract," or for Newman's weekly sermon at St. Mary's. To Newman's high subtleties of brain, to Newman's magic of style, ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Sarah, 'I am not sure your rhapsody has made the mystery any plainer than before. May I not, in my turn, ask if your feelings are quite Christian? Are you not afraid you entertain a species of repulsion toward your fellow men?' ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... gate and down the narrow straight road. There was still not a soul in sight. I drew nearer and nearer to the spot. Once more I essayed to move him. It was utterly in vain. Such nerve as I possessed had left me wholly and altogether. A sense of repulsion, nauseating, invincible, made a child of me. I stood up and looked around wildly. It was then for the first time I saw what my right foot had ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... agreed. "Once, a couple of years ago, I proposed wearing a mask wherever I went, but my friends assured me the effect would be so marked that it would attract to me an embarrassing amount of attention. I have trained myself to bear the repulsion involuntarily exhibited by all I meet and have taught myself to take a philosophic, if somewhat cynical, view of my facial blemishes; yet in this work I can see how a mask might be merciful to my patients. I will experiment a bit along ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... walked down to the Coliseum. Soldiers were stationed on all the high ground about the circus, and large numbers of persons were already assembled inside. The people were poor and ill-clad, and they smelt of garlic and uncleanness. "His people, though," thought Roma, and so she conquered her repulsion. ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... It was the first time he had touched her, and she felt a queer surging of the blood to her head, a sudden and almost uncontrollable repulsion. The touch of his long fingers was like flame; his eyes, behind their sheltering spectacles, glowed in a curious, ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... faded away as if under a blight, the eyes were sinking into purple hollows, the attitude was listless, the whole air full of suffering. Phoebe was dismayed and conscience-stricken, and would fain have offered inquiries and sympathy, but no one had more thoroughly than Lucy the power of repulsion. 'No, nothing was amiss—of course she felt the frost. She would not speak to Honor—there was nothing to speak about;' and she went ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the skull indicates brutality. Never before, to my eyes, had the sign asserted itself with so much aggression. I had often wondered why, apart from the Vilboek Farm legend, I had always disliked and distrusted him. Now I seemed to know. It was the neck not of a man, but of a brute. The curious repulsion of the previous evening, when he had carried me into the house, came over me again. From junction of arm and body protruded six inches of the steel-covered life-preserver, the washleather that hid its ghastly knob staring at me ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... turns about, with the question which any one would ask, 'What is it that you want?' That question would derive all its meaning from the look with which it was accompanied, and the tone in which it was spoken. It might mean either annoyance and rude repulsion of a request, even before it was presented, or it might mean a glad wish to draw out the petition, and more than half a pledge to bestow it. All depends on the smile with which it was asked and the intonation of voice which carried it to their ears. And if we had been there ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... connections—and of inhabitants of a metropolis, among whom shyness of intercourse is necessary as a security against imposture—it is not to be wondered that most of the showy mansions in these villages are points of repulsion rather than of attraction. It must, however, be conceded, that many of these families are hospitable, charitable, sociable, and anxious to be agreeable—qualities which would serve as the basis of systems of more liberal intercourse, if properly directed, and if cherished in such establishments ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... growth and preservation of these several aristocracies abound in London; and no where on the earth have we the same facilities for the study and investigation of their family likenesses and contrasts, their points of contact and repulsion. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the sulphur auriculas, flowers that come first from the darkness, and feel cold to the touch, flowers scentless or pungent, ammoniacal almost; what is it, that, from the faces of the fair young women comes like a pungent scent, a vibration beneath that startles me, alarms me, stirs up a repulsion? ...
— Look! We Have Come Through! • D. H. Lawrence
... shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept without restraint like a little child, so much so that people were sorry for him, in spite of the repulsion he inspired. It is quite possible that both versions were true, that he rejoiced at his release, and at the same time wept for her who released him. As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naive and simple-hearted than we suppose. ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... appears to me probable that these symbolize—and if so the symbol is at once full of meaning and grandeur—the inevitable, ever wakeful energies and forces of nature, the marvellous agency of electricity, chemical affinity, heat, attraction, repulsion, and so forth. We are accustomed to speak of "blind force;" but here observe the wheels are full of eyes, ever vigilant to fulfil the purpose for which they are appointed. And this representation of forces appears ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... dingy chromos, and a battered cottage organ made that certain. On the floor was a rag carpet; on the walls, torn and dirty paper, with huge weather stains marking where water had leaked from the roof down the supporting beams. Keziah scowled at Susan's frank expression of repulsion for the surroundings. Susan seated herself on the edge of the chair, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... as benefit of both parties were promoted by such an arrangement; whilst, so far from arguing hauteur, it was the high civil condition of the English servant, which, by forcing respect from his master, first widened the interval between the two ranks, and founded a wholesome repulsion between them. In our own times, we have read descriptions of West India planters admitting the infant children of their slaves to play and sprawl about their saloons: but now, since the slave has acquired the station of a free man, and (from the fact of not having won ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various |
