"Prescient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mirror, prophetic, shadowy, and pictured glimpses of those awful events which were marching out of futurity toward France. Her letters written during this period show that she gazed upon them with a prescient eye, and heard with keenest ear the alarum of the legions which were gathering for attack. The young men of Lyons, where she and her husband spent the Winters, gathered in her parlors, and heard from the lips of this ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... Bytown's history, and 'tis said, Though hard to drive, thou may'st be led, That is, if one could just agree In view and argument with thee; When standing in the days of yore At "Pooley's Bridge," thine eye ran o'er The picture with a prescient glance; Experience taught thee that thy chance Was then—thy foresight came To aid thee in life's winning game. Although no silver spoon was in Thy mouth, when to this world of sin Thou camest, thou hast forged from fate A path ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... man fancy that these sometimes exuberant expressions of a noble and far-seeing faith by your own predecessors and by a prescient foreigner have been revived in derision or even in doubt. Those were the days when, if some were for a party, at any rate all were for the State. These were great men, far-seeing, courageous, patriotic, the men of ...
— Problems of Expansion - As Considered In Papers and Addresses • Whitelaw Reid
... look into another's soul we may enter Paradise. There is an indescribable grace in the air this first day of prescient autumn. The summer has taught me the secret of loneliness and the infinite way of satisfying its desire. To be alone with God we must be intimate with the beauty in the eyes of every face, and yet absolutely detached ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... by paying homage to the sincerity of his belief in himself and his mission. In that belief he was honestly loyal. His conception of his duty was of the highest, and in its interest he would, and did, make every sacrifice in his power. If some prescient tongue could have told Leichhardt that the end of his quest would be an unknown death, he would have accepted the fate without a murmur, provided his ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... prescient shadow of the coming "boom" had stolen over the hills and the work of the Guard had ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... as black as a crow and, as Bob claimed, always knowing when falling weather was at hand and speaking his prophecy by stamping in his stall. He could hear Basil noisily making his way to the barn. As he walked through the garden toward the old family graveyard, he could still hear the boy, and a prescient tithe of the pain, that he felt would strike him in full some day, smote him so sharply now that he stopped a moment to listen, with one hand quickly raised to his forehead. Basil was whistling—whistling joyously. Foreboding touched ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... surprise. Who on earth in Cape Town could have known I was coming? I had not a friend to my knowledge in the colony. I glanced at the envelope. My wonder deepened. That prescient ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... beforehand &c. (early) 132; predict &c. 511; foreknow, forejudge, forecast; presurmise[obs3]; have an eye to the future, have an eye to the main chance; respicere finem[Lat]; keep a sharp lookout &c. (vigilance) 459; forewarn &c. 668. Adj. foreseeing &c. v.; prescient; farseeing, farsighted; sagacious &c. (intelligent) 498; weatherwise[obs3]; provident &c. (prepared) 673; prospective &c. 507. Adv. against the time when. Phr. cernit omnia Deus vindex[Lat]; mihi cura futuri[Lat]; run it up the flagpole and see ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... unnecessary; his book will speak for itself. {57} His peculiar style will justify a little more quotation than is just necessary to prove the point. Looking at the "battle of opinion" now in progress, we see that Mr. Smith was a prescient: ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... words were polysyllabic, and not monosyllabic like Chinese, had no written language beyond certain rude attempts at alphabetic writing, formed from Chinese characters, and found to be of little practical value. The necessity for something more convenient soon appealed to the prescient and active mind of Nurhachu; accordingly, in 1599, he gave orders to two learned scholars to prepare a suitable script for his rapidly increasing subjects. This they accomplished by basing the new script upon Mongol, which had been invented in 1269, by Baschpa, or 'Phagspa, ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... from those eyes That oft had kindled passionate desire He drew an inspiration high and pure, A prescient sense of victory and peace, And falling on his knees once more, he bowed, Kissed her white robe, and left ...
— Under King Constantine • Katrina Trask
... sight-seeing retinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar, and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in a certain prescient classicism of the house. It somehow recalled both the Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separate house of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court or yard, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... was passed between the unchinked logs in a convulsive grasp upon them. Her figure was tall and slender, and expressive in its rigid constraint; it was an attitude of despair, of repulsion, of fear. It might have implied grief, or remorse, or anxiety. Often the eyes of the prescient victims of circumstantial evidence rested dubiously upon her. To the great majority of men, the presence of women in affairs of business is an intrusive evil of times out of joint. Now, since matters of life and liberty were in the balance, the primitive denizens of Witch-Face ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Mischief assailed our Spanish comrades' ships; Several ran foul of neighbours; whose new hurts, Being added to their innate clumsiness, Gave hap the upper hand; and in quick course Demoralized the whole; until Villeneuve, Judging that Calder now with Nelson rode, And prescient of unparalleled disaster If he pushed on in so disjoint a trim, Bowed to the inevitable; and thus, perforce, Leaving to other opportunity Brest and the Channel scheme, with vast ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... not refrain from falling into a reverie upon his fortunes. It was wonderful, all wonderful, very, very wonderful. There seemed indeed, as Glastonbury affirmed, a providential dispensation in the whole transaction. The fall of his family, the heroic, and, as it now appeared, prescient firmness with which his father had clung, in all their deprivations, to his unproductive patrimony, his own education, the extinction of his mother's house, his very follies, once to him a cause of so much unhappiness, but which it now ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... equally true, that the Infinite Inspirer of all good adjusts His secret energies by certain laws, and condescends to work by analogous means. Bearing this in mind, we venture to think Burke's gift of almost prescient insight into the recesses of our common nature, and his consummate faculty of instructing the Future through the medium of the Present,—were partly derived from the elevation of his sentiments, and ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... access to the principal intrigues and intriguers of a Court in transitionship, by the death of Frederick, from eccentric greatness to orderly mediocrity; habituated him to ministerial correspondence and reports, which, if disgustingly mean, were, at all events, systematic and prescient, and secured him—I could wish to say honestly—those historic and statistical data which, published in his elaborate work on the Prussian monarchy, countenanced ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... of the field and flood To shun their poison and to choose their food? Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand, Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand? Who made the spider parallels design Sure as De Moivre, without rule or line? Who bid the stork Columbus-like explore Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before? ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... often rewarded for some little deed by the pleased surprise with which she will say, "How did you know I wanted it done?" You need not tell her how you knew, but you may be sure she will appreciate you all the more for your prescient thoughtfulness. Her pillows may be flat and hot, her hair uncomfortable, her under sheet wrinkled or untucked from the bottom; all these and a dozen more little things can be arranged so easily, and they conduce so much ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... in our city. The children from these three homes naturally became playmates. Mr. Motley's house was a very hospitable one, and Lothrop and two of his young companions were allowed to carry out their schemes of amusement in the garden and the garret. If one with a prescient glance could have looked into that garret on some Saturday afternoon while our century was not far advanced in its second score of years, he might have found three boys in cloaks and doublets and plumed hats, heroes and bandits, enacting more or less impromptu melodramas. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the name of the son of Eylimi, the brother of Hiordis. He ruled over lands, and was of all men wisest and prescient of the future. Sigurd rode alone, and came to Gripir's dwelling. Sigurd was of a distinguished figure. He found a man to address outside the hall, whose name was Geitir. Sigurd applied ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... will stand as the great Magna Charta, which, by the prescient wisdom of our fathers, dedicated in advance of the coming civilization the fertile and beautiful Northwest, with all its possibilities, for all time, to freedom, education, and ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... exaggerated horrors, to take a conspicuous but not now important example, of Charles Kingsley's Roman and Teuton. He would represent it as a period of wealth and order, full of menace, warning and change, but no more prescient of utter ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... great University, her great soldiers, White, Wolseley, Roberts, her greatest living authors, the whole of her Protestant clergy of whatever sect, with their congregations, the pith and marrow of everything that is strong, stable, cultured, enlightened, prescient, must be pronounced unpatriotic—if Nationalism is Patriotism. Contrary to all human experience and to the course and constitution of nature, the people of England are asked to believe that love of their native land and desire to do the best for the commonweal, are the sole possession of the ignorant ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... regret that he had but one world to conquer, betrayed the majesty of his restless genius when but a youth. Had Aristotle been nigh when, solicited to join in the course, the princely boy replied, that "He would run in no career where kings were not the competitors," the prescient tutor might have recognised in his pupil the future and successful rival ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... side, what makes Milton's versification as unique as it is admirable, is the instinctive and yet prescient skill with which the pause is continuously varied so as to keep the whole metrical structure in movement. There are no dead lines. There are no jerks or stoppages. His movement may best be described by quoting a passage which, like many ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... at the vast mass of fresh water that was pouring into the Gulf of Paria. He correctly divined the cause, and made the deduction that a river with such a volume of water must come from a great distance. His prescient mind showed him the mighty river Orinoco, the wide savannas, and the lofty range of the Andes; but the trammels of the erroneous measurements of astronomers bound them to Asia, and prevented him from picturing them to himself ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... was that circumstances, save for one brief and invigorating interlude, were persistently unfavourable to Ireland. The task was enormous, demanding infinitely more self-sacrifice than even the ablest and most prescient of her Parliamentarians realized. Until it was too late, in fact, they never awoke to the true nature of the task, dazzled by illusory victories. Rotten to the core as the Irish Parliament was, they sought, strengthened ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... comradeship with the proud and passionate boy, and a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, said that he was insane; but Shelley, in "Adonais," classes him with Keats among "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that Keats had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early death. He dedicated "Endymion" to his memory. In his epistle "To George Felton Mathew," he asks him to help ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... turned and glanced back, and the sight his eyes beheld was a goodly one for him to carry away with him into the world—a sight as old as the ages, as new as the hour, as prescient as the hours and ages to come. Just a man and a maid, sunshine and happiness, youth and love!—that, and the light of undying gratitude in the eyes ...
— The Crevice • William John Burns and Isabel Ostrander
... with the disappearance of their food and cover the mice had ceased to be. The famine-stricken cats sneaked back to the house. It was pitiful to see the little burrowing owls; for these birds, not having the powerful wings and prescient instincts of the vagrant Otus brachyotus, are compelled to face the poverty from which the others escape. Just as abundance had before made the domestic cats wild, scarcity now made the burrowing owls tame and fearless of man. They were so reduced as scarcely to be able to fly, and hung about ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... dwells The prescient Dis, From Yggdrasil's Ash sunk down, Of alfen race, Idun by name, The youngest of Ivaldi's Elder children. She ill brooked Her descent Under the hoar tree's Trunk confined. She would not happy be With Norvi's daughter, Accustomed to a ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... Sebastian was a merit. At the end we were satisfied that it was a well-built town with regular blocks in the modern quarter, and not without the charm of picturesqueness which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the older parts. Prescient of the incalculable riches before us, we did not ask much of it, and we got all we asked. I should be grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing else than the two very Spanish experiences I had there. ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... lolling. Now he sat down on his haunches on a big rug, because the Master told him to sit down. For a moment the Master dropped on one knee beside him, one arm about his shoulders. Finn gave an anxious little whine. His heart was thudding against his ribs; the prescient anxiety stirring within him affected ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... her to write, as he had a story to tell. He dictated to his mother, too, when a boy of six, an essay on Moses. As a housebound child, he had to amuse himself. Skelt's dramas were then his delight; but the life of every child is a prophecy for those who know how to interpret it. His mother was prescient, and fore-told her white-faced Louis had the light of genius in those windows of the soul—the eyes. "Talent," she knew, "was the result of human labor and culture." He dreamed, when but four, he "heard the noise of pens writing." She took it and his childish ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... Prescient in the changes of the season, they have been the first to go. Men, who can endure greater changes and vicissitudes than all the animal creation put together, have lingered longer; but at last one after another has left Pa-wa-teeg, till ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... fable that there was a race of men tried upon the earth once, who knew the future better than the past, but that they died in a twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them. They say that if any were to be born too prescient now, he would die miserably, before he had time to transmit so peace-destroying a faculty ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... statesman's pen. Nor were these exceptional passages; there is much more of the same sort at least equally forcible. Mr. Adams notes an interesting remark made to him by Calhoun at this time. The great Southern chief, less prescient than Mr. Adams, declared that he did not think that the slavery question "would produce a dissolution of the Union; but if it should, the South would be from necessity compelled to form an alliance offensive and defensive ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... that Manhood, which could not be expressed in a term more profound and complete than this same morphe doulou, Form of Bondservant, leaves us yet perfectly sure that He who chose to be Bondservant is to us only all the more, even in His Manhood, LORD. Was it not His own prescient choice to be true Man? And was it not His choice with a prescient and infallible regard to "the things of others," to "us men and our salvation"? Then we may be sure that, whatever is meant by the "made Himself void," heauton ekenosen, which describes His Incarnation here, one thing it ...
— Philippian Studies - Lessons in Faith and Love from St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians • Handley C. G. Moule
... scarcely jarred with the thoughts of his mind. They had been altogether of war and rumors of war. Every hour that subtile consciousness of coming events, which makes whole communities at times prescient, was becoming stronger. "If the powers of the air have anything to do with the destinies of men," he muttered, "there must be unseen battalions around me. The air I am breathing is charged with ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... what good genius, or by what prescient timidity, it may be difficult to discover, he was true to the British interest, and remained obstinately deaf to the seductive animosity of the Sikh council, which was prone to take advantage of the disasters in Caubul, and to attack the avenging army of Sir George Pollock in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... in most that we know of the poor young King of Rome, from his childish but strangely prescient resistance to his removal from Paris to Blois on the approach of the Allies in 1814, to the message of remembrance sent in after years to the column of the Place Vendome, "his only friend ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... To the house of the king The prescient two, Fenja and Menja. There must the mighty Maidens toil For ...
— The Younger Edda - Also called Snorre's Edda, or The Prose Edda • Snorre
... a rough plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must stay on a few days, and you must immediately, both of you, meet him at dinner." In addition to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an instinct of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to prepare that ground. "The poor child, when I was with her there while you were getting your shawl, quite gave ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... black-whiteness and of white-blackness. A hundred generations of divines have never been able to ree the riddle; a million will fail. The difficulty is insurmountable to the Theist whose Almighty is perforce Omniscient, and as Omniscient, Prescient. But it disappears when we convert the Person into Law, or a settled order of events; subject, moreover, to certain exceptions fixed and immutable, but at present unknown to man. The difference is essential as that ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... his sextant revolving on a fixed pivot, looks up to the vault of the heavens and beholds their zodiac; prescient of what else with optic glass the Tuscan artist viewed, at evening, from the ...
— Mornings in Florence • John Ruskin
... personality dominating that old, unhappy, ignorant self. If at times the man glimpsed that other shadowy self of hers, it was part of her mysterious appeal, her enthralling, baffling charm. It invested her with a shade of inscrutable, prescient sorrow, as of old unhappy far-off things. He hadn't the faintest idea of Nancy Simms, a creature utterly foreign to his experience. And because she did not love him, Anne Champneys never spoke of that old self, never confided in ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... weather that is about to come. This they cannot consciously have; the only natural intermediate link, therefore, between their conscious knowledge and their action is supplied by unconscious idea, which, however, is always accurately prescient, inasmuch as it contains something which is neither given directly to the animal through sensual perception, nor can be ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... Hadley on Friday; Saturday I went to New York; Sunday and Monday I spent at the Yale Club, writing; Tuesday, this telltale letter fell under the prescient eye of my brother. On that day he at once got in touch with me by telephone. We briefly discussed the situation. He did not intimate that he believed me to be in elation. He simply urged me not to attempt to interest anyone ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers |
