"Prone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desperate set of fellows, and killed one another upon the slightest provocation. At all events, this little incident appeared to have a very good effect, as the natives, who had continually been interfering with our observations, now left us, not wishing to be so near to people who were so prone to mischief. ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat
... down toward the floor, he made out two prone bodies. One, that of the first man he had struck down, a man whom he knew by name as Lefty Devine, a brawler and boon companion of Quinnion. The other Quinnion himself. Devine lay very still, clearly completely stunned. Quinnion ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... Man is prone to idealization. He cannot accept as final the phenomena of the sensible world, but looks behind that world into another which rules the sensible one. From this tendency of the human mind, systems of mythology and scientific theories have equally sprung. By the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... Greece? where the eye cannot turn, or the foot move to a place which is not eternalized by its associations: where the waters will not remind you of Castalian founts; the flowers of Parnassian wreaths; the eminences of the Phocian hills; and where the air of all breathes inspiration. To a mind prone to contemplation, a walk through Athens must awaken the most exquisite reveries. Although "fallen from its high estate," there is enough in the tottering ruins which yet remain to recall the history ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... disgrace of noble families which have deserved well of their country; to avoid any circumstance that may tend to diminish the lustre of the English nobility in the eyes of foreign nations; or to bring it into contempt with the common people of our own, already too licentious, and prone to abolish those distinctions which serve as the basis of decorum, order, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... of Adonis, under the name of Tammuz[59], with all its seductive abominations, was one of the Canaanitish idolatries into which the Israelites were prone to fall. Father Bresciani considers these rites to be emphatically referred to in the indignant apostrophe of Isaiah:—How is the faithful city become an harlot!... ye shall be confounded with idols to which ye have sacrificed, and be ashamed of the gardens which ye have chosen.[60] ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... them singing "The White Cockade" through the country. "King James was beaten, and all his well-wishers; my grief, my boy that went with them!" But I don't think the people had ever much opinion of the Stuarts; but in those days they were all prone to versify. But the famine did away with all that.' And then he also was scornful, and said: 'Sure King James ran all the way from the Boyne to Dublin, after the battle. There was a lady walking in the street at Dublin when he got ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... States are never fettered by the axioms of their profession; they escape from all the prejudices of their present station; they are not more attached to one line of operation than to another; they are not more prone to employ an old method than a new one; they have no rooted habits, and they easily shake off the influence which the habits of other nations might exercise upon their minds, from a conviction that their country is unlike any other, and that its situation is without a precedent in ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... no hint of enthusiasm. Her mind was ever of the prosaic sort, little prone to flights. In that prosaic quality, was to be found the explanation of her dependability as a private secretary. So, now, she ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those illogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differs from most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what an institution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution actually ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... that, even if I had not the double sight of the angekok," replied the other, with a touch of sarcasm, for Eskimos, although by no means addicted to quarrelling, are very fond of satire. They are also prone to go straight to the point in conversation, and although fond of similes and figurative language, ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... previous article's spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make, instead of actually responding to that point (compare {dictionary flame}). Of course, people who are more than usually slovenly spellers are prone to think *any* correction is a spelling flame. It's an amusing comment on human nature that spelling flames themselves often contain ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... Martin were trying to revive the prone forms. The control men lay beside the others, brought there by the two earthmen. The eyes of first one then another, slowly opened, and they looked around in amazement. Cold affected them like ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... that room, except the low radiance from a prone figure by the outer wall. It seemed at first that this ghost of Annette lay suspended between heaven and earth. Blake's mind put down the awe which was stealing over his senses. His eyes sharpened until he could ...
— The House of Mystery • William Henry Irwin
... with doctors is prone to abandon himself to charlatans. Thus it has befallen those who have believed in the natural laws of the beautiful. Artists sometimes adopt empirical canons, such as that of the proportions of the human body, or of the golden section, that is to say, of a line divided into two parts in such ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... investment is complete— A semicircular one. Both wings the Cumberland's margin meet, Then, backwkard curving, clasp the rebel seat. On Wednesday this good work was done; But of the doers some lie prone. Each wood, each hill, each glen was fought for; The bold inclosing line we wrought for Flamed with sharpshooters. Each cliff cost A limb or life. But back we forced Reserves and all; made good our hold; ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... The amateur is prone to the conviction, deduced, I fear, from the practice of the cheap melodrama and the cheaper novel, that "climax" and "tragedy" are synonymous terms, and that he is violating sacred traditions unless he ...
— Short Story Writing - A Practical Treatise on the Art of The Short Story • Charles Raymond Barrett
... tell ourselves a story, give and take strokes until the bucklers ring, ride far and fast, marry, fall, and die; all the while sitting quietly by the fire or lying prone in bed. This is exactly what a child cannot do, or does not do, at least, when he can find anything else. He works all with lay figures and stage properties. When his story comes to the fighting, he must rise, get something by way of a sword and have a set-to with a piece of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... broken ones carefully excluded. Canes may, however, be kept some days without fermenting, provided they be not broken or damaged, it being, as we said before, the mixture of the sap and the cane juice that makes the liquid so prone to fermentation; and the mill, gutters, and everything with which the juice is likely to come in contact, should be kept carefully clean, and whitewashed immediately after, and the whitewash removed before use, as acetate ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... new wife pleased him; he found that she was what he had wanted her to be,—gentle, kindly, timid, modest. It seemed sure that she would bring him heirs. Being neither ambitious nor prone to intrigue, she did not meddle with politics. She was religious, moral, and her principles were most sound. She would never oppose her husband, whose slightest wish she regarded as a command. She would appease his few stubborn foes of the French aristocracy, and put a ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... at her red handkerchief, and the black hair blowing a little; thus did they cross the tiny cool home acre through the twinkling pleasantness of the leaves, and pass at once outside the magic circle of irrigation into Arizona's domain, among a prone herd of carcasses upon the ground—dead cattle, two seasons dead now, hunted to this sanctuary by the drought, killed in the sanctuary ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... good characteristic, but if carried to an excess it becomes foolishness. We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so. The mineral wealth of the country, the coal, iron, oil, gas, and the like, does not reproduce itself, and therefore is certain to be exhausted ultimately; ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... astonishment went along the line. What could he mean, it was sheer madness; the line of white smoke along the wood and the puffs of dust about his feet showed that bullets were raining around him. The next second he stopped dead-still, threw up his arms, and fell prone on his face in full view of both lines. A groan went up from his comrades; the whole company knew he was dead, and on the instant a puff of white from the rock and a hissing bullet told that the sharp-shooter there was still intrenched in his ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... means for giving drive and direction to further development. A child who devotes too much time to athletics and too little to literature, may be drawn to reading through books about athletic contests of the classics, or through modern stories of college life. On the other hand, the boy who is prone to get his satisfactions vicariously and to neglect active participation in games and other activities, must be led through his reading, properly selected and unostentatiously placed under his nose, to more direct concern with producing practical effects in his environment. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg
... babe, my sweet Aglaia, my one child: And I will take her up and go my way, And satisfy my soul with kissing her: Ah! what might that man not deserve of me Who gave me back my child?' 'Be comforted,' Said Cyril, 'you shall have it:' but again She veiled her brows, and prone she sank, and so Like tender things that being caught feign death, Spoke not, nor stirred. By this a murmur ran Through all the camp and inward raced the scouts With rumour of Prince Arab hard at hand. We left her by the woman, and without Found the ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... road from Santa Fe to Huelva, a long journey to make on foot, and the company of a sad heart and a little talking boy, prone to sudden weariness and the asking of innumerable difficult questions, would not make it very much shorter. Every step that Christopher took carried him farther away from the glittering scene where his hopes had once been so bright, and were now fallen to the dust; and every step ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... She was bright and amusing, guileless and very worldly wise in the same breath—simple for Paul and a match for De Chauxville, within the space of three seconds. Withal she was a beautiful woman beautifully dressed. A thousand times too wise to scorn her womanhood, as learned fools are prone to do in print and on platform in these wordy days, but wielding the strongest power on earth, to wit, that same womanhood, with daring and with skill. A learned woman is not of much account in the world. A clever woman moves as much of it as ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... this railing at first, and maintained that there was not the least danger of their falling into the water; but Captain Sedley, knowing how prone boys are to scuffle and be careless, ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... arisen, when labour has again reached the point where the demand exceeds the supply, we are to admit an influx of strangers amongst us, and thereby entail upon ourselves and posterity the evils of prospective pauperism. We have been already too prone, in matters relating rather to the luxuries than the necessities of our social system, to give undue preference to the foreigner. British art has, in many branches, been thereby crippled and discouraged, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... his brother up, and was surprised, after those cheerful tones, to feel the weight so prone and feeble, that Gerald's support on the other side was welcome. Mrs. Grinstead followed to take Gertrude to her room ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... glaring eies, and to bidde vs a farewell (comming right against the Hinde) he sent forth a horrible voyce, roaring or bellowing as doeth a lion, which spectacle wee all beheld so farre as we were able to discerne the same, as men prone to wonder at euery strange thing, as this doubtlesse was, to see a lion in the Ocean sea, or fish in shape of a lion. What opinion others had thereof, and chiefly the Generall himselfe, I forbeare to deliuer: ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... she heard Lady Clifford's maid, Aline, say that her mistress had had a bad night and was indisposed in consequence, it meant nothing special to her. She had come to regard the beautiful Frenchwoman as spoiled and self-indulgent, prone, like many others of her type, to exaggerate trifling ailments—though she concluded that the explanation of this tendency lay in the boredom of the woman's daily life. If she had been indulging in a round of gaiety ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... for Claire Robson. Not that she could look back on any holiday season with unalloyed happiness, but time had drawn the sting from the misfortune of the old days. Through the mist of the years outlines softened, and she was more prone to measure the results by the slight harvest that their efforts had brought. For instance, they had never been too poor to deny themselves the luxury of a tree. And a tree to Mrs. Robson meant none of the scant, ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Lonsdale, who fortunately stopped her horse, sent her home, and told her not to hunt with his hounds until she had provided herself with a safety skirt. The young and inexperienced, who, with the fearlessness of ignorance, are prone to rush headlong into difficulties, ought surely to be safeguarded in every possible manner. Fig. 57 shows a safe and comfortable riding dress for a very young girl. For winter wear, the coat and leggings should ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... sheet upon sheet of pale rose-colour, soon to show paler and fade before the rosy splendours of the mesembryanthemum. But the thrift had no rival to fear, condensing blue heaven and blue sea in the flower it lifted against both; and to lie prone and make a frame of it for some winding channel when the tide-rip flashed and tossed was to send the eye plunging into blue like an Eastern diver ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the truth about the Senate? Even Bryce says it is impossible to get at it, the country is so prone to exaggeration; but estimates that one-fifth of ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... began its spiritual blight, is incorrect. But no less incorrect is it to assert that the Rig Veda represents a period when hymns are made only for rubrication by priests that sing only for baksheesh. Scholars are too prone to-day to speak of the Rig Veda in the same way as the Greeks spoke of Homer. It is to be hoped that the time may soon come when critics will no longer talk about the Collection as if it were all made in the same circumstances ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... lore of the woods, the ways of "wild critters," and the most efficacious means both to woo and kill them. Prim spinsters eye him acridly, as a man given over to "shif'less" ways, and wives set him up, like a lurid guidepost, before husbands prone to lapse from domestic thrift; but the dogs smile at him, and children, for whom he is ever ready to make kite or dory, though all his hay should mildew, or to string thimbleberries on a grass spear while supper cools within, tumble merrily ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... while the Texan searched the trail with keen eyes that missed nothing. Suddenly he drew up his horse. Blizzard had shied at something lying prone ahead of them, and The Kid's eyes had seen it ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... observed: 'The mode of teaching in the primary schools has certainly fallen off in intelligence, spirit, and inventiveness during the four or five years which have elapsed since my last report. It could not well be otherwise. In a country where everyone is prone to rely too much on mechanical processes, and too little on intelligence, a change in the Education Department's regulations, which, by making two-thirds of the Government grant depend upon a mechanical ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... the bosoms of all His creatures," observed the Doctor. "But when they are neglected, and sin is allowed to get the better of them, they are destroyed. None of our hearts are in their right place, as the saying is. They are all by nature prone to ill. The same man who was doing you the kindness might in other ways ...
— Mountain Moggy - The Stoning of the Witch • William H. G. Kingston
... State was but just learning to walk without leading-strings; and it has been the aim of the author to show how two stout young fellows, prone to honesty and not afraid of hard work, were able to do their share in advancing the prosperity of the growing Commonwealth in ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... Surgical treatment also was, whenever possible, always promptly rendered. Indeed, they were in countless cases treated as tenderly as our own wounded. This further: in action there are no soldiers less prone to needless blood-spilling, or men readier to forgive and forget, than "Tommy Atkins." Official returns exist setting at rest the fiction about Tel-el-Kebir and the Soudan battles. At Tel-el-Kebir many thousand ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... collapsed instantly, like the snapping of a fiddle-string. He fell forward on his face, and lay prone... ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... have been as prone in those days as at present to seek for victory by laying the enemy on board and trusting to the strength of their own arms. At present, instead of battle-axes and clubs, or spears, or two-handed swords they have a fondness for their cutlasses and pistols. In the days, before Britannia could loudly ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... other half remained to see what had happened. It seemed impossible that Whistling Dan had escaped from their midst. Half a dozen sulphur matches spurted little jets of blue flame and discovered four men lying prone on the floor, most of them with the wind trampled from their bodies, but otherwise unhurt. One of ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... you is not the same to her. You must be forbearing, Ethel. Remember that dependence is prone to morbid sensitiveness, especially in those who have ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... mouth. It was indeed to have been born to social dignity, fortune, courage, and more than the usual allowance of good looks. And though the fortune was lavishly spent, the courage sometimes betrayed into a rather theatrical dare-deviltry, and the good looks prone to deteriorate in style, there was always the social position left, and this was a matter of the deepest importance in Delisleville. The sentiments of Delisleville were purely patrician. It was the county ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in the middle by reflected light and darkening towards their edges is a very important thing to remember, the heavy, smoky look students' early work is so prone to, being almost entirely due to their neglect through ignorance of this principle. Nothing is more awful than shadows darker in the middle and gradually lighter towards their edges. Of course, where there is a deep hollow ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... a very reasonable, and almost universally established rule, which teachers are very frequently prone to forget, viz., the employed ought always to be responsible to the employers, and to be under their direction. So obviously reasonable is this rule, and in fact, so absolutely indispensable in the transaction of all the business of life, that it would be idle to attempt to establish ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... to. For it can hardly be imagined, that any such constant Synchronisme should be in Nature; but where, either the one is the cause of the other, or both depend upon some Common cause. And where we see so fair a foundation for a Physical connection. I am not prone to ascribe it to an Independent Sychronism. In sum; His History doth well enough agree with my Hypothesis; and I think, the Phaenomena are much better ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... battle and the troubles of a war-weary world, as one might suppose. It was surrounded by swamps everywhere. And it had been raining, of course. It always seems to have been raining in France during this war. There were duck boards over the swampy ground, and a single mis- step might send one prone in the ooze up to ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... protection of the cocoanut palms. Satan multiplied himself. Never had he been free to tear and rend such a quantity of black flesh before, and he bit and snapped and rushed the flying legs till the last pair were above his head. All were treed except Telepasse, who was too old and fat, and he lay prone and without movement where he had fallen; while Satan, with too great a heart to worry an enemy that did not move, dashed frantically from tree to tree, barking and springing at those who clung ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... present, but is of a mild type. The outdoor dispensary does a rushing business, but only seventy-five cases were sufficiently serious last season to be sent to hospital, and only ten of these were fatal. The divers are prone to pneumonia and pleurisy, and these diseases carried off five. The deaths out of hospital ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... certain quality of kaleidoscope, there is besides (in the harmonic manner of Cesar Franck) an infinitesimal kind of progress in smallest steps. It is a dangerous form of ingenuity, to which the French are perhaps most prone,—an originality ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... thought of; I have also so continual a fear that I may at last fall some way or other so as to dishonour the Gospel that I have often desired that my name may be buried in oblivion; and indeed I have reason for those fears, for I am so prone to sin that I wonder every night that I have been preserved from foul crimes through the day, and when I escape a temptation I esteem it to be a miracle of grace which has preserved me. I never was so fully persuaded as I am now that no habit of religion is a security from falling into ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... elevation of his views above those of the common herd, for in every respect I would have him superior to his age. Ever mindful of the delicate attentions due to the weak, he will be gentle to all women, but not prone lightly to fall in love with any; for love will seem to him too serious to turn ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... to suspect others of the vices to which they themselves are prone. It is very hard for one who never does anything but with an eye to what he can make out of it, to believe that there are other people actuated by higher motives. So Paul had, over and over again, to meet the hateful charge of making money out of his apostleship. It ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the bed, on which a forlorn little figure lay prone. A white cheek pressed the pillow, and two big blue eyes ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... came around for the fifth time, one of the horses stumbled and fell and rolled completely over, pitching his rider headlong upon the prairie. Before he could regain his horse, father's rifle cracked and the unlucky equestrian rolled prone upon the ground with ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... are characteristically active, aggressive, spontaneous, and automatic, while those of women as a rule are passive and subject to awakening by external stimuli, especially in connection with affection. Such forgetful men and uninformed women are prone to regard the lack of control of many young men as simply due to "original sin," "innate viciousness," "bad companions," or "irresistible temptations"; and they overlook the great fact that maintaining perfect sexual control in his pre-marital years is for the average healthy young man a ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... are men to custom, and so prone To reverence what is ancient, and can plead A course of long observance for its use, That even servitude, the worst of ills, Because delivered down from sire to son, Is kept and guarded as a ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... speculate upon events! Muse as we may, we are the creatures of circumstances; and the unexpected arrival of a London dandy at the country-seat of an English nobleman sent this representative of the New Generation, fresh from Eton, nursed in prejudices, yet with a mind predisposed to inquiry and prone to meditation, to a scene apt to stimulate both intellectual processes; which demanded investigation and induced thought, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... for a clergyman to indulge in even a distant partisan allusion without offending some one of his hearers. The clergyman is free, like any other citizen, to indicate his preferences and express his opinions in regard to public affairs, but the judicious pastor is not prone to use ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... my despairing rhymes That I am prone to sigh. Poets, like children, weep and laugh at times, ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... to his own bunk and lay prone, his forehead resting on his folded arms and his face hidden. "Very well, sir; I'll do my best. We have to accept each other for the best there is in us, I take it. You've saved my life and the life of those two women, and we all owe ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... any other man, but still he held it a necessity to be avoided if possible. He had, we are fain to confess, but small passion for that "grassy couch," and "leafy bower," and those other rural felicities, of which your city poets, who lie snug in garrets, are so prone to sing; and always gave the most unromantic preference to comfortable lodgings and a good roof; so, persevering in his search after the pathway, while any prospect of success remained, he circled about until equally ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... saints of Mere, so there was little merit in quizzing them. They were never seen to be cross with their friends, and so fun was pushed so far with them that it sometimes bordered on coarseness; but they were very prone to intestine warfare, and to get cross with each other; however, we know the leading ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... confidence. His letters to his mother were not safe from the eye of his aunt, and neither his father nor Mr. Fotheringham could be what a lady correspondent would be to a man of his character, reflective, fond of description, and prone to dwell on the ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to his compassion. I entered his chamber, approached his bed to speak to him, when this hero of a hundred fields started up in a panic, and at the sight of the pale woman who drew his curtains in the dead of the night, he shrieked, violently rang his bell and fainted prone away." ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... immoral. And herein lies an important point to be considered. Anything which is radically unlike prevailing standards or styles to which we have become accustomed will impress most persons as being immodest or indecent. The unusual in dress is usually denounced as immoral because we are all prone to allow our prejudice to obscure our reason and o'ersway our judgment. This point must be recognized before any real reform can be accomplished. When humanity has grown sufficiently wise to reason broadly and view problems on their own merits, aside from preconceived opinion or inherited ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... were received by Lily, now a pretty, pale, half-developed girl of fifteen. In a few minutes her sister entered. Bella was charming; nervousness made her words few, and it could be seen that she was naturally thoughtful, earnest, prone to reverie; her beauty had still to ripen, and gave much promise for the years between twenty and thirty. Last of all appeared Mrs. Jacox, who blushed as she shook hands with Earwaker, and for a time was ill at ease; but her vocatives were not long restrained, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... land bridge between Africa and remainder of Eastern Hemisphere; controls Suez Canal, a sea link between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean Sea; size, and juxtaposition to Israel, establish its major role in Middle Eastern geopolitics; dependence on upstream neighbors; dominance of Nile basin issues; prone to influxes of refugees ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... water during heavy rains, drainage must be provided. Notice whether any cellar windows have been closed. Countrymen are prone to do this as a cheap and easy method when the framework gets beyond repair. Replacing stoned-up windows is not expensive or difficult but just one more thing which must be done. Notice the extent of the cellar. Old builders sometimes did ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... Spring, he appeared delighted at the idea of leaving; for he was fond of change, and required exciting scenes to keep him out of mischief, which he was prone to, in defiance of the vigilant eye that Murden kept on him; and I had but little doubt, as I stood and watched their forms disappear amidst a labyrinth of tents and crazy huts, that the long-limbed ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... first introduced him to our reader's notice, we endeavoured to depict him as he then really was,—a man of strong principles, warm heart, and many noble qualities; but one, prone to over-estimate the value of birth and fortune—with a large proportion of pride and reserve—and with ideas greatly tinctured with the absurd fallacies of the ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... fathers, in their writings, generally quote traditions concernng Jesus, instead of histories. Since these things are so, who knows, but that the authors of the histories of him now extant, have attributed to him words and actions of which he was guiltless. We know how prone mankind are to invent falsehoods concerning eminent men; for instance, Mahomet expressly disclaimed the power of working miracles, and yet the writings of his early followers ascribe hundreds to him. Why may it not be possible then, ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... usual conditions of sitting in a closed space and using pen, tongue, and eye combined, has a tendency to overstimulate the accessory muscles. This is especially harmful for city children who are too prone to the distraction of overmobility at an age especially exposed to maladjustment of motor income and expenditure; and it constitutes not a liberal or power-generating, but a highly and prematurely specialized, narrowing, and weakening education unless offset by safeguards better than any system ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... fever. Nearly a third of the insular population was still composed of negro slaves, who could hardly relish the thought that, while the mother country had tolerated the suppression of the hateful institution in Santo Domingo, she still maintained it in Cuba. A bureaucracy, also, prone to corruption owing to the temptations of loose accounting at the custom house, governed in routinary, if not in arbitrary, fashion. Under these circumstances dislike for the suspicious and repressive administration of Spain grew apace, and secret societies renewed their agitation ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... there were still sporadic outbreaks here and there, and occasionally bands of marauding young braves were a menace to outlying and lonely settlements. Many of the white men were themselves lawless and brutal, and prone to commit outrages on the Indians. Unfortunately, each race tended to hold all the members of the other race responsible for the misdeeds of a few, so that the crime of the miscreant, red or white, who committed the original outrage too often invited retaliation upon entirely innocent ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... to his condition. Even the shrubbery-loving Canary, and lofty-soaring Eagle, may be tamed to the cage, and learn to love it from habit of confinement. It has been so with us in our position among our oppressors; we have been so prone to such positions; that we have learned to love them. When reflecting upon this all important, and to us, all absorbing subject; we feel in the agony and anxiety of the moment, as though we could cry out in the language of a Prophet of old: "Oh that my head were ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... rather prone to be misled by appearances. As one walks down Piccadilly, or the Strand, or Fleet Street and meets numerous irreproachably dressed men with glossy tall hats and polished boots, with affable manners and a courteous way of deporting ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... a great deal of love for her, and probably feeling as much as she did for any one in the world. But Molly had reached to this superficial depth of affection and intimacy in the first few weeks of Cynthia's residence in her father's house; and if she had been of a nature prone to analyse the character of one whom she loved dearly, she might have perceived that, with all Cynthia's apparent frankness, there were certain limits beyond which her confidence did not go; where her reserve began, and her real self was shrouded in mystery. For ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... he had discounted all this, knowing what an impetuous lot his followers were, and how prone to push aside all thought of personal danger when tempted to perform some act that might redound ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... lacks sincerity. Byron, like his brother poets, wrote copiously what was published indiscriminately; but if the first-class work had not been very good it would never have buoyed up above sheer oblivion so much that was third-rate and bad. His pieces are much too occasional, for he was prone to indulgence in hasty verse whenever the fit was upon him, or as a method of enlisting public sympathy with his own misconduct, so that he was constantly appearing before the world as a perfidious sentimentalist, with a ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... very unreasonably, a Degree of] Shame and [Disgrace. [3]] And here I cannot but take notice of those depraved Notions which prevail among us, and which must have taken rise from our natural Inclination to favour a Vice to which we are so very prone, namely, that Bastardy and Cuckoldom should be look'd upon as Reproaches, and that the [Ignominy [4]] which is only due to Lewdness and Falsehood, should fall in so unreasonable a manner upon the Persons ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... To prone by anthoritie a passage to be on the North side of America, to goe to Cataia, China, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... the birds, and even the swill is taken from the mouths of the swine. There is no grain anywhere, and people lack clothes, unguents, and oil. Every man saith, 'There is none.' The storehouse is destroyed, and its keeper lieth prone on the ground. The documents have been filched from their august chambers, and the shrine is desecrated. Words of power are unravelled, and spells made powerless. The public offices are broken open and their documents stolen, and serfs have become their own masters. The laws of the court-house ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... lady not at all disturbed, the colonel did not interrupt them for a while. But when the lady at length rose, holding Phil by the hand, the colonel, fearing that the boy, who was a child of strong impulses, prone to sudden friendships, might be proving troublesome, left his seat on the flat-topped tomb of his Revolutionary ancestor and hastened to ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... classes, either altogether overlook or deny, or at least greatly extenuate the corruption and weakness here in question. They acknowledge indeed that there is, and ever has been in the world, a great portion of vice and wickedness; that mankind have been ever prone to sensuality and selfishness, in disobedience to the more refined and liberal principles of their nature; that in all ages and countries, in public and in private life, innumerable instances have ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... wide in brimstone blue. But now at length the pygmy legions yield, And, winged with terror, fly the fatal field. They raise a weak and melancholy wail, All in distraction scattering o'er the vale. Prone on their routed rear the cranes descend; Their bills bite furious, and their talons rend: With unrelenting ire they urge the chace, Sworn to exterminate the hated race. 'Twas thus the Pygmy Name, once great in war, For spoils of conquered cranes renown'd afar, Perished. For, by the dread decree ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... back from him, he crept out of his chair and fell prone at her feet. Afterward his hands stretched forward toward her, clutching, and then trembled and ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... now full circle comes the wheel, And, prone across the knees of Fate, You are to hear, without appeal, The final terms that we dictate; And, when you whine (the German way) On presentation of the bill: "Ach, Himmel! we can never pay," "Can't you?" we'll ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... a few feet and dropped prone on the ground, cuddling the stock of his rifle to his cheek. Two hundred yards ahead a figure was scurrying over the rocks away from the cabin. Walter drew in his breath and his hand suddenly grew steady as his keen gray eyes peered through the sights. Carnes and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... ye shall see me!" Would that the eye of faith might be kept more intently fixed on "that glorious appearing!" How the world, with its guilty fascinations, tries to dim and obscure this blessed hope! How the heart is prone to throw out its fibres here, and get them rooted in some perishable object! Reader! seek to dwell more habitually on this the grand consummation of all thy dearest wishes. "Stand on the edge of your nest, pluming your wings for flight." Like the mother of Sisera, be looking ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... knight, Sir Ralph De Courcy, greeting—It seems to me that, prone as your son and Master Edgar Ormskirk are to rush into danger in order to aid and succour those in peril, it were but right that they should be clad in armour suitable for such adventures, and meet that such ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... quotations nothing less than a complete sentence should be quoted. Do not patch together sentences of indirect and direct quotation, like the following—He said that some of us are prone to let things be as they are, "because the philanthropic rich help in our times of trouble and in sickness." Such quotation is worse than no direct quotation at all. Of course, this does not mean that one cannot add "said the speaker" to a direct quotation, but it means that ...
— Newspaper Reporting and Correspondence - A Manual for Reporters, Correspondents, and Students of - Newspaper Writing • Grant Milnor Hyde
... he wrote this work. The footnote to the first page of the fourth part is the testimony of a collaborator to the genius of his fellow-workman, an example of appreciation and modest self-effacement which it would not be easy to match, and to which literary men who work together are not over-prone. Nothing else could bear more eloquent testimony to the loftiness of character and sincerity of purpose ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... This is unfair. I tell them so. But they cannot get away from their own miserable egos long enough to hear me. They think I am crazy. In return, I am sympathetic. It is a state of mind familiar to me. We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... that of Charles, eager to multiply experiments, and prone to believe improbabilities, the hostile position of these parties opened a new field for intrigue. He persuaded himself that by gaining either, he should be enabled to destroy both.[2] He therefore tempted the Independents with promises ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... weakness, but that, according to an expressive nursery formula, we were "seeing how naughty we could be." I think we were genuinely anxious to see this undesirable climax; in some measure as a matter of experiment, to which all boys are prone, and in which dangerous experiments, and experiments likely to be followed by explosion, are naturally preferred. Partly, too, from an irresistible impulse to "raise a row," and take one's luck of the ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... relieved sometimes by the arrival of horsemen and others in search of water. Amongst our occasional visitors was a well-known gentleman, bearing the proud title of "The biggest liar in Australia." How far he deserved the distinction I should hesitate to say, for men prone to exaggerate are not uncommon in the bush. Sometimes, however, they must have the melancholy satisfaction of knowing that they are disbelieved, when they really do happen to tell the truth. A ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... respectable, to do what others expect of you, is the backbone of all their virtue. It has been said, we are a nation of shopkeepers. If that is true, then all the shops are in one street, packed tight, the one against the other. For we are a nation of neighbours too, prone to do what is being done next door, and a lax king upon the throne of England could turn our morals upside down. All things are fashions—even moralities—they take longer to come and longer to go, but they change with the rest ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... neither may you be a Pathan, because you in no way resemble one, nor do you speak the Pushtu tongue. But I will be a Pathan, because I can speak that language; therefore they will respect me as a man prone to fight readily and well. And knowing that no Pathan would demean himself by being servant to a man of no account, they will more readily respect you, although you are neither Sikh nor yet Pathan but are supposed to be a Punjabi Mussulman. Therefore, sahib, you must ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... being the first to mount the breach of a fort in Savoy during the memorable campaign of 1709, and his having there defended himself with his half-pike for nearly ten minutes before any support reached him. To do the Baron justice, although sufficiently prone to dwell upon, and even to exaggerate, his family dignity and consequence, he was too much a man of real courage ever to allude to such personal acts of merit as ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... have had again much reason to see how weak I am, and how prone to give way to every sin if I am not kept by God. May He have mercy upon me, and keep me from bringing an open disgrace upon His holy name! O ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... cottage was in flames, set alight by them to burn the evidence of their foul deed. What I did I know not. I have tried to urge my memory along from the point of my awakening, but in vain. By what miracle I crawled forth, I cannot tell; but in the morning I was found by my man lying prone in the garden, half a dozen paces from the blackened ruins of the cottage, as near death as ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... of the king, who engaged teachers to instruct him thoroughly in the ancient literature of India and Persia. But he seems to have boldly opened a way for himself, instead of following (as modern Orientals, timid or servile, are so prone to do) the well-worn path of the old Hindoo writers. In his tragedy (which I saw acted) of Manda-thi-Nung, "The First Mother," there are passages of noble thought and true passion, expressed with a power and ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... meant is the things that they are doing every day. I can only ask you to try to remember, while I speak, that I mean those little acts of temper, or triflings with truth, or yieldings to passion or anger, or indulgence in sensuality, and above all, the living without God, to which we are all prone. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... again. Abuse a man dead and gone, and one, too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor, was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who was only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the chance, seems but a poor thing. The professor's quarrel with his father had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a Government appointment—obtained with some difficulty—for the very insufficient ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... many of the modern men, whose privations in early life in no wise approached those of our hero look back with gratitude upon their early days? Are we not prone to excuse and condone our shortcomings, either of character or of achievement, by murmuring at the hard fate which deprived us of those advantages which more fortunate brothers and sisters enjoyed in infancy and youth? Do we not to-day swing too far ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... supported by all the interest of Titus. But Philopoemen crossed it, not from ill-will to the men, but that they might be beholden to him and the Achaeans, not to Titus and the Romans. For when he came to be General himself, he restored them. So impatient was his spirit of any subjection, and so prone his nature to contest everything ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Anson fell, the Duke turned to Cantemir, who was separated from him by two prone figures and the chest. The Count held the advantage and meant to use it by springing ahead into the opening. There was no opportunity for Buckingham to either reach him or head him off. Cantemir had caught up the filled bags and was smiling insolently across ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... than Mr. Jefferson the unfairness of this assertion. None knew better than he how little Washington was prone to be swayed in his judgment by partiality either toward a man or a measure. He always weighed everything with the greatest care and most profound wisdom, and the opinions of friends and foes were always submitted to the alembic of his keen penetration, and the tests of his almost unfailing ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... ours; and one of the keenest dreads of the best American citizens during a recent wave of jingoism was that of "the reflex influence of militarism upon the national character, the transformation of a peace-loving people into a nation of swaggerers ever ready to take offence, prone to create difficulties, eager to shed blood, and taking all sorts of occasions to bring the Christian religion to shame under pretence of vindicating the rights of humanity in some other country." The spectacle of a section in the United States ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... the knights to try to drag the defenceless Archbishop out of the Cathedral, but he struggled with such vigour, flinging one of the men down on the stone floor, that they gave up the attempt and killed him with three or four sword strokes, the last of which, as he lay prone, was delivered by Richard le Bret, or the Breton, and so tremendous was the force with which it was delivered that the crown of the head was severed from the skull and the sword broke in two on ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... impoverished to support not only the resident but an absentee priesthood, and to enable the Princes of the Church to maintain a more than princely state at Rome. This was a standing grievance even in the eyes of many sincerely devout Churchmen, and one which was prone to make statesmen and politicians look with a favourable eye on any movement which promised to lessen or to abolish it. Germany in this respect had special reasons for discontent; as has been well said, "It was the milch cow of the Papacy, which at ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... touch of the eternal in the two sexual tastes brings them the more into antagonism; for one stands for a universal vigilance and the other for an almost infinite output. Partly through the nature of his moral weakness, and partly through the nature of his physical strength, the male is normally prone to expand things into a sort of eternity; he always thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night; and he always thinks of a night as lasting forever. When the working women in the poor districts come to the doors of the public houses and try to get ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... force thrusts her into the waggon, stifling her cries as on the road they drive quickly away. As the last faint wail dies away, and the vehicle bearing its victim disappears in the distance, we think how sweet is liberty, how prone to injustice is man, how crushing of right ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... occurred so quickly and suddenly that no one had realised it all, until it was over, and the lad was lying prone on the ground, his elegant blue satin coat stained with red, and his ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... say, Goggles," he added, "if, the next time you inventory stock, you are shy a sack of flour and a side of bacon, you can remark to the company that prospectors is thick around here, and that prospectors is prone to evil as the sparks fly upward. That's where the flour and bacon are going. Up to where St. Peter can smell them cooking; leastways he can if he hangs his nose over the ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... unpromising view of the agricultural part of the settlement. Much might be expected from the exertions of three hundred and fifty-five people, and the greatest advantage would have been derived from their labours had they been less prone to dissipation and useless traffic—a traffic which most of them entered into solely with a view to indulging themselves in their favourite ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... of the permanent causes, it is well known that a conceited man will be disposed to attribute admiration of himself to others. On the other hand, a shy, timid person will be prone to read into other minds the opposite kind ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... the voice ceased. There fell a silence, followed by a wild, half-strangled cry. She had a glimpse of a prone figure in a corner struggling upwards, and then Curtis was before her—Curtis haggard and agitated as she had never seen him—pushing her back out of the dim place ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... two streams of opinion regarding women: on the one hand, a tendency to regard women as a supernatural element in life, more or less superior to men, and, on the other hand, a tendency to regard women as especially embodying the sexual instinct and as peculiarly prone to ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... otherwise, people are prone to believe in the reality of the things they think ought to be so. This comes of the cheery optimism which is innate with life itself; and, while it may sometimes be deplored, it must never be censured, for, as a rule, it is productive of more good ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... round. Except for the figures lying prone in the snow they were quite alone. "Dey must haf done," he said, ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns |
