"Petrifaction" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tropical lowlands, with their feeble grasp on the sterner aspects of creed and character, have nothing in common with this Indian tribe, remaining on the outskirts of an alien civilisation. The creed for which the early Tenggerese fought and conquered, has cooled from white heat to a shapeless petrifaction, and weird influences throng the ruined temple of a moribund faith, but the shadows which loom darkly above the mouldering altars still command the old allegiance, and a thousand hereditary ties bind heart ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... sense. The most hearty aversion to the prolonged reign of some of the old gods does not hinder him from seeing, that what are now frigid and unlovely blocks were full of vitality and light in days before the era of their petrifaction. There is much less eagerness of praise or blame, and much less faith in knife and cautery, less confidence that new and right growth will naturally and necessarily follow ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... poet had called a lover's mistress "the lode-star of his one desire." That to him Peggy ought to be. Lode-star. One desire. The words confused him. He had no lode-star. His one desire was to be left alone. Without doubt he was suffering from some process of moral petrifaction. ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... slow that the life-time of a human being hardly counts in the calculation. There is something sublime in the contemplation of this steady persistence of Nature, this undeviating march to a goal; and as we gaze upon the embryo stages of the petrifaction, stalagmite patiently lifting itself upward, stalactite as patiently bending down to the remote but inevitable union, we might almost fancy them sentient agents in the marvellous transformation. The stamens of a passion-flower do not more eagerly, as it seems, coil upwards to embrace the pistil; ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... deck shone brightly, stretching to the forecastle and bows, where the tiny glass roof of the photographer glistened like a gem in the Pontiac's crest. So peaceful and motionless she lay that she might have been some petrifaction of a past age now first exhumed and laid bare to the cold light of ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... object in such a situation. All trusting feminine instincts, all sweet emotions of hope, all sentiment, all passion even, retreat and fall away from her, leaving either a cold, bitter, heartless petrifaction, in a woman's clinging robe, or the Fury that is the twin sister of every little red-lipped, clear-eyed girl born into the world. She never dreamed but that this story was true. In fact so entirely had her woman's wit deserted ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... Church schools and "universities" to-day it is quite pathetic to hear the professors wrestle with geology and Genesis, and cut their astronomy to fit Joshua. If in one of these institutions for the petrifaction of the human mind there is a teacher who is either not nimble enough to escape the conclusions of a bright pupil or too honest to try, he is at once found to be "incompetent as an instructor," and is dropped from the faculty. I know one case where it took twenty years ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener
... fell; trees of old date, growing where the pillars of the aisles used to stand,—these are the best points of ruined abbeys. But, everything here is kept with such trimness that it gives you the idea of a petrifaction. Decay is no longer triumphant; the Duke of Devonshire has got the better of it. The grounds around the church and the ruins are still used for burial, and there are several flat tombstones and altar tombs, with ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... speckerlation there." And when the way became altogether inscrutable,—"Waal, this is a reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole." As some one remarked, "The dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter." "A petrifaction was a kind of a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... benumbed by the personality and action of Napoleon. The burning enthusiasm for the Rights of Man was quenched, the passion for civic equality survived only as the gibbering ghost of what it had been in 1790, and the consolidation of revolutionary France was effected by a process nearly akin to petrifaction. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... His reverence attacked the petrifaction and egotism of the separate cell as far as the shallow system of this prison let him. First, he encouraged prisoners to write their lives for the use of the prison; these were weeded, if necessary (the editor was strong-minded and did not weed out the re-poppies); printed and circulated ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... vapour, which marks the position of Junner, and behind that again climb heaven-ward the Manmoda hills. On the right, with its ruined mosque and conning-tower grey in the morning light, the massive pile of Shivner frowns over the valley, like some dismasted battleship, hurled upwards into sudden petrifaction by the hands of Titans. It is an impressive scene—the pre-Christian monastery behind you; the relics of Musulman and Maratha sovereignty in front; and below, bathed in a sea of morning-mist which Surya is hastening to disperse, Junner, the town of ancient memories, in her latest avatar of a British ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... theories are given in the books in which theological students are mis-educated, all of which unite in claiming that which they cannot agree in defining. The Westminster Confession of Faith may be taken as the dogmatic petrifaction of the notion which lies, more or less undeveloped and still living, in the ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... associated a legend or a myth. A deep river's gorge is called 'the Blind Man's Pass,' because a peculiar bit of rock, looked at from a certain angle, assumes the outline of the human form, and there comes to be connected therewith a pleasing story which reaches its climax in the petrifaction of the hero. A mountain's crest shaped like a swooping eagle will from some one have received the name of 'Eagle Mountain,' whilst by its side another shaped like a couchant lion will have a name to match. There is no lack of poetry ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... love of thorniness—(in their mystic root, the truncation of the limbless serpent and the spines of the dragon's wing. Compare "Modern Painters," vol. iv., "Chapter on the Mountain Gloom," s. 19); and in all forms of it, with petrifaction or loss of power by cold in the blood, whence the last Darwinian process of the witches' charm—"cool it with a baboon's blood, then the charm is firm and good." The two frescoes in the colossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... refreshing slumber for the next day's labours. At certain periods of the year Prince Esterhazy and his court adjourned to Esterhaz, and at certain periods they came back to Eisenstadt: thus they were saved by due variety from utter petrifaction. Haydn seems to have liked the life, and to have thought moreover that it was good for him and his art. By being thrown so much back upon himself, he said, he had been forced to become original. Whether it made him original or ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... here stopping the way, a somewhat longer silence ensued, which would probably have been broken as before by the outpouring of some sage reflections, but for a slight sound which caused the hunter to become what we may style a human petrifaction, with a half-chewed morsel in its open ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... employed pumice in building their arched incombustible roofs. This porous material possessed the additional advantage, when combined with good cement, of rendering the arched surface one united petrifaction, opposing (in consequence of its firm union) little lateral pressure, comparatively, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... stone; this unmeaning emphasis of weight and bulk, though diminished, is not to be got rid of. The life that sculpture can give is superficial and abstract, does not penetrate and possess the work; it is still the petrifaction of an instant, that does not instantly pass away, but remains as a contradiction to the next. It is the struggle against this fixity that gives to the sculpture of the Renaissance its aspect of unrest, of disdain of the present, of endless unsatisfied search. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various |
