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More "Inanimate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about with life. Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... glimmered and flashed jewels of every size and lustre for the adorning of the children of this world,—slowly and carefully, step by step, they reached the upper floor,—and there, in a luxurious apartment furnished with almost feminine elegance, they lifted the inanimate form from the stretcher and laid it down, still shrouded, on a velvet sofa, removing the last number of Truth, and two of Zola's novels, to make room for ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... weeping near my bed; again plaintive voices called to me out of the darkness. I stretched out my arms, but nothing met them, I fought with phantoms; at length a cold hand grasped mine and led me rapidly forward. Under a dark and damp vault a woman lay on the ground, bleeding, inanimate—it was my wife! At the same moment, a groan made me look round, and I beheld a man striking my son with a dagger. I cried out and awoke, bathed in cold perspiration, panting under this terrible vision. I was obliged to get up, walk about, and speak aloud, in order to convince ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... in short, had become so critical that I felt it my duty to acquaint Sir Edgar with it forthwith; and I was on my way toward the companion in search of him when he emerged from it and joined me, the two seamen who had conveyed the inanimate body of the mate below following him and making their way forward, dodging the seas as best ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... see one another—they are like blind people talking together—and no one of them can do his part unless the other two do theirs. In the third place, the instrument is a lifeless thing, and when something goes wrong with it it rouses the helpless fury inspired by all inanimate objects which interfere with our comfort—like intermittent alarm clocks, collar buttons that roll under the furniture, and flivvers that go dead without reason in the middle of country roads. In each case whatever one does has no effect. The alarm clock continues ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... further stage of progress was the substitution of a mere inanimate symbol for a living victim, whether human or brute, as shown in the old Roman custom of appeasing "Father Tiber" once a year by the ceremony of drowning a lot of dolls in that river. Of this significant rite Mommsen aptly observes, "Die Ideen goettlicher Gnade und Versoehnbarkeit ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... minutes before had given up even the last hope, who had ceased, as he thought, to believe even in the possibility of faith or honor among men, of constancy, or purity, or truth in women, no sooner saw his Melanie, whom he knew to be the wife of another, solitary and in tears, no sooner felt her inanimate form reclining on his bosom, than he was prepared to believe any thing, rather than ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... understand you!-the art of Orville has prevailed;-cold, inanimate, phlegmatic as he is, you have rendered him the most envied of men!-One thing more, and I have ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... matter hinted at a weird and mysterious antagonism. All the inanimate things seemed to have conspired to throw in our way this man just enough alive to feel pain. The faint and lamentable sounds we had heard must have come from him. He was looking at me. It was impossible to say whether he saw anything ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... her staircase, all the week, by the length of iron road dividing Coketown from the country house, she yet maintained her cat-like observation of Louisa, through her husband, through her brother, through James Harthouse, through the outsides of letters and packets, through everything animate and inanimate that at any time went near the stairs. 'Your foot on the last step, my lady,' said Mrs. Sparsit, apostrophizing the descending figure, with the aid of her threatening mitten, 'and all your art shall ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... brigs to his list of male exceptions. The real explanation may possibly be that the English still spoken at sea is, in some ways, centuries older than the English spoken on land, and that the nautical 'she' comes down to us from the ancient days in which all inanimate objects were endowed with life in everyday speech and ...
— All Afloat - A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways • William Wood
... became so exhausted that the first physicians of the city declared that there was no more hope. It was not long, in fact, before she was observed to rise in her bed and fall back as if struck with death. "For four hours she appeared to me," says Dr. Pfendler, "completely inanimate. With Messrs. Franck and Schaeffer, I made every possible effort to rekindle the spark of life. Neither mirror, nor burned feather, nor ammonia, nor pricking succeeded in giving us a sign of sensibility. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... quite childishly absurd), so the savage has expressed, in rude fantastic ways, his conclusion as to the existence of spirit. He believes in wandering separable souls of men, surviving death, and he has peopled with his dreams the whole inanimate universe. ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... was thereby quadrupled, and the furniture and ornaments multiplied everywhere and most unexpectedly into twins and triplets, producing such sociabilities among them, and forcing such correspondences between inanimate objects with such hospitable insistence, that the effect was full of gaiety and life, although the interchange in reality was the mere repetition of one original, ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... before seen this latest type of French avion de chasse, crowded round, examining and admiring with feelings of awe and reverence. It was a marvelous piece of aero-craftsmanship, the result of more than two years of accumulating experience in military aviation. It was hard to think of it as an inanimate thing, once having seen it in the air. It seemed living, intelligent, almost human. I could readily understand how it is that airmen become attached to their machines and speak of their fine points, their little peculiarities of individuality, with a kind ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... irrevocably lost, irrevocably abandoned to a horrible death. (Leans against the wall for support. After a pause she continues despondingly.) And if my beloved one still lives—if he should return to keep his word, to fetch his bride away in triumph, and find all here lonely and silent, and the inanimate corpse no longer sensible to his transports—when his burning kisses shall in vain endeavor to restore the life which has fled from these lips, and his tears flow on me hopelessly—when my father shall sink weeping on the body of his daughter, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... The PENTORRENS' are related, by old cavalier stock, to the Dukes of Mandeville, whose present ducal descendant combines the elegance of an Esterhazy with the intellect of an Argyle. That a scion of such blood as this has reduced a fellow-being to a condition of inanimate protoplasm, is to be regretted for his sake; but more for that of a country in which the philosophy of COMTE finds in a corrupt radical pantarchy all-sufficient first-cause of whatsoever is rotten in the State of Denmark." The Times said: "We give no details ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... absent on solitary excursions for weeks and even months together, in the wilderness. He was a genuine son of nature, a grown up child of the woods and prairie, which he worshiped with a sort of Pagan adoration. Excluded by his infirmities from cordial fellowship with his kind, he made the inanimate things of the earth his friends, and entered, by the heart's own adoption, into brotherhood with the luminaries of heaven! Wherever there was land or water, barren rocks or tangled brakes of wild, waving cane, there was Deaf Smith's home, and there he was happy; but ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... dogmatical terms, it was neither one nor the other; at length the wiser magistrates of the town agreed to send it as a present to their august monarch Lewis the XIVth; and if you have a mind to see an inanimate woman who has made such a noise in the world, you will find her at Versailles, without any other notice taken of her or the quarrels about her, than the following words written (I think) upon her pedestal, ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... a sigh of satisfaction in their beauty; "I derive all my pleasure in life from things inanimate. An arrangement of deep-toned marigolds with brown centres in a glass like these, all aglow beneath the maiden-hair, gives me more pleasure than anything else I can ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... existences he reckoned among the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell us not to be afraid of studying the meanest ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the compassionating officers, as they directed their glance alternately from the common to the pale and marble-like features of the younger De Haldimar, who, with parted lips and stupid gaze, continued to fix his eyes upon the inanimate form of his ill-fated brother, as if the very faculty of life itself had been for a period suspended. At length, however, while his companions watched in silence the mining workings of that grief which they feared to interrupt by ill-timed observations, even of condolence, the death-like hue, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... whirling round the corporal, who turned with him, gradually approaching the trunk of the elm-tree, till at last his head came in contact with it with a resounding blow, and the dog fell senseless. "Try it again, corporal, let's finish him." The corporal again swung round the inanimate body of the dog; again, and again, and again, did the head come in contact with the hard wood; and then the corporal, quite out of breath with the exertion, dropped the body on the grass. Neither of them spoke a word for some time, but watched the body, as it lay motionless, doubled up, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... one thought after another is hastily used and hastily dismissed, as if he were putting his own powers to the test or trying the effect of various kinds of objects on his readers; his most ambitious flights, in the shape of allegories and the like, are stiff and inanimate; and his favourite field of literary criticism is touched so slightly, as to show that he still wanted confidence in the taste and knowledge of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the lingering cricket, and the soft speed of ripe pine cones through dense-grown branches, each struck its discriminate chord in the scented air. The outdoor world was magnified in every dimension; inanimate things were vivified; living ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... business is discussed, always providing on their side apologies for future failures, instead of means of success, and projects of vigour and enterprize. Yet though the shortness of our possible residence here makes this inanimate character of the Government a bar to that immediate spirit and alacrity which, for the purposes of the present crisis, it was highly desirable to create here, so as to act upon instantaneously; much, I should suppose, may be done after our return, by any person of steadiness ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... and fill it; individuals, however distinguished, are, as it were, sheathed in collective symbols and represented by principles. Documentary evidence suffices now! Treaties, minutes, diplomatic reports, instruments of all descriptions, are really the requisite agents of this inanimate diplomatic narration. State papers are the adequate expression, the exclusive speech of mere states, and of this speech Heinrich v. Sybel is one ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... and, though still unconscious, became less rigid They then poured a little wine down his throat, and he fell into a passive but painless condition, more inanimate than sleep, but less positive ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... and Van Berg speedily became absorbed in watching the impression made on each other by these two characters that were so utterly diverse. It needed but a glance to see that Mr. Mayhew was a heavy-hearted, broken-spirited man. His shrunken inanimate features, and slight, bent form, looked all the more dim and shadowy in contrast with his stout, florid wife, who even in public scarcely more than tolerated his presence. This evening she devoted herself to Sibley, who sat between her and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... That merits, in a kind mistake, A pardon for th' offence's sake. Or if it did not, but the cause 125 Were left to th' injury at laws, What tyranny can disapprove There should be equity in love; For laws that are inanimate, And feel no sense of love or hate, 130 That have no passion of their own, Nor pity to be wrought upon, Are only proper to inflict Revenge on criminals as strict But to have power to forgive, 135 Is ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... natures and makes them better, truer and nobler. Who among us would be willing to exchange the influence of the immortal song "Home Sweet Home," or be willing to forget the Christian's "Nearer My God to Thee," for all the inanimate beauty of art? One charms the eye, the other touches and calls to life the best and sweetest emotions of the human heart. So it is with fraternal societies. Flashing swords, glittering helmets, jeweled regalias and beautiful ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... and best way that ever was, and—the most difficult to imitate. His mere pen-strokes have, for the expert, a beauty and an interest quite apart from the thing they are made to depict, whether he uses them as mere outlines to express the shape of things animate or inanimate, even such shapeless, irregular things as the stones on a sea-beach—or in combination to suggest the tone and colour of a dress-coat, or a drunkard's nose, of a cab or omnibus—of a distant mountain with miles of atmosphere between it and ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... original figure of London. The papers quoted him—his doings, not his sayings. People pointed him out in the Park. His celebrity waxed. Even the Marble Arch seemed turning to gaze after him as he went by, showing the observation which the imaginative think into inanimate things. ...
— The Folly Of Eustace - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... glittering insignia of his new rank reached Canada, Sir Isaac Brock's eyes were closed in death. His inanimate body, from which one of the noblest souls of the century had fled, lay rigid in ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... chanced that a combination of disastrous circumstances wrought havoc with my temper. I lost my train; my head hummed like a bumblebee with weary pain, and the elastic that held my hat to its moorings broke, so that that capering compromise between inanimate matter and demoniac possession blew half a block up street on its own account, and was brought back to me by a youthful son of Belial, who took my very last quarter as ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... character does Maggie show? Do children think of their dolls as alive? Or as representing people they know? Did you ever have the impulse to "take your spite out" on something, animate or inanimate? Did you feel any better for relieving your feelings so? There is an interesting account of a savage beating his idol in ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... of George Brotherton, as he stood before her when she closed the door. He gazed at her piteously, a wreck of a man, storm-battered and haggard. His big hands were shaking with a palsy of terrible grief. His moon face was inanimate, and vagrant emotions from his heart flicked across his features in quivers of anguish. His thin hair was tousled and his clothes were soiled ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... unfolding, expanding, and trailing far away from her smoke-stacks. There is a surging, hissing, and smothered screaming of the pent-up steam in her boilers, as if they had put on all energy for the moment. They had;—flesh, blood, bones, iron, brass, steel,—animate and inanimate,—were nerved up for the trial of ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... waves above them her green leaves, Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, Over the unreturning brave—alas! Ere evening to be trodden like the grass Which, now beneath them, but above shall grow In its next verdure, when this fiery mass Of living valour, rolling on the foe, And burning with high hope, ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... you had never heard or seen it, or heard of it in its cruelty, could you believe that it beats every inanimate thing in its way to pieces, without mercy, and destroys ...
— Hunted Down • Charles Dickens
... contains when opened—photographic portraits, small, yet clear and delicate as miniatures. Lilith's eyes gaze forth, seeming to shine from the inanimate cardboard as though with the love-light of gladness; Lilith's beautiful form, erect in characteristic attitude, the head slightly thrown back, the sweet lips compressed, just a touch of sadness in their ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... crossed the room as he spoke to open the door for her. His fingers were on the handle, but he did not turn it, awaiting her answer. She did not look at him, but past him towards the shaded lamp with that desire to fix her attention upon some inanimate object which he ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... literature, admits ungrudgingly that "there are certain corners of the great city and certain aspects of Parisian manners, there are some physiognomies that perhaps no one has been able to render so well as Daudet, with that infinitely subtle and patient art which succeeds in giving even to inanimate things ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... and interesting theme with the ancients. It entered into all their philosophy and religion, and gave rise to numerous fables. They believed that sympathy was a miraculous principle, and that it reigned in irrational and inanimate things. Thus they thought that "two harps being tuned alike, and one being played, the chords of the other would follow the tune with a faint, sympathetic music." It was also believed that precious stones ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... which exist; a good tree cannot bear evil fruit; it must, therefore, have another origin. But this is dualism, and must be rejected.[163] Nor is evil in God, nor of God; nor in the angels; nor in the human soul; nor in the brutes; nor in inanimate nature; nor in matter. Having thus hunted evil out of every corner of the universe, he asks—Is evil, then, simply privation of good? But privation is not evil in itself. No; evil must arise from "disorderly and inharmonious motion." As dirt has been defined as matter in the wrong ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... began to feel better, she went to Bessie, who pale and inanimate, seemed to be gently fading away, and only now and then raised her little finger to play ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... remembered that all Oriental languages give power to gems, perfumes and talismanic symbols. This fact makes direct translation of Oriental writings a difficult task for the Occidental scholar, who, until recently at least, gave no power to so-called "inanimate" things. ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... movement from east to west. Now the created rational nature alone is immediately subordinate to God, since other creatures do not attain to the universal, but only to something particular, while they partake of the Divine goodness either in being only, as inanimate things, or also in living, and in knowing singulars, as plants and animals; whereas the rational nature, in as much as it apprehends the universal notion of good and being, is immediately related to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the rich presents made to the inanimate clay which yesterday influenced those who still trembled lest the spirit of the dead war-chief would haunt them. The richest cloth enrobed his body, and, a short distance from the village, he ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... of coolness derived from a knowledge of its temperature. Thus also the evening cloud, exhibiting a fleeting representation of successive objects, is, perhaps, justly appropriated to Autumn, as in that Season the general decay of inanimate nature leads the mind to turn upon itself, and without effort to apply almost every image of sense or vision of the imagination,* ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... and so he always contrived to keep a clear head and a steady eye and hand. He also took good care of his horse and dog for his own sake, as he wanted to make the best and the longest of their services, and was shrewd enough to know that you cannot get out of anything, whether animate or inanimate, more than is put into it. So self and wife, and horse and dog were all well fed and cared for, and ...
— Working in the Shade - Lowly Sowing brings Glorious Reaping • Theodore P Wilson
... length he lay in bed, clutching the umbrella to his breast. Nothing had induced him to loose it from both hands at once. The priceless value of the umbrella was the one clearly-defined notion that illuminated his poor devastated brain. I left him to his inanimate companion. ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the inanimate form of poor Hillars into the inn and laid it on the sofa. I tore back his blood-wet shirt. The wound was slightly below the right lung. The bullet had severed an artery, for I could see that the blood gushed. We worked over him for ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... Napoleon's great drama of invasion. His men and horses had succumbed to summer heats as rapidly and extensively as to winter frosts; he had brought ruin to his enterprise by miscalculating the proportions of inanimate nature and human strategy, and by fatal indecision at critical moments when the statesman's delay was the soldier's ruin. Russia, like Spain, had the strength of low organisms; her vigor was not centralized in one member, the destruction of which would be ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... hesitate to tell me what you want. I don't do it from a sense of duty, but it is a positive pleasure for me to have anything to do for you. I long for letters; as soon as possible send me photographs, and not merely inanimate photographs of scenes and places, but be sure that you make a part of them yourself. I want to see you standing, sitting, reading in the new house; and give me an exact and detailed account of your day, please; ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... less because of the curious standard they supply by which to gauge the intellectual level of that age than as the symbols chosen by the poet to express the identity and nothingness of all things living and inanimate. Before God, all creatures think, reason, speak, like man, because all are equal to him and he is but a breath. The stars, which are relatives of the Satan and of God's own children, wax enthusiastic and shout for joy; the lightning hearkens ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... "though it be common and familiar language amongst us to call corn Ceres, and wine Bacchus, yet who can think any one so mad as to take that to be really a god that he feeds upon?"[141] And Plutarch condemns the whole practice of giving the names of gods and goddesses to inanimate objects, as absurd, impious, and atheistical: "they who give the names of gods to senseless matter and inanimate things, and such as are destroyed by men in the using, beget most wicked and atheistical opinions ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... however, other features of their mythology which belong to them exclusively, and which remind us rather of the sprightly and poetical imagination of the Greeks. We allude to their mode of attributing life to the inanimate objects of nature, rocks, brooks and trees; of peopling with supernatural beings the woods which surrounded them, the mountains between which they lived. The Rusalki of the Russians, the Vila of the southern Slavic nations, the Leshie of several other tribes, nymphs, ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... that images and statues may sometimes make a noise not unlike that of a moan or groan, through a rupture or violent internal separation of the parts; but that an articulate voice, and such express words, and language so clear and exact and elaborate, should proceed from inanimate things, is, in my judgment, a thing utterly out of possibility. For it was never known that either the soul of man, or the deity himself, uttered vocal sounds and language, alone, without an organized body and members fitted for speech. But where history seems in a manner to force our assent by ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... was not a natural glider and gliding as Tootsie explained to him was essential in a ballroom, in polite society at least. Skippy's feet could skip, hop and jump with the best, but they were not, in any sense of the word, gliders. The change from the inanimate embrace of the dressmaker's form to Tootsie's pliant figure, however, worked such miracles that at the end of twenty minutes' industrious application, Tootsie expressed herself ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... stopped. Her nature prompted her to go on; her present feelings restrained her. She could not help wondering at this, and said to herself that she must be aging faster than she thought. Her distant vision was excellent, and she knew that the inanimate form which was now being laid on the dry ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... dead-seeming bride: she, all the while, though unable to move, in an agony of self-consciousness; and at last, when Rowland in fiendish triumph pronounces the curse complete, to the extreme horror of both, by an effort of tortured mind over apparently inanimate matter, rolls her glazed eyes, and gives an involuntary groan: having thus to all appearance confirmed the curse, she lies more marble-white, more corpse-like, more entranced than ever. Then, after long lingering, draws on the horrible catastrophe: a catastrophe, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... prove) you cannot divorce accurate thought from accurate speech; but for accuracy, even for hair-splitting accuracy, of speech the Universities had the definitions of the Schoolmen. In literature they had yet to discover a concern. Literature was a thing of the past, inanimate. Nowhere in Europe could it be felt even to breathe. To borrow a beautiful phrase of Wordsworth's, men numbered it among 'things silently gone out of mind or ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... Neoptolemus will not be able to maintain to the end the character which, so much against his will, he has assumed. Not without reason after this deception does Philoctetes turn away from mankind to those inanimate companions to which the instinctive craving for society had attached him. He calls on the island and its volcanoes to witness this fresh wrong; he believes that his beloved bow feels pain in being taken from him; and at length he takes a melancholy leave ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... short a time is more than I can fathom. Men whom I would bank on; men to whom I have felt that I could go in any conceivable extremity, have turned me down as soon as I mentioned your name. The prison story is like a big, brutal, inanimate mountain standing squarely in the way; and I—I haven't the faith needful ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... you arrange some inanimate object or objects outside the eastern window, or elsewhere, on the Darrow estate so that it or they might wound ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... servant but a terrible master. When you have it mastering you; when interest is constantly piling up against you, it will keep you down in the worst kind of slavery. But let money work for you, and you have the most devoted servant in the world. It is no "eye-servant." There is nothing animate or inanimate that will work so faithfully as money when placed at interest, well secured. It works night and day, and in wet ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... his own safety, had thus risked his life to save another's. Three cheers broke the stillness that had fallen on the company, as the brave man was seen coming through the window and slowly descending to the ground holding under one arm the inanimate form of the child. Another cheer and then another, made the welkin ring, as the stranger, with hair burned and eyebrows closely singed, fainted at the foot of the ladder. But the child ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... up to the time of meeting in Dock Square, it was evident the plan of operations had not been carried further than that, and the excited ones looked about eagerly for the enemy, but, seeing none, began to vent their fury on inanimate objects. ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... genial spirit of springtime cheered the heart of man and the heart of nature, and all things animate and inanimate sang ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... asserted for Himself authority over all the powers and functions of our bodily life, when He gave eyes to the blind, hearing to the deaf, feet to the lame. He showed that He was Lord over the fowl of the air, the beasts of the earth, the fish of the sea. And He asserted His dominion over inanimate nature, when the fig-tree, cursed by Him, withered away to its roots, and the winds and waves sunk into silence at His gentle voice. He let us get a glimpse into the dark regions of His rule over the unseen, when 'with authority He commanded the unclean spirits, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... say, any fact pertaining to the higher ranks of society which would seem to confirm or to disprove his conclusions), and, lastly, to record that fact as it may have occurred within his own experience, while giving full details of persons (of individual manners, tendencies, and customs) and also of inanimate surroundings (of dress, furniture, fittings of houses, and so forth). For I need knowledge of the classes in question, which are the flower of our people. In fact, this very reason—the reason that I do not yet know Russian life ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... and the exterior graces of his person were such, that nature perhaps never formed anything more complete: His face was extremely handsome; and yet it was a manly face, neither inanimate nor effeminate; each feature having its beauty and peculiar delicacy: He had a wonderful genius for every sort of exercise, an engaging aspect, and an air of grandeur: in a word, he possessed every personal advantage; but then he ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... and rattling like wood against the steps. Nathanael was stupefied;—he had seen only too distinctly that in Olimpia's pallid waxed face there were no eyes, merely black holes in their stead; she was an inanimate puppet. Spalanzani was rolling on the floor; the pieces of glass had cut his head and breast and arm; the blood was escaping from him in streams. But he gathered his strength ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... a natural course of reasoning, that there has never been an effected without a cause, and we infer from this, that there can be no action, either in animate or inanimate matter, without there first being some cause to produce it. And from this self-evident fact we know that there is some cause for every impulse or movement of either mind or matter, and that this law governs every action or movement of the animal kingdom. ...
— The Arabian Art of Taming and Training Wild and Vicious Horses • P. R. Kincaid
... mighty saint directed them all one by one to put an end to the life of their mother. They, however, were quite confounded and lost heart. And they could not utter a single word. Then he in ire cursed them. And on being cursed they lost their sense and suddenly became like inanimate objects, and comparable in conduct to beasts and birds. And then Rama, the slayer of hostile heroes, came to the hermitage, last of all. Him the mighty-armed Jamadagni, of great austerities, addressed, saying, 'Kill this wicked ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... relations by broader and less fiercely egotistical conceptions; how it denies a man "property" rights over his wife and children, leaving, however, all his other relations with them intact, how it would insure and protect their welfare, and how it asserts that a vast range of inanimate things also which are now held as private property must be regarded as the inalienable possession of the whole community. This change in the circle of ideas (as the Herbartians put it) is the essence of ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... is eternity; whose thought is that of a god; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity; whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain, a being which we in consequence regard as purely inanimate and material, much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... shadows on the whitening face turned upward on the couch. The pains of death had given a distorted expression, and the eyes remained open. Roma wished to close them, but dared not try, and the image of inanimate objects standing in the light was mirrored in their dull and glassy surface. The dog in the distance was still barking, and a company of tipsy revellers were passing through the piazza singing a drinking song with ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... is true of inanimate matter is doubly true of living tissue. The tissues of the human body can be molded into almost any form you choose if taken in time. A child may be placed on his feet at too early an age, and the bones of his legs form the habit ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... tradition that he was set free about the end of the year 1774. We know too, that he was present at the execution of Pougatcheff, who, recognizing him in the crowd, gave him one last sign with the head which, a moment after, was shown to the people, bleeding and inanimate. ...
— Marie • Alexander Pushkin
... like growing old. I want to kiss you so—in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you've got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you're gone. I can't even hate the damnable presence of PEOPLE, those people in the station who haven't any right to live—I can't resent them even though they're dirtying up our world, because I'm engrossed in wanting ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the post of the sluice with one arm, and with the other tried to arrest the course of the drowning man, who was borne by a rapid current towards the mill wheel; and was already so far beneath the surface, that Martinel could not reach him without letting go of the post. Grasping the inanimate body, he actually allowed himself to be carried under the mill wheel, without loosing his hold, and came up immediately after on the other side, still able to bring the man to land, in time for his suspended animation ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... but, stooping, lifted her in her strong arms. And the child shrank back no longer, but was carried as if inanimate; her teeth closely set, her eyes shut, chilled through and through, and with the lightness of a little bird that had ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... youth, in the ordinary social amusements of his class when he had once found out that they did not amuse him; nor wear their clothes if he could not feel at ease and be himself in them; nor use, whether in speech or writing, any trite or inanimate form of words that did not faithfully and livingly express his thought. A readier acceptance alike of current usages and current phrases might have been better for him, but was simply not in his nature. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... personal and supreme Deity a providential oversight of this world,—a being whom all are required to worship, and alone to worship, as the only true God whose right it is to reign, and who does reign, and will reign forever and ever over everything that exists, animate or inanimate, visible or invisible, known or unknown, in the mighty universe of whose glory and grandeur we have such overwhelming yet ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... flight, the yearning, yet hopelessness, of the enamored gazer, while a shadowy ideal character is thrown over the whole! Or this power acts by impressing the stamp of humanity, and of human feelings, on inanimate or ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... you need to be ashamed of this sentiment, or that an inanimate structure should call it into being," said the young commander. "I am sure I have not ceased to love the Bellevite; and in my eyes she is handsomer than any young lady I ever saw. I have not been able to transfer my affections to the Bronx ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic
... metallic coffin: the grave is no protection against their mania for novelty. In the windows of a shop in Broadway, this strange, and to my mind revolting, article may be seen, shaped like a mummy, fitting hermetically tight, and with a plate of glass to reveal the features of the inanimate inmate. I have certainly read of the disconsolate lover who, on the death of her who ungratefully refused to reciprocate his affection, disinterred her body by stealth, supplied himself with scanty provision, ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... turrets that Usk from its waters reflected, Arthur vanish'd with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad, all gone, dissolv'd utterly like an exhalation; Pass'd! pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now void, inanimate, phantom world, Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends, myths, Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly dames, Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on, Blazon'd with Shakspere's purple page, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... the nature of mind and matter, entertained by the philosophers. The doctrine of Plato consisted of three primary principles: matter, ideas, and God. While matter is co-eternal with God, he created all animate and inanimate things from matter. Plato maintained that there was a unity in design. And as God was an independent and individual creator of the world, who fashioned the universe, and is father to all creatures, there was unity in God. Plato advanced ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... they all fell asleep, that they might not wake before their mistress, and that they might be ready to wait upon her when she wanted them. The very spits at the fire, as full as they could be of partridges and pheasants, and everything in the place, whether animate or inanimate, fell asleep also. ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... She presented him as though he were some inanimate personal possession. "We have been in Paris and Monte Carlo all winter. Got back yesterday. Nice old place, Rome, don't you think so? I dote on it, but of course it gets provincial if you stay too long!" At the same moment she caught sight of Zoya ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... round him vaguely, as if he wanted all the dumb, inanimate things around him to bear witness to this monstrous idea: Elsa flouted for another woman! Elsa! the most beautiful woman on God's earth, the purest, the best—flouted! And for whom? for what?—other girls—women—who ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Both were inanimate. The oval tea-table invariably separated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her. He bowed; she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They sat in the alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears. Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose Shaw marvelled and deplored. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... in a badgering tone. "What are the processes?" He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley's "plow or sword or spade" for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... poor inanimate piece of electronic equipment has taken a beating when UFO proof is being offered. "Radar is not subject to the frailties of the human mind," is the outcry of every saucer fan, "and ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... clad in dismal black, and apparently unconscious of his surroundings, sunk in a profound reverie that none would dare to intrude upon. He had dreamed of a gracious, smiling sovereign, showering good gifts upon his loyal subjects, and here was an apathetic, inanimate being, who seemed capable of no thought for any one but himself. He was sadly disappointed, shocked, amazed; and he felt, with a sinking heart, how hopeless was his own case. For even should he be able to approach this mournful, listless monarch, what sympathy ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... heart shall kindle; her dull eye, Dull and inanimate, no more shall hang Chained to its object in ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... Whether it was a lion or a snake in him that fascinated, it is certainly true that he impressed every one who knew him. In some respects his influence was very singular. He seemed to throw out a strange devitalizing force that acted as well upon inanimate as upon animate things. The new buffet had not been in the dining-room six months before it looked as ancient as the Louis XIV. pier-glass in the upper hall. This subtle influence of Mr. Maddledock had wrought ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... little house in a distant, lonely spot, no sooner becomes a home than it is baptized, as it were, with tears? No doubt there are bright and happy days in store for us yet, but these first ones here have been sadly darkened by this shadow of death. Inanimate things have such a terrible power to wound one: though everything which would remind me of Baby has been carefully removed and hidden away by F——'s orders, still now and then I come across some trifle belonging to him, and, as ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... necessities. You do not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves. But if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... unity with a tendency to movement. And this is given by the diagonal and V-shaped type. This type merely allows free play to the natural tendency of the "active" picture; but it constrains the neutral, inanimate landscape. The shape itself imparts motion to the picture: the sweep of line, the concentration of the vista, the unifying power of the inverted triangle between two masses, act, as it were, externally to the suggestion of the object itself. There is always enough quiet in a landscape,— the ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... descriptions given to him by others, had enabled him to form, in his own mind, the most complete and faithful image of his wife's face. Nothing that Mr. Sebright could say would induce him to believe that it was physically impossible for him to form a really correct idea of any object, animate or inanimate, which he had never seen. He wouldn't hear of it. He was so certain of the result, that he held his wife's hand in his, to encourage her, when the bandage was removed from him. At his first look at her, he ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... little urchins who ride them to water; the cows, and those who milk them. And then, country-folks are nature's freeholders; they enjoy a full portion of the earth, the air, the sky, with the thousand charms an ever-merciful Creator has lavished on them. Every inanimate object—this hill, that wood, the brook, the bridge, C.'s farm-house, and D.'s barn—to the very highway, as far as eye can reach, all form pleasing parts of a country home. In a city, on the contrary, we live surrounded by strangers. Home is entirely restricted to our own fire-side. ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... in nature is generally believed to be a rearrangement of the very same atoms). If you mean to assert that the difference between a live animal and a dead animal, i.e., between animate and sensitive matter, and the same matter when it becomes inanimate and insensitive, is a mere rearrangement of the same atoms, your premiss is intelligible. (It is a bolder one than any biologists have yet advanced. The most sceptical of them admits, I believe, that "vitality" is a thing per se. However, that is beside my present scope.) But this premiss is advanced ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... degree of unity and sensitiveness, an injury to the remotest part affecting instantaneously the whole organism; so, precisely, is the same true of society in its higher stages of development. The law is universal; it governs the organic as well as the inanimate, the social as well as the organic world. Hence the reason why the rupture of Europe, on the death of Charlemagne, into provinces and kingdoms loosely united, could not prevent the ultimate organization of national government, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... on the plains all his life without learning how to approach moving game. As long as the caribou were in action, they could not tell whether he moved or was motionless. In order to tell if an object was inanimate or not, they must stop to see, of which fact the keen hunter took advantage. Suddenly he saw the gray mass slow down and bunch up. He stopped running, to stand like a stump. When the reindeer moved again, he moved, and when they slackened again, he stopped and became motionless. As they kept to their ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... way through the walls of the green-room, before his messenger could return with the gladsome tidings. Yet, not till the last sentence was spoken, and the curtain fairly dropped upon Cato and his weeping friends, did the author venture to move from the inanimate position in which he was fixed. This acute dread of failure now heightened the joy of success, and never was success ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... clouds, indeed, was like a land on fire, or a battle-ground illumined by another sunset, a country of blackened villages and crimsoned pastures. The tumult of the clouds increased; it was hard to believe them inanimate. You might have fancied them an army of gigantic souls playing at football with the sun. They seemed to sway in confused splendor; the opposing squadrons bore each other down; and then suddenly they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... cell door closed upon Royal Maillot I returned at once to the house of tragedy, whose evil genius was promising to play havoc with the lives of so many of the living; and as I approached the bleak, austere old mansion something in its silent and inanimate exterior seemed to repulse my advance up the gravel walk. My steps lagged, and at last ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... balustrade and looked down into the kitchen. Nothing there was visible but a narrow strip of the white table, on which lay a black cotton glove, and beyond, the glint of a copper pan. What made all these mute and inanimate things ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... was an awful accessory to the attempted murder. The inanimate object had moved as a human being would if suddenly shot through a vital part. Perhaps the very gasp of horror Enoch had uttered reached the ears of him who had fired from ambush. At least the enemy did not seek to come nearer. Indeed, the youth heard a crash in the brush and then ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... majesty from the sea, there came a refreshing breeze off the land, bringing with it the perfume of a thousand aromatic herbs; albatrosses and sea-gulls circled round the ship; flying-fish were to be seen in shoals; and all nature, animate and inanimate, seemed to be freshened for the time into activity and life. But gradually the breeze would become warmer and lighter, and then die away altogether, so that before noon the sails would hang flapping against the mast. They scarcely made five knots in the watch, and ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... regards these things as matters of formalism. But inasmuch as, to the studious eye of affection, they suggest human action and human sympathies, this is a proof that they had their birth in some corresponding affection. It is the inanimate body of Geometry made spiritual and living by the Love of the human heart. And when a later generation reduced the Ionic volutes to rule, and endeavored to inscribe them with the gyrations of the compass, they have no further interest for us, save as a mathematical problem with an unknown value equal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... into the bargain. And she cared less about the probation; but she craved for liberty. With a frigidity that astonished her, she marvelled at the act of kissing, and at the obligation it forced upon an inanimate person to be an accomplice. Why was she not free? By what strange right was it that she ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... resistless force. And this truth applies not only to the tremendous powers of the hurricane, the flood and the earthquake, but to economic principles, which are simply a translation into human terms of the laws manifested in inanimate nature. ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... were stretched on the rock, inanimate, and no longer conscious of what passed around them. Ayrton alone, by a supreme effort, from time to time raised his head, and cast a despairing glance over ...
— The Secret of the Island • W.H.G. Kingston (translation from Jules Verne)
... we ever met with. Certainly nothing else in London, from St. Paul's, Westminster Abbey and the Tower to our Picture Galleries and Crystal Palace, not even the Duke of Wellington's Equestrian Statue, elicited such praise from him as "very nice," at least as applied to any inanimate object. ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... had been the scene of so many singular happenings. The detective and I seated ourselves, but the Scotsman, holding the Chinaman by the neck as though he had been some inanimate bundle, stood just within the doorway, one of the most gigantic specimens of manhood I had ever set ...
— Tales of Chinatown • Sax Rohmer
... whose eye and brain and hand had been thirty years in service, lay under his engine, a mangled, inanimate mass of flesh; His fireman, who had looked forward to a place on the engineer's side of a cab as a young soldier dreams of sword and shoulder straps, lay still beside his chief. From the wrecked coaches, above the sound of hissing steam and crackling ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... "that the more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... that only so much of the personal note is retained as is sufficient to bring these various poems into touch with each other. And we can perceive that their inspiration is drawn, chiefly if not exclusively, from the spiritual influence of inanimate nature, the effects of inland or woodland solitude, of the land silent under the noontide heat, of the sterile shore, or the raging of the sea. The Midsummer Holiday group has two pictures of sweet homeliness—'The Mill Garden' and 'On a Country Road'—the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... him, of the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... father and mother were, of course, the main thing, after all. She was with us all day long; he, from the time he stopped writing, early in the afternoon, till our bed-time. They answered all our questions about things animate and inanimate, physical and metaphysical; and that must have taken time, for our curiosity was magnificent; and "The Old Boy," my father records, "asked me today what were sensible questions—I suppose with a view to asking me some." ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... improvements in places to which our childish recollections cling! The gushing fulness of unchilled love is lavished even on inanimate and senseless things, in a happy childhood. How was my heart grieved when the old-fashioned meeting-house was converted into the modern temple! Time and decay had rendered the tall spire unsafe, yet its fall by force and premeditated purpose ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... cultivate, exercise, practise, or cherish,—say rather, in any sense, to take pains about a thing: hence, used in the blessed service of religion, it is to regard, venerate, respect, or worship. Therefore cultus, which is the noun of this verb, signifies, when referred to things inanimate, tending or cultivation to things animate, education, culture; to God and the holy saints, reverence and worship. Dost thou now understand, ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... they took a lamb or some other animal, which they slew and burned its flesh, acknowledging by this act that the Lord was the supreme Master of life and death. The ancients offered to God two kinds of sacrifices, viz., living creatures, such as bulls, lambs and birds; and inanimate objects, such as wheat and barley, and, in general, the first ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... of extinction of species, and creation of new ones going on perpetually now, and through an indefinite period of the past, and to continue for ages to come, all in accommodation to the changes which must continue in the inanimate and habitable earth, the idea struck me as the grandest which I had ever conceived, so far as regards the attributes of ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... and fanning Mrs. Curwen: "There! there! Wake up, Mrs. Curwen. I didn't mean to scold you for joking. I didn't, indeed. I—I—I don't know what the deuce I'm up to." He gathers Mrs. Curwen's inanimate form in his arms, and fans her face where it lies on his shoulder. "I don't know what my ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... is the standpoint of romance, and it is the soul of 'Treasure Island' and 'The Wrecker.' It was not, indeed, that Stevenson loved men less, but that he loved clubs and pistols more. He had, in truth, in the devouring universalism of his soul, a positive love for inanimate objects such as has not been known since St Francis called the sun brother and the well sister. We feel that he was actually in love with the wooden crutch that Silver sent hurtling in the sunlight, with the box that Billy ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... implorer, to implore, beseech. important, important, weighty. importer, to be of importance; il n'importe, no matter. imposteur, m., impostor. impuissant, powerless, impotent. impur, unclean, foul. imputer, to ascribe. inanim, inanimate, lifeless. inconnu, unknown. inconstance, f., inconstancy, restlessness, fickleness. Inde, Indus (river). Indien, m., Indian. indigne, unworthy, shameful. indompt, wild, untamed, indomitable. invitable, unavoidable. inexorable, ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... Bessy with so much interest; there was something so beautifully calm in her countenance as she lay there like an effigy on a tomb, hardly appearing to breathe; and when I thought of the courage and devotion shown but a few hours before by the present almost inanimate form, I bent over her with admiration, and felt as if I could kneel before the beautiful shrine which contained such an energetic and noble spirit. While this was passing through my mind, Bramble had knelt by the bed-side, and was evidently in prayer. When he rose ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... of Nature, there were given to Maltboy a light and cheerful heart, a tendency to laugh on the smallest provocation, and a nice susceptibility to the beautiful. Not the beautiful in rivers, forests, skies, and other inanimate things, but the beautiful in woman. And as Overtop was gifted to discover charms in material objects which were plain in other eyes, so Maltboy possessed the wonderful faculty of seeing beauty in female faces, where other people saw, perhaps, ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... wet, and seemed as if it had just been plunged into the water. She appeared to be severely wounded in the face; and her garments, which were raised up, in spite of the cold and rainy weather, left the upper part of her knees almost entirely exposed. At the sight of this half-naked and inanimate body, all the spectators were affected. People said that the first duty to pay to a dying woman was, to preserve her from the cold, to cover her. A physician examined the body; he declared that all remedies were useless; that Madame ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the fact of the slave, being undoubtedly by the law of the day property in the colonies, that, while his colonial master made a temporary stay in Britain, he should be property there also, without any direct law to that effect. Had it been a question of inanimate goods, there would be no reason why the property should not continue in the colonial owner. It would be all one to the inanimate object what hands it was in, and regularity and justice would decree that the person who was owner of it in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... his fierce and furious struggles, was effected in less space than we have taken to describe it. Then, leaving him in the hands of two of their number, who proceeded to bind him securely, the others rushed after Nathan, who, though encumbered by his burden, again inanimate, her arms clasped around his neck, as they had been round that of her kinsman, made the most desperate exertions to bear her off, seeming to regard her weight no more than if the burden had been a cushion of thistle-down. He ran for a moment with astonishing activity, leaping over ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... The richest in flavour and heaviest in weight and price are placed on large and massy salvers; one, enormously superior in size, is the chief object of curiosity; and all are decorated with all imaginable images of things animate and inanimate. Stars, castles, kings, cottages, dragons, trees, fish, palaces, cats, dogs, churches, lions, milkmaids, knights, serpents, and innumerable other forms in snow-white confectionery, painted with variegated colours, glitter by 'excess of light' from mirrors against ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... wishes. Gradually as the intellectual sight became overclouded, these gay visions became obscure, like the dying hues of sunset, until they were at last lost in total oblivion; and Sir Kenneth lay extended at the feet of El Hakim, to all appearance, but for his deep respiration, as inanimate a corpse as if life ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... his heart—an inanimate burden—he kissed her cold lips, her eyelids, her hair; called her by names whose use she had long forgotten, whose revival caused her pain like nausea. If he could have known it, this was the last way to win her. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... dark soul departs at death to Hades, while the light soul stays near the place where he died or was killed. "Probably," says Thomas Williams, "this doctrine of shadows has to do with the notion of inanimate objects having spirits. I once placed a good-looking native suddenly before a mirror. He stood delighted. 'Now,' said he, softly, 'I can see into the world of spirits.'"[659] However, according to another good authority this distinction of two human souls rests merely on a misapprehension ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... my hands I eagerly scanned the horizon in the direction indicated, and there, to my astonishment, saw a long thin black line. At first I could not distinguish whether it was a file of men or some inanimate object, but the keen eyes of the savages before and behind me soon detected its presence, and dozens of voices were in accord that it was a line of armed men, and that they were moving in ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... herd seemed all at once to grow bolder. He was a stout old buck—what had he to fear? Why should he dread such creatures as these, without heads, or teeth, or claws, and evidently incapable of moving themselves? No doubt they were inanimate objects. He would soon decide that question, by simply stepping up and laying his nose ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... slowly forward beneath the resistless force of the other's huge muscles, she heard the crack that announced the parting of the vertebrae and saw the limp thing which had but a moment before been a man, pulsing with life and vigor, roll helplessly aside—a harmless and inanimate lump of clay. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... no polished mirror to the lips, nor make use of any of those tests which, under the circumstances, would be absolutely necessary before life could be pronounced to be extinct; they would see that the body was lifeless, inanimate, to all outward appearance like the few other dead bodies which they had probably observed closely; with this they ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted, and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy when ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... he began a sad inquiry into the nature of things. The world was so full of things: clouds and winds and sewing machines, kings and brigands, hats and heads, flower-pots, jam and public-houses—surely one could find a little to chat about at any moment if one were not ambitiously particular. With inanimate objects one could speak of shape and colour and usefulness. Animate objects had, beside these, movements and aptitudes for eating and drinking, playing and quarrelling. Artistic things were well or ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... action spoken of. For instance, the same word will not express two similar actions performed, the one on the water, the other on the land; or two similar actions, the one referring to a living; the other to an inanimate object; there must be a separate conjugation for each. The forms of the verb thus vary to infinity, and hence arose the immense difficulty to the ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... modeled youth—as beautiful a thing, doubtless, as God ever created in His sense of form; better than his sisters, better than the four-foots, or the fishes, or the birds, and he meant so much more than the inanimate things, in so far as we can see. He had the body given to him and he wanted to keep it, but there were the mysterious demons of the darkness, the wind and the flames; there were the monsters from the shadows, and from under the waters; there were the machinations of his enemies, ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... writers of mythology supposed," replied Cortlandt, "inanimate objects were endowed with senses, these moons would doubtless be unable to perceive the spiritual beings here; for the satellites, being material, should, to be consistent, have only those senses possessed by ourselves, so that to them this ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... of any species, feels the truth of what I am saying. I know in my own case, that my mind during such experiments has always been in a different state according to the line of experiment. When the experiment has been conducted on dead or inanimate matter, the return obtained from the labour demanded has always been not only satisfacdtory, but pleasant to the mind. On the contrary, when the experiment has been conducted on living or animate matter, the labour, whether affirmative or negative ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... approached, and they precipitately fled. It was a mixed and villainous crew that first reached the spot after the departure of the murderers, mainly consisting of natives; but there was a sprinkling of Europeans of doubtful repute, and they quickly gathered round the two inanimate bodies. ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... for as long a period as six weeks, and then have been dug up and restored to perfect health and strength again in a few hours. Now, if life can be suspended for six weeks and then restored to an organism which, from all physiological standpoints, must be regarded as inanimate, why not for six years or six hundred years, for the matter of that? Given once the possibility, which we may assume as proved, of a restoration to life after total suspension of animation, then it only becomes a question of preservation of tissue for more or less indefinite periods. Granted ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... saw something new in life and humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate things. ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... and trailing far away from her smoke-stacks. There is a surging, hissing, and smothered screaming of the pent-up steam in her boilers, as if they had put on all energy for the moment. They had;—flesh, blood, bones, iron, brass, steel,—animate and inanimate,—were nerved up for the ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... open-hearted and straight-forward Neoptolemus will not be able to maintain to the end the character which, so much against his will, he has assumed. Not without reason after this deception does Philoctetes turn away from mankind to those inanimate companions to which the instinctive craving for society had attached him. He calls on the island and its volcanoes to witness this fresh wrong; he believes that his beloved bow feels pain in being taken ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... he does not attract his own land body and soul to himself, and hang on its neck with incomparable love—and if he be not himself the age transfigured—and if to him is not opened the eternity which gives similitude to all periods and locations and processes and animate and inanimate forms, and which is the bond of time, and rises up from its inconceivable vagueness and infiniteness in the swimming shape of to-day, and is held by the ductile anchors of life, and makes the present spot the passage from what was to what shall be, and commits ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... invocation to the heavenly host, the Psalmist calls first on the forms of inanimate and inorganic existence. These things, of which he enumerates a few, praise the power of God. The crags and headlands, jarred and worn by the billows they breast; the granite peaks, bald and grey, under light and tempest, with the silent ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... alkalkuli. In en. In front antauxe. In place of, to put anstatauxi. In that manner tiamaniere. Inability neebleco. Inaccessible neatingebla. Inaccurate neakurata. Inaction senokupo. Inactive senokupa. Inadvertence malatenteco. Inane malplena. Inanimate senviva. Inappreciable netaksebla. Inappropriate nedeca. In as much as tial ke. Inattention neatenteco. Inaudible neauxdebla. Inauspicious nefavora. Incalculable nekalkulebla. Incapable nekapabla. Incapacity nekapableco. Incarnate korpigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... graces of his person were such, that nature perhaps never formed anything more complete: His face was extremely handsome; and yet it was a manly face, neither inanimate nor effeminate; each feature having its beauty and peculiar delicacy: He had a wonderful genius for every sort of exercise, an engaging aspect, and an air of grandeur: in a word, he possessed every ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... saw Nettie lying with her vigorous black hair sprawling in a thick twist across the pillow. Her face was pinched, it seemed thin, and the brilliancy and size of her eyes were exaggerated. One arm, clumsy and inanimate in splints, was extended over the cotton spread; but with the other hand she was feverishly busy with her appearance. She smiled, a wan tremulous movement that again shut the pain like a leaden casket about ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Poem as Literature.—Ovid here depicts in language purposely exaggerated the power of music over the hearts of men, and even over nature, animate and inanimate. This gives point to the strong contrast in the lines which follow, where greed dominates all the feelings. Shakespeare refers to the love of music as ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... that with one of them it was a case of a broken arm; and as to the long individual with grey moustaches he was the chief engineer, and in various ways a pretty notorious personality. They were nobodies. They approached. The skipper gazed in an inanimate way between his feet: he seemed to be swollen to an unnatural size by some awful disease, by the mysterious action of an unknown poison. He lifted his head, saw the two before him waiting, opened his mouth with an extraordinary, sneering contortion of ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... soldiers, horses, carriages, mines and miners, convents, monks, hermits, &c.,—all in a state of quiescence. The pulling of a few strings, however, gives a totally novel aspect to the face of affairs. Inanimate objects continue, of course, at rest; but no sooner is the clock-work set a-going, than music sounds, soldiers march, carriages rattle about, ploughs travel, miners dig, mills go round, monks toll bells, hermits read and nod their heads, milkmaids ply their occupation visibly and effectively ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... could not brook it;— So seeing a huge brick-bat, up he took it; And aiming, like a marksman at a crow, Plump on the breast he hit his deadly foe; Who fell, like Pedants' periods, to the ground,— Very inanimate, ...
— Broad Grins • George Colman, the Younger
... Gus spent the night in the best spare room, under the heavy covers of an immense fourposter. They slept through the cold night like inanimate objects. Tony, alone, occupied a room which had evidently been that of an only son who had gone away to the Great War to remain away forever. There was crape hanging over the frame of a picture showing a sturdy, manly looking ...
— Radio Boys Loyalty - Bill Brown Listens In • Wayne Whipple
... yellow light, and conversed with none but Albano and Claude Lorrain, till the beams of the morning sun entered my chamber, and forced my visiting companions to fly murmuring to the shades. I cannot say but I was sorry to leave Mannheim, though my acquaintance with it was entirely confined to inanimate objects. The cheerful air and free range of the galleries would be sufficient, for several days, for my amusement; as you know I could people them with phantoms. Not many leagues out of town, lie the famous gardens of Schweidsing. The weather being extremely ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... may be found in the fact that the now civilized Muskoki or Creeks, as mentioned by Rev. H.F. Buckner, when speaking of the height of children or women, illustrate their words by holding their hands at the proper elevation, palm up; but when describing the height of "soulless" animals or inanimate objects, they hold the palm downward. This, when correlated with the distinctive signs of other Indians, is an interesting case of the survival of a practice which, so far as yet reported, the ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... vision, before the soul can soar above the delicious but inanimate charms of earth, into the glowing region of human ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the change was accomplished, our captors handling us as unceremoniously as though we had been inanimate things. ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medical notion of "irritable weakness" is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr. ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... of the night, of the inanimate and imponderable black walls, and of herself, were exquisitely and abnormally keen. She saw him there, bowed under his burden, gloomy and wroth and sick with himself because the man in him despised the coward. Men of his stamp were seldom or never cowards. Their lives did ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... action there should be little suggestion of attention or of direction of movement. What is less evident is the reason for the high percentage of I. Of course, figures do appear in many examples, and in most pictures some inanimate object is emphasized—as, for instance, the mill in our second example. But the most remarkable point of difference in these tables from the preceding is the presence of V. in practically every example. It is, of course, natural that ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... stood in the hall when Miss Preston passed through the hall to dinner, and, unless suddenly stricken with ophthalmy, she could not fail to see the flaring notice. "Ah," she said, softly, to herself, "you have a triple mission, you inanimate bit of the carpenter's skill: first, to teach my girls a lesson in longitude and time, second, to mutely ask my permission for a frolic to-night, and, third, to suggest that when birthdays arrive it would be a most ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... canvas limned it for all time in forms of unuttered and unutterable loveliness. They shaped into glowing life the phantoms of grace that were always flitting before their enchanted eyes, and poured into inanimate marble their rapt and passionate souls. They struck the lyre to wild and stirring songs whose tremulous echoes still linger along the corridors of Time. Some sought the icebound North, and grappled with dangers by field and flood. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... make-believes—the pleasure of listening to marvellous and impossible tales, and of hearing odd and unpronounceable words or combination of words —the love of acting, and of disguises—of the impersonation of inanimate objects—of seeing things as they are not, and of creating and giving reality to what has no existence except in their own minds—are all the gambollings and frolics, so to speak, of the embryo faculties just becoming conscious of ...
— Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... chamber, and finds Saville mourning over his dead-seeming bride: she, all the while, though unable to move, in an agony of self-consciousness; and at last, when Rowland in fiendish triumph pronounces the curse complete, to the extreme horror of both, by an effort of tortured mind over apparently inanimate matter, rolls her glazed eyes, and gives an involuntary groan: having thus to all appearance confirmed the curse, she lies more marble-white, more corpse-like, more entranced than ever. Then, after long lingering, draws on the horrible catastrophe: ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... served to remind, or rather to convince her, of the opulence of the owner of the house. Here every object was estimated, not for its beauty or elegance, but by its costliness. Money was the grand criterion, by which the worth of animate and inanimate objects was alike decided. In this society, the worship of the golden idol was avowed without shame or mystery; and all who did not bow the knee to it were considered as hypocrites or fools. Our heroine, possessed of two hundred thousand pounds, could not fail to have a large share ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... yard from the sweet lips I had kissed; I stood within arm's length of the inanimate beauty I desired to quicken, and I saw opening between us a gulf of years, toil, waiting, disappointments ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... French avion de chasse, crowded round, examining and admiring with feelings of awe and reverence. It was a marvelous piece of aero-craftsmanship, the result of more than two years of accumulating experience in military aviation. It was hard to think of it as an inanimate thing, once having seen it in the air. It seemed living, intelligent, almost human. I could readily understand how it is that airmen become attached to their machines and speak of their fine points, their little peculiarities of individuality, with a kind of loving interest, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... her hand and, drawing her nearer to the bed and to himself, placed it upon her dead brother's breast, she recoiled at the touch of the inanimate body, so unlike anything she had ever touched before, but she obeyed her father without any question, and listened to his words as to those ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... transforms the scene. The old woman who owned the obstinate pig is the centre of a circle in which stand only familiar images,—stick, fire, water, cow, and the rest; but the wonder enters with the fact that these usually inanimate or dumb objects of nature enter so humanly into the contest of wills. So it is, also, with the doings of the three little pigs. Every image is explicable to the youngest hearer, while none suggests actual ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... transact *Alius other alias, inalienable *Alter other alteration, adultery *Altus high altitude, exalt *Ambulo walk perambulator, preamble *Amicus friend amicable, enemy *Amo, amatum love inamorata, amateur, inimical *Anima life animal, inanimate Animus mind animosity, unanimous Annus year annuity, biennial *Aqua water aquarium, aqueduct Audio, auditum hear audience, audit *Bellum war rebel, belligerent *Bene well benefit, benevolence *Bonus good bonanza, bona fide *Brevis short ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... would have picked up a paper-cutter, a pencil, a match-box, if any of these had been within reach of his nervous fingers. Most men who are at times mentally embarrassed find relief in touching small inanimate objects. So he said reassuringly: "Don't let a pair ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... Still, out of school hours we walked and talked continually together; when the theme of conversation was our companions or our masters we understood each other, and when I recurred to some sentiment of affection, some vague love of an excellent or beautiful object, whether in animate or inanimate nature, your sardonic coldness did not move me. I felt myself superior to that check ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... always "students of nature," and suppose that to be so will suffice; but when the understanding and imagination gain width and elasticity, life is more and more understood as a long struggle to overcome or humanise nature by that which most essentially distinguishes man from other animals and inanimate nature. Religion should be the drill and exercise of the human faculties to fit them and maintain them in readiness for this struggle; the work of art should be the assertion of victory. A life worthy of remembrance is a work of art, a life worthy of universal remembrance is a masterpiece: ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... Hall, which she informed me was a summons to breakfast. I obeyed its call, and after thanking her for her conversation, returned with a heart warmed and enlarged, to the amiable society. My mind was so filled with exalted reflections on their virtues that I was less attentive to the charms of inanimate nature than when I ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... I should be, as it were, displeased with those persons; but when there was no resistance, but a full acquiescence, this divine virtue had its full effect. Healing virtue has so much power over things inanimate, yet the least thing in man either restrains it, or stops ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... now came forward. Great was his amazement to recognize, in this dark object, the negro, Cato! He lay upon his face, as lax and motionless as a piece of inanimate matter. ...
— Oonomoo the Huron • Edward S. Ellis
... British public lives, in which all these things will be set out with tact and dignity. Horatio Blenker or Adolphus Blenker may survive to be entrusted with this congenial task. She will be represented as a tall inanimate person pursuing one clear benevolent purpose in life from her very beginning, and Sir Isaac and her relations with Sir Isaac will be rescued from reality. The book will be illustrated by a number of carefully posed photographer's photographs of her, studies ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... inanimate. The oval tea-table invariably separated them, and the plate of biscuits was all he ever gave her. He bowed; she inclined her head. They danced. He danced divinely. They sat in the alcove; never a word was said. Her pillow was wet with tears. Kind Mr. Bowley and dear Rose Shaw marvelled ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Names of inanimate objects usually substitute prepositional phrases to denote possession: [The hardness of the ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal passions or animal enjoyment, but human discursive intellect and moral sense, to inanimate objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more of a man than the poet is—as indeed ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... wolves range restlessly abroad, while the birds, numbed to the heart, are silent; or yet again the recluse in his cell, humorously comparing his quest of ideas to the pursuit of the mice by his pet cat. This deep love of inanimate and animate things becomes individualized in those poems in which every tree, every spring, every bird is described with ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... stock, to the Dukes of Mandeville, whose present ducal descendant combines the elegance of an Esterhazy with the intellect of an Argyle. That a scion of such blood as this has reduced a fellow-being to a condition of inanimate protoplasm, is to be regretted for his sake; but more for that of a country in which the philosophy of COMTE finds in a corrupt radical pantarchy all-sufficient first-cause of whatsoever is rotten in the State of Denmark." The Times said: "We give no details of the Burnstableville tragedy ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... retained the presence of mind necessary to devise the steps to be immediately taken. He sprang to the examination of Denbigh; the eyes of the wounded man were open, and his recollection perfect: the first were fixed in intense observation on the inanimate body ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... almost dragged him down to the bottom. Fortunately, he released himself from the clutch of the now senseless youth, and continued to support him by swimming and treading water. For fear of exhaustion, he afterwards threw himself on his back, and, placing the head of his almost inanimate shipmate on his chest, he kept him up for a quarter of an hour, till a boat reached them and ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... him, unknown—there had she first confessed to herself that fancy had begotten love—there had she gone through love's short and exhausting process of lone emotion;—the doubt, the hope, the ecstasy; the reverse, the terror; the inanimate despondency, the agonised despair! And there now, sadly and patiently, she awaited the gradual march of inevitable decay. And books and pictures, and musical instruments, and marble busts, half shadowed by classic draperies—and ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the house startled him from his semi-stupor. His eyes wandered from the picture to the inanimate form lying ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... animate and inanimate, in the visible physical world, as circumscribed to this secluded settlement, on the morning when opened the first scene in the closing act of our story's changeful drama. But in the moral world, so ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... to scuttle away as he came nearer, and then for the first time Nat discovered that they, like the inanimate things about them, were completely sheathed in ice; so much so, in fact, that they could ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls, Vol. XIII, Nov. 28, 1891 • Various
... intelligence may address invectives? If Krishna in his infancy slew a vulture, what is there remarkable in that, or in that other feat of his, O Bhishma, viz., in his slaughter of Aswa and Vrishava, both of whom were unskilled in battle? If this one threw drown by a kick an inanimate piece of wood, viz., a car, what is there, O Bhishma, wonderful in that? O Bhishma, what is there remarkable in this one's having supported for a week the Govardhan mount which is like an anthill? "While sporting on the top of a mountain this one ate a large quantity of food,"—hearing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... which they are held, and the strings with which they are tied getting entangled together. In an exaggerated pantomime, Madame Tres-Propre expresses her despair at wasting so much of our valuable time: oh! if it only depended on her personal efforts! but ah! the natural perversity of inanimate things which have no consideration for human dignity! With monkeyish antics, she even deems it her duty to threaten the lanterns and shake her fist at these inextricably tangled strings which have the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... room is as murky as a smithy; railing at French chimneys, French masons, and French architects; giving a poke at the end of every sentence, as though he were stirring up the very bowels of the delinquents he is anathematizing. He lives in a state militant with inanimate objects around him; gets into high dudgeon with doors and casements, because they will not come under English law, and has implacable feuds with sundry refractory pieces of furniture. Among these is one in particular with ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... are inanimate objects elected to take the guardianship of individuals—they sometimes become protectors of the national interests. There is a large, fiat rock, about ten miles from Plymouth, Massachusetts, which continues to receive tribute from the Indians, probably from having, at a ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... you have it mastering you; when interest is constantly piling up against you, it will keep you down in the worst kind of slavery. But let money work for you, and you have the most devoted servant in the world. It is no "eye-servant." There is nothing animate or inanimate that will work so faithfully as money when placed at interest, well secured. It works night and day, and in ...
— The Art of Money Getting - or, Golden Rules for Making Money • P. T. Barnum
... joy illuminates his countenance, as both respond to his examination. It grows brighter, on perceiving a muscular movement of the limbs, late rigid and seemingly inanimate, a light in the eyes looking like life; above all, words from the lips so long mute. Words low-murmured, but still distinguishable; telling him a tale, at the same time giving its interpretation. That in this hour of his unconsciousness ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... The inanimate body, wrapped in linen, was deposited in a spacious,[44] cool rock chamber, the entrance of which was closed, not by a well-fitting door, but by a stone rolled against the opening, which would of course ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... called from the beauties of inanimate nature, to objects more interesting; for he observed two persons, whom he instantly recollected to be the same that he had formerly pursued over the plains. They were seated on the margin of the lake, under the shade of some high trees at the foot of the rocks, and seemed ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe
... This can be said of things created and finite, not because they possess anything Divine, but because they are in the Divine, and the Divine is in them. For everything that has been created is, in itself, inanimate and dead, but all things are animated and made alive by this, that the Divine is in them, and that they are ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... time the car and the air ship were slowly drifting nearer to one another, drawn by that strange attraction which seems to affect inanimate things when in close neighborhood, and when they were not more than fifteen yards apart the personage we had been watching slowly lifted her arm, revealing a glittering bracelet, and, with an ineffably winning smile, made a ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... exhibited a curious instance of the effect produced upon inanimate things when subjected to the contact of persons who differ widely from each other in taste. You smile, dear lady, at the complicated form of expression. I mean merely that if two people who like ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... Winifred Anstice leaned. He remembered to have noted how perfectly her dun-colored dress had harmonized with the environment, so much so, that, but for the patch of red in her hat, he might have passed her as a part of the inanimate nature of the beach. He remembered, too, the touch of her hand on his shoulder there in the light-house, and the sound of her voice as she counted the steps, "One—two—three—four." Then he fell ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... not know whether it came most from the ship or from the grave, but I fell into some melancholy scruples, as I stood there, leaning with one hand against the battered timbers. The homelessness of men, and even of inanimate vessels, cast away upon strange shores, came strongly in upon my mind. To make a profit of such pitiful misadventures seemed an unmanly and a sordid act; and I began to think of my then quest as of something sacrilegious in its nature. But when I remembered Mary I took heart ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... repeat the question;—why this difference? The only answer is, because God made the brute to be the property of man; but He never gave us our noble nature for such degradation. Man's title deed, in the eighth Psalm, extends his right of property to the inanimate and brute creation only—not to the flesh and bones and spirit ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core of the brain, in the part where Des ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... chemistry and physics. Physics and chemistry are two sciences related in this close way, and it is not easy to make a precise distinction between them. In a general way it may be said that they are both concerned with inanimate matter rather than with living, and more particularly with the changes which such matter may be made to undergo. These changes must be considered more closely before a definition of the two sciences can ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities—the sky, the rock, and the ocean—the minute personality of this washer-girl filled his consciousness to its extremest boundary, and the stupendous inanimate scene shrank to ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... no wonder,' said the youthful Abbe, as he tenderly lifted the inanimate figure. 'This has been a night of horrors. I was coming in haste to know whether the King knows of this frightful plot of M. de Guise, and the bloody work that ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... time is new, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are mainly passed. We are supposed to have associations with the old things which render them precious, but do not the associations rather render them painful? If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it is of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives! Take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to the reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... on life ought never to be a mournful thing; it ought to be light-hearted, high-spirited, amusing. The spirit survives, and there is yet much experience ahead of us. We waste our sense of pathos very strangely over inanimate things. We get to feel about the things that surround us, our houses, our very chairs and tables, as if they were somehow things that were actually attached to us. We feel, when the old house that has belonged to our family ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a great friend of Mr. Fleet," she said, studying and sketching him as if he had been an inanimate object. ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... that sport only with inanimate nature may claim some indulgence; if they are useless, they are still innocent; but there are others, whom I know not how to mention without more emotion than my love of quiet willingly admits. Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge is a race of wretches whose lives are only varied by ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... the noonday, yet mild and gentle as the morning, even in age, in the life and character of that great and venerable man, around whose precious, but, alas! inanimate form we all press in gratitude, admiration, and love, those high virtues derived from faith in God, and nurtured by his revealed truth, this bereaved Congress, and, I may add, this nation witnesses. * * * * ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... wine Bacchus, yet who can think any one so mad as to take that to be really a god that he feeds upon?"[141] And Plutarch condemns the whole practice of giving the names of gods and goddesses to inanimate objects, as absurd, impious, and atheistical: "they who give the names of gods to senseless matter and inanimate things, and such as are destroyed by men in the using, beget most wicked and atheistical opinions in ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooners still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... room he opened the safe in the corner where his collection of curious rings had lain unnoticed for many months. He drew out a tray, sat down by the light and began to look them over. At first only small inanimate objects, gradually as from tray after tray they glittered duskily up at him, they began to yield their riches as they had so often done before. Spanish, French, Italian, Bohemian, Hungarian, Russian and Arabian, rings small and rings enormous, religious ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... following. We may infer, then, that the wealth of knowledge of nature he displays was acquired in his boyhood and youth in the country round about Stratford. His intimate acquaintance with animate and inanimate life in all their forms, his knowledge of banks where wild thyme grew, his love of flowers and of natural beauty which remained with him all through his life, were evidently gained at that ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... Usk from its waters reflected, Arthur vanish'd with all his knights, Merlin and Lancelot and Galahad, all gone, dissolv'd utterly like an exhalation; Pass'd! pass'd! for us, forever pass'd, that once so mighty world, now void, inanimate, phantom world, Embroider'd, dazzling, foreign world, with all its gorgeous legends, myths, Its kings and castles proud, its priests and warlike lords and courtly dames, Pass'd to its charnel vault, coffin'd with crown and armor on, Blazon'd with Shakspere's ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... with the poor and the simple is infinite. He is full of pity and tenderness and enfolds in his heart and in his poetry, saint and sinner, man and beast, all that which is animate and inanimate. He is passionately religious with a profound and humble faith, but it has nothing in common with the sumptuous and decorative neo-catholicism of men like Huysmans or Paul Claudel. Rather one must seek his origins in the child-like faith of Saint Francis of Assisi and ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... for the same use as statues in other religions. They are not adored nor worshiped in any sense of the word. They are looked upon as inanimate representations of a deity, and tributes of honor and respect are paid not to them, but to the spirits that they represent. I have seen rice actually put to the lips of these images and bead necklaces ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... pronominal prefix to denote the gender, i.e. the third personal pronoun, u (masculine), ka (feminine), i (diminutive). The great majority of inanimate nouns are feminine, and all abstract nouns. The sun (day), ka sngi, is feminine, the moon (month), u b'nai, is masculine. Sometimes the word varies in meaning according to the gender, e,g. u ngap, a bee; ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... approached, and grew every moment more distinct. I then heard the sound, as it were, of a body falling on the sand, accompanied by a painful cry. I heard no more. Soon I saw the light of the torches of my servants, who being uneasy, had come to look for me. They found me, and also a half inanimate body, dripping with water. It was doubtless the person whose boat had foundered in the water, and I ordered him to be taken to the villa and carefully attended to. It was late, and I returned. A few hours had passed since the event, and I was sitting alone at the piano. Fancy bore me back to my last ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... spitting water, and talking excitedly to his companion. Instantly she understood. The young woods runner, with the rare quickness of expedient peculiar to these people, had allowed himself to be carried through the rapids muscle-loose, as an inanimate object would be carried, without an attempt to help himself in any way. It was a desperate chance, but it was the only chance. The slightest stiffening of the muscles, the least struggle would have thrown him out ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... says a medical writer, are even afraid of inanimate objects. This accounts for many nervous people being afraid of venturing too ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 15, 1920 • Various
... the Enemy of Ra, the Enemy of Un-Nefer" (i.e., Osiris). This work contained a series of spells which were recited during the performance of certain prescribed ceremonies, with the object of preventing storms, and dispersing rain-clouds, and removing any obstacle, animate or inanimate, which could prevent the rising of the sun in the morning, or obscure his light during the day. The Leader-in Chief of the hosts of darkness was a fiend called Apep who appeared in the sky in the form of a monster serpent, and, marshalling all the ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... how much more eloquent they would be! Another rule is to avoid converting mere abstractions into persons. I believe you will very rarely find in any great writer before the Revolution the possessive case of an inanimate noun used in prose instead of the dependent case, as 'the watch's hand,' for 'the hand of the watch.' The possessive or Saxon genitive was confined to persons, or at least to animated subjects. And I cannot conclude this Lecture without insisting on the importance of accuracy of style as being near ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... lowered her chin as much as half an inch, and looked at me as if I were an exceeding commonplace, inanimate object that could not possibly interest her. Her aunt, Lodema King, was almost as bad, I think; I didn't notice particularly. But Miss King's I-do-not-know-you-sir air could not save her; I hadn't schemed like a villain for a week, and ridden twenty-five ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... to her face. His features were coarse and heavy, but his eyes were keen as a ferret's; and without answering his question, she turned away and looked across the water which teemed with craft of every description, laden with freight animate and inanimate, passing to and from the vast city, whose spires, domes and forest of masts rose like a gray cloud against the sky, etching there ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... been a familiar decoration of conventual refectories before the time when Lionardo brought his profound knowledge of external human nature, and his unsurpassed powers of executive art, to bear on a subject which had before been treated in the dry, conventional, inanimate manner of the Middle Ages. The leading features of the traditional picture are retained: the long table, the linen cloth, the one-sided arrangement of the figures, the classic drapery, and the general form and design of the apartment, are all to be found in the earlier works; and must have been ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 187, May 28, 1853 • Various
... close to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... like blind people talking together—and no one of them can do his part unless the other two do theirs. In the third place, the instrument is a lifeless thing, and when something goes wrong with it it rouses the helpless fury inspired by all inanimate objects which interfere with our comfort—like intermittent alarm clocks, collar buttons that roll under the furniture, and flivvers that go dead without reason in the middle of country roads. In each ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney
... conversed with them with the greatest familiarity, and never retired to his tent before he had visited the camps. He refused the statues which the flattery of friends wished to erect to him, and he ridiculed the follies of an enlightened nation that could pay adoration to cold inanimate pieces of marble. His public entry into Rome gained him the hearts of the people; for he appeared on foot, and showed himself an enemy to parade and ostentatious equipage. His wish to listen to the just complaints of his subjects, caused his royal abode to be called "the public palace"; ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... was strangely handsome. The remains of it are still visible through the rifts of time. I was so handsome that human activities ceased as if spellbound when I came in view, and even inanimate things stopped to look—like locomotives, and district messenger boys and so-on. In San Francisco, in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather. Upon one occasion I was traveling in the Sonora region, and stopped for an hour's nooning, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a kind mistake, A pardon for th' offence's sake. Or if it did not, but the cause 125 Were left to th' injury at laws, What tyranny can disapprove There should be equity in love; For laws that are inanimate, And feel no sense of love or hate, 130 That have no passion of their own, Nor pity to be wrought upon, Are only proper to inflict Revenge on criminals as strict But to have power to forgive, 135 Is empire and prerogative; And 'tis in crowns a nobler gem To grant a pardon ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... Boutan was there at the head of the bed, holding the inanimate hand in which the final pulsation of blood was dying away. And when he saw Mathieu and Marianne, who had instinctively crossed the disorderly drawing-room, rushing into that bedchamber whose odor of nihility they recognized, he could but ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... said Cyrus severely. "Inanimate nature I speak of. All inanimate nature is green. But we poor fellow creatures have gotten away from the universal mother-color. We must get back to it. We must learn to think greenly. But first we must learn to see greenly. How shall we accomplish ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... touch with Arthur through her jealous care of the things that he had left behind, in the arrangement of his books, in the mending of his clothes, and in the preparation of an upstairs room that he had begun to turn into a study for his holiday reading. On these inanimate traces of him she lavished a peculiar tenderness, for their presence had the effect of ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... merely thrusts the soap-brush into each eye, and if any motion still persists, he breathes gin and peppermint over the face, till all sign of life is extinct. Then he talks the game over in detail with the barber at the next chair, each leaning across an inanimate thing extended under steaming towels that was once ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... honesty the single gift by which they are sometimes able to warm us into admiration. But {248} even this faithfulness seems to have a sort of inorganic ring, and to remind us more of the immutable properties of a piece of inanimate matter than of the steadfastness of a human will capable of alternative choice. When we descend to the brutes, all these peculiarities are intensified. No reader of Schopenhauer can forget his frequent allusions to the trockener ernst of dogs and ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... and mischances, that led up to this denouncement will show that it was not so strange a thing, after all. To take the Lady Barbara, first. Up to the time of her visit to London, Lord Farquhart had been to her something of a figurehead. She had considered him merely as a creature quite inanimate and impersonal, who was to be forced upon her by her father's will just as she was to be forced upon him. But Lord Farquhart in the flesh was a young man of most pleasing appearance, if of most exasperating manners. When the Lady Barbara compared him with the other gallants of the society she ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... disappearing, the press inveighed against it, the clubs insulted it; the worn-out tool by which the people had acquired conquest, it felt the people were about to snap it asunder if it did not dissolve of its own accord. Its sittings were inanimate, and it was completing the constitution as a task inflicted on it, but at which it was discouraged before completion. It had no belief in the duration of that which it proclaimed imperishable. The lofty voices which had shaken France so ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... upon it—scarce a few minutes—when the body moved. Was it the water that moved it? it could not be, surely, that the moonbeams had the power of recalling life into that inanimate mass, that lay there for some time still and motionless as the very stones ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... empire was furnished with a national character, which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature, it further had need of unity in those institutions which express the general life of nations—in constitution and administration, in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights; as to which, of course, local diversities ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... one is to engage every thing in one's distress, when it is deep! and one wonders too, that things animate and inanimate look with the same face, when we are greatly moved by ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... its thoughts so free, as to act at that time without perplexity. The ancient poets have compared this sedate courage to a rock that remains immovable amidst the rage of winds and waves; but that is too stupid and inanimate a similitude, and could do no credit to the hero. At other times they are all of them wonderfully obliged to a Lybian lion, which may give indeed very agreeable terrors to a description; but is no compliment to the person to whom it is applied: eagles, tigers, and wolves, are ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... was something not wholly disagreeable in the hazy character of the retrospect, especially to a nature such as Kafka's, full of undeveloped artistic instincts and of a passionate love of all sensuous beauty, animate and inanimate. The gorgeous pictures rose one after the other in his imagination, and satisfied a longing of which he felt that he had been vaguely aware before beginning the journey. None of these lacked reality, any more than Keyork himself, thought it seemed strange ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... entirely by machinery. What we will never be able to replace by machinery is a Man, because man belongs to the level of a dimension above machinery. Engine-power, sun man-power, and capital—mainly the work of the dead—are inanimate; they become productive only when quickened by the time-binding energies of living men and women. Then only are the results proportional to the ever growing magnitude of exponential power. In nature's economy the time-binders are ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... common ones; desirable things to those which you can easily do without; things complete to things which are only begun; wholes to parts; things proceeding on reason to things void of reason; voluntary to necessary things; animate to inanimate things; things natural to things not natural; things skilfully produced by art to things with which art ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... bled, and, though still unconscious, became less rigid They then poured a little wine down his throat, and he fell into a passive but painless condition, more inanimate than sleep, but less positive than a ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... drops down into such a place by mere accident. They were present to the lives of Winterborne, Melbury, and Grace; but not to the doctor's. They are old association—an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer's horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so gray from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... principal town, from communicating with it for days at a time.[7] And, as the roads grew rougher, Canadian conditions seemed to the stranger to assert themselves more and more offensively, animate and inanimate nature thrusting man back on the bare elements of things. The early descriptions of the colony are crowded with pictures of wretched immigrants, mosquito-bitten, or, in winter, half dead with cold, struggling through mud and swamp, ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... We fail to praise the ceaseless ministry of the great inanimate world around us only because its kindness is unobtrusive. Nature is always noiseless. All her greatest gifts are given in secret. And we forget how truly every good and perfect gift comes from without, and from above, because ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... unknown land our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions. Does Humanity weep at these painful separations from every thing, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it. It is rather a source of joy that our country affords scope where our young population may range unconstrained in body or in mind, developing the power and faculties of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... over the habit of transferring the limitations of the nervous temperament and of hectic constitutions to the great Source of all the mighty forces of nature, animate and inanimate. We may confidently trust that we have over us a Being thoroughly robust and grandly magnanimous, in distinction from the Infinite Invalid bred in the studies of sickly monomaniacs, who corresponds to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... with that diadem-and-sceptre bearing—many people for reasons of heredity discovering such graces only in those whose vestibules are lined with ancestral mail, forgetting that a bear may be taught to dance. While this air of hers lasted, even the inanimate objects in the street appeared to know that she was there; but from a way she had of carelessly overthrowing her dignity by versatile moods, one could not calculate upon its presence to a certainty when she was round corners or ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... but on the occasion of his trial he enters the temple and makes his defence. If the actual offender is unknown, the writ runs against 'the doer of the deed'. The King and the tribe-kings also hear the cases in which the guilt rests on inanimate objects and ...
— The Athenian Constitution • Aristotle
... passed through the minds of the compassionating officers, as they directed their glance alternately from the common to the pale and marble-like features of the younger De Haldimar, who, with parted lips and stupid gaze, continued to fix his eyes upon the inanimate form of his ill-fated brother, as if the very faculty of life itself had been for a period suspended. At length, however, while his companions watched in silence the mining workings of that grief which they feared to interrupt by ill-timed observations, even of condolence, ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... commanded the Billionaire, in a badgering tone. "What are the processes?" He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley's "plow or sword or spade" for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. "Go on! Tell me what ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... saumon were superb, when he had never been known to commend anything to another until he had fully discussed it himself. On the opposite side of the table sat Adelaide and the Duke of Altamont, the latter looking still more heavy and inanimate than ever. The operation of eating over, he seemed unable to keep himself awake, and every now and then yielded to a gentle slumber, from which, however, he was instantly recalled at the sound of Adelaide's ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... preserved when not out of harmony with the state of affairs prevailing in the external world. Or variation may occur through the establishment of new relations between the species inhabiting some locality while inanimate nature remains uniform, or through migration into new inanimate or animate surroundings. Variations, in short, may arise under the influence of any change in the general environment which renders necessary adaptive changes in structure. But this adaptation in some cases takes place in the mind, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... said, "I had forgotten myself." I took her hand and was raising it naturally, without premeditation, when I felt suddenly the arm to which it belonged become insensible, passive, like a stuffed limb, and the whole woman go inanimate all over! Brusquely I dropped the hand before it reached my lips; and it was so lifeless that it fell heavily on ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... we have traced in its rocks, there could only be seen preparation for his existence;—the characters which enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily—in all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human beings ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... by a look, and rushing to the house where the child still lay, seemingly inanimate, on the floor among the soiled clothes, she caught it up eagerly, and hurried away to her own poor garret in a tumble-down tenement at the farthest end of the alley. The infant had been stunned by its fall, but under her tender care, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... object of repose, not to mention the grateful idea of coolness derived from a knowledge of its temperature. Thus also the evening cloud, exhibiting a fleeting representation of successive objects, is, perhaps, justly appropriated to Autumn, as in that Season the general decay of inanimate nature leads the mind to turn upon itself, and without effort to apply almost every image of sense or vision of the imagination,* to ...
— The Sylphs of the Season with Other Poems • Washington Allston
... of atomic energy, the discovery of radioactivity, and the recognition of potential and latent energies stored in inanimate matter, throw a brilliant illumination upon the whole problem of sex and the inner energies of mankind. Speaking of the discovery of radium, Professor Soddy writes: "Tracked to earth the clew to a great secret for which a thousand telescopes might have ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... strongly attached to the rector, so much so, that to him neither the rector nor the things belonging to the rector, whether animate or inanimate, could do wrong. He had a watch, and even though it might not be one of the best, a watch was no small acquisition to a working man of his time. He did not live in the days of the three-and-sixpenny marvel, or of the half-crown wonder, now to be found in the pocket of almost every schoolboy. Dixon's ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... and in the midst of vague but intense sensations William showed her the pigeon-house with all the blue birds dozing on the tiles, a white one here and there. They visited the workshop, the forge, and the old cottages where the bailiff and the shepherd lived; and all this inanimate nature—the most insignificant objects—seemed inspired, seemed like symbols ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... gradually approaching the trunk of the elm-tree, till at last his head came in contact with it with a resounding blow, and the dog fell senseless. "Try it again, corporal, let's finish him." The corporal again swung round the inanimate body of the dog; again, and again, and again, did the head come in contact with the hard wood; and then the corporal, quite out of breath with the exertion, dropped the body on the grass. Neither of them spoke a word for some time, but watched the body, as it lay ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... withering effect. I sought shelter behind a large gum-tree, but the blasts of heat were so terrific, that I wondered the very grass did not take fire. This really was nothing ideal: every thing, both animate and inanimate, gave way before it; the horses stood with their backs to the wind, and their noses to the ground, without the muscular strength to raise their heads; the birds were mute, and the leaves of the trees, under which we were sitting, fell like a snow shower around us. At noon I took a ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... words are employed to express what might be expressed in fewer."—Iid., ib. "Hyperbole is when a thing is magnified above the truth,"—Adam, p. 249; Gould, 240. "Personification is when we ascribe life, sentiments, or actions, to inanimate beings, or to abstract qualities."—Iid., ib. "Apostrophe, or Address, is when the speaker breaks off from the series of his discourse, and addresses himself to some person present or absent, living or dead, or to inanimate nature, as ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... caught her ear. Sounds are animate or inanimate. This was unmistakably the sound ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... sensitive, expressed one look of stupid and yet agonized desire—all eyes were turned upward toward the summit wreathed with lightning. There those who had just gained their goal, lightly touched by the tips of the rose-colored bolts, sank back inanimate, went tumbling down the slope with astonishment frozen on their faces, scattering broadcast from their hands a cascade of treasures—jewels, scraps of paper, purses, images of gold and ivory, wreaths of laurel or of lilies, scepters, and objects in which no one could ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... resume of the church's efforts in this direction is given by Dr. William Burke Ryan in his authoritative and exhaustive study entitled "Infanticide; Its Law, Prevalence, Prevention and History". Dr. Ryan says: "Theologians of the church of Rome made a distinction between the inanimate and the animate foetus to which the soul is added by the creation of God, and adopted the opinions of some of the old philosophers, more particularly those of Aristotle, as to animation in the male and female, but the canon law altogether negatived the ...
— Woman and the New Race • Margaret Sanger
... things to be active. All nature, animate and inanimate, calls man to labor. If old ocean did not ebb and flow, and roll its waves, it would stagnate, and become so noxious that no animal could live on the face of the earth. If the earth did not pursue ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... of still life is used in English for all sorts of pictures which represent groupings of inanimate objects except flowers. The French word for it is better than ours. They call it "nature morte" or ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... their pistols into the mirrors, paintings, chandeliers, &c. Of course the watchmen came in, about the time the young gentlemen finished their youthful indiscretions, and after the usual battering and banging of the now almost inanimate bodies of the quartette, landed them in the calaboose. Next day they settled their bills, and it cost them about $2200! It was rather an expensive lesson, but it's altogether probable that they haven't forgotten a ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... by a chemist. The three immediately behind, Mr. Bosengate did not thoroughly master; but the three at the end of the second row he learned in their order of an oldish man in a grey suit, given to winking; an inanimate person with the mouth of a moustachioed codfish, over whose long bald crown three wisps of damp hair were carefully arranged; and a dried, dapperish, clean-shorn man, whose mouth seemed terrified lest it should be surprised without a smile. Their first and second verdicts were recorded ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... single combat. In swimming we have the elastic fluid, water, to overcome by means of arm and leg movements. This may be made very difficult by a strong current, or by rough water, and yet we always have here to strive against an inanimate object. On the contrary, in horseback riding we have to deal with something that has a self of its own, and the contest challenges not our strength alone, but also our skill and courage. The motion ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... the mastery, generally to the discomfiture of the latter, after the manner of the Hunting of Paupukewis in Hiawatha. The baffled magician or witch—often the mother-in-law or stepmother, the stock villain of the piece in these old tales—alters her shape rapidly to living creature or inanimate thing; but fast as she changes the avenger also changes, pursues, and at length destroys. In the ballad of The Twa Magicians, given in Buchan's collection, it is virtue that flees, and wrong, in the shape of a Smith, of Weyland's mystic kin, that ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... was that Fanny Brandeis, the creative, was not being fed. And the creative fire requires fuel. Fanny Brandeis fed on people, not things. And her work at Haynes-Cooper was all with inanimate objects. The three months since her coming to Chicago had been crowded and eventful. Haynes-Cooper claimed every ounce of her energy, every atom of her wit and resourcefulness. In return it gave—salary. Not too much salary. ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... in again, with one of its fitful gusts, only to clear at last and to leave them face to face. Medaine's eyes went with womanly instinct to the bundle in his arms. And even though she could see nothing but the roundness of the blankets, the tender manner in which Barry Houston held the poor, inanimate ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... story of the dolphin that was attracted by Arion's song and carried him safely across the sea, are quite as significant as if they were true stories, for they show that the Greeks were so deeply moved by music that they could readily imagine it to have a similar effect on animals, and even on inanimate objects. Almost three thousand years ago, Homer represented Achilles as "comforting his heart with the sound of the lyre," after losing his sweet Briseis; "stimulating his courage and singing the deeds of the heroes." ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck
... falling just at my feet, and bringing down with his fall splinters of the rock, one of which, fortunately but a small one, struck and for the time stunned me. When I recovered my senses I saw my companion an inanimate mass beside me, life utterly extinct. While I was bending over his corpse in grief and horror, I heard close at hand a strange sound between a snort and a hiss; and turning instinctively to the quarter from which it came, I saw emerging from ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... five, his mother breathed her last. The boy gazed upon the inanimate form, but he was dazed, and could not realize that his mother had left him, never ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the most mobile of inanimate shapes, it may be considered as the "opposite equal" of the living organism. The quickness and ease of its motion as well as its elasticity cause the child to regard it as instinct with life, while its softness renders him able to grasp and ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... especially human beings, an action that does not seem to be explicable by any physical or chemical properties already known." He believes also that there is in human beings a radiating influence susceptible of being exercised at a distance over other animate beings or else upon inanimate objects. He finds in trance mediumship all the elements which enter into any hypnotic state. "The trance is produced and developed spontaneously, without the intervention of any visible operator, under the sole effect of the nervous and ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before. Wit lies in the assemblage of ideas, judgment in the careful discrimination among them. "Things are good or evil only in reference to pleasure or pain;" ... "our love and hatred of inanimate, insensible beings is commonly founded on that pleasure or pain which we receive from their use and application any way to our senses, though with their destruction; but hatred or love of beings incapable of happiness or misery is often ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... of romanticism, actually sprang from an earlier faith in a God-directed universe of law and order. There is a kind of universal law of supply and demand, and the argument is simply that each link in the human chain, like those in the animate and inanimate worlds above and below it, is predestined to a specific function for the better ordering of the whole. Lewis Maidwell, for instance, still employs the medieval and Renaissance analogy of the correspondence between the human body and the social organism (An Essay upon ...
— 'Of Genius', in The Occasional Paper, and Preface to The Creation • Aaron Hill
... words of Shakespeare uttered by the small inanimate voice which had been given to the world must indeed have been a rare delight to the ardent soul of the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... this prince made every one tremble. Stern and choleric to the last degree, and even against inanimate objects; impetuous with frenzy, incapable of suffering the slightest resistance even from the hours and the elements, without flying into a passion that threatened to destroy his body; obstinate to excess; passionately ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... short, had become so critical that I felt it my duty to acquaint Sir Edgar with it forthwith; and I was on my way toward the companion in search of him when he emerged from it and joined me, the two seamen who had conveyed the inanimate body of the mate below following him and making their way forward, dodging the seas as best ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... Thomas scornfully, "Curios be blowed, put 'em in the beggars!" Of course, you can guess he did not exactly use those identical words, but they will do. Then having joined in the destruction of a monster hog, and obtained my share of his inanimate form, I, triumphant and perspiring, continued to ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... to the little blaze, his broad shoulders hunched over, steadying a small pot over the flame. Beyond him were the dogs huddled about the sledge, inanimate as death. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... was declining, and Moscow continued dull, silent, and seemingly inanimate. The anxiety of the emperor increased, and the impatience of the soldiers could scarcely be repressed. Some officers ventured within the walls of ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... society which would seem to confirm or to disprove his conclusions), and, lastly, to record that fact as it may have occurred within his own experience, while giving full details of persons (of individual manners, tendencies, and customs) and also of inanimate surroundings (of dress, furniture, fittings of houses, and so forth). For I need knowledge of the classes in question, which are the flower of our people. In fact, this very reason—the reason that I do not yet know Russian life in all its aspects, and in the degree to which it is necessary for me ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... not be able to carry the inanimate figure, so he hurriedly put on his clothes and set out on a run for Colonel Zane's house. The first person whom he saw was the old negro slave, who was brushing one of ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... vaporous blue, painted with faded pink roses. She was seated in a large carved and gilded chair, opposite an excessively Louis-Quinze mirror, while her pale golden hair was being brushed out by a brown, inanimate-looking maid. Her little oval face, with its soft cloudy hair growing low on the forehead, long blue eyes, and rosebud mouth, had something of the romantic improbability of an eighteenth-century miniature. From the age of two Felicity had been an acknowledged beauty. She profited ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... hearing about money, just as his good sense caused him to be weary of socialistic prattling and absurd pleas for Bolshevism. It seemed to him that the dollar standard was the paramount means both magnate and socialist used to value inanimate and animate objects. He longed for a ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... watched the race. Only one watcher was silent and motionless. Hidden by the leaves he braced himself upon the tree limb. For the first moments after the rock was released he had turned sick and dizzy. Now, as they came near—the thing relentless but inanimate pursuing the thing helpless, beautiful and most precious to him of all things in the world, not the quiver of a muscle hindered the desperate task that he had ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... transform themselves into eagles, lions, tigers, etc. Thus, they said, ru puz, ru naual, pedro lae cot, balam, 'Peter's power, his naual, is a lion, a tiger.' They also applied the words puz and naual to certain trees, rocks and other inanimate objects, whence the Devil used to speak to them, and likewise to the idols which they worshiped, as gazlic che, gazlic abah, huyu, k'o ru naual, 'The life of the tree, the life of the stone, of the hill, is its naual,' ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... sorrow in honour of the young master, but I stopped him. He insisted, however, on carrying the body, as the last mark of respect he could show to my uncle's son. "It would have broken my heart entirely, Mr. Maurice, if it had been you. It's bad enough, sure, as it is," he exclaimed, as he placed the inanimate form ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... the ruins of a castle, its tower still intact. Marta always referred to the castle as the baron; for in her girlhood she had a way of personifying all inanimate things. If the castle walls were covered with hoar frost, she said that the baron was shivering; if the wind tore around the tower, she said that the baron was groaning over the democratic tendencies of the time. On such a summer afternoon ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... and yet terrible annunciation stole on the ears of the multitude, a stillness as deep and awful succeeded as if the venerated spirit they worshiped had uttered the words without the aid of human organs; and even the inanimate Uncas appeared a being of life, compared with the humbled and submissive throng by whom he was surrounded. As the immediate effect, however, gradually passed away, a low murmur of voices commenced a sort of chant in honor of the dead. The sounds were those of females, ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... arises when all is lost—as this woman flung herself past Zillah, as though she had a grief superior to Zillah's, and a right to pass even her in the terrible precedence of sorrow. It was thus that Mrs. Hart came before the presence of the dead and flung herself upon the inanimate corpse, and wound her thin arms around that clay from which the soul had departed, and pressed her wan lips upon the cold brow from which the immortal dweller had ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... in crossing, and both suffered considerably; the difference being that, as soon as they got into the smooth waters of Calais harbor, Calabressa recovered himself directly, whereas Reitzei remained an almost inanimate heap of wrappings, and had to be assisted or shoved up the steep gangway into the glare of the officials' lamps. Then, as soon as he had got into a compartment of the railway-carriage, he rolled himself up in a corner, and sought to forget his ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... back upon the peopled parts behind him, he has no relations with his fellow-men—at least none arising out of the claim of previous occupancy. In other words, during the primary migration, the world that lay before our progenitors was either brute or inanimate. But before many generations have passed away, all becomes full to overflowing, so that men must enlarge their boundaries at the expense of their fellows. The migrations that now take place are secondary. They differ from the primary in many respects. ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... is the social sense, animates the inanimate and anthropomorphizes everything; it humanizes everything and even makes everything identical with man.[36] And the work of man is to supernaturalize Nature—that is to say, to make it divine by making ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... everything loses the character of life, and is transformed into inanimate units. Man is something different from the sum of the services he may be made to render, and from the sum of enjoyments which may be procured for him. We must not run the risk of lowering him to the level of a living tool; ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... finding things was remarkable. Drifting dories, spars, oars, and trawl-tubs sought her unsavory company, as though impelled by the inanimate perversity which had sent them drifting. They were sold in port, or returned to their owners, when paid for. In the early part of her career she had towed a whistling buoy into Boston and claimed salvage of the government, ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... crowd begins to stir, A whisper runs along the hall, A lady draws the hostess near, Behind her a grave general. Her manners were deliberate, Reserved, but not inanimate, Her eyes no saucy glance address, There was no angling for success. Her features no grimaces bleared; Of affectation innocent, Calm and without embarrassment, A faithful model she appeared Of "comme il faut." Shishkoff, forgive! I ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... after this, when the July sun was at its zenith and the starch out of everything animate and inanimate, old man Kapus came up to the ranch-house. Johnnie, he said, disappeared during ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... memory of what, lately, she had endured—she saw him at the dusty end of that long corridor through which she had monotonously journeyed, denied of her one triumph, lost in inconsequential shadows—and she continued firmly to the door which closed behind her with a normal mute smoothness, an inanimate silence. ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the most puzzling things in this living out-of-doors on our own place is the reversal of our ordinary viewpoints. Never before did I realize how we look at the outdoor world from inside the house, where inanimate things force themselves into comparison. Now we are seeing from outside and looking in at ourselves, so to speak, very much like the robin, who has his third nest, lop-sided disaster having overtaken the other two, in the old white ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... that whenever a female Bison, having a calf, is slain, the young one remains by its fallen dam, with signs of strong natural affection, and instinctively follows the inanimate carcase of its parent to the residence of the hunter. In this way ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... And Cydnus swell'd above the banks, or for/The press of boats, or pride] [This is an agreeable ridicule on poetical exaggeration, which gives human passions to inanimate things: and particularly, upon what he himself writes in the foregoing play on ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... assume have not the natural virtues which they show, nor the operations of life, but those which are common to inanimate things. ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the depravity of inanimate things, had taken that occasion to leap all bounds and run wild where never before it had ventured. Not being content in carrying its legitimate burden of logs to the lower towns, it bore away, one black night, more than half ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... but know, O Bharata, that mine is greater than that of the gods. If the Earth herself cleaves in twain, or mountain crests split, I can re-unite them, O king, by my incantations before the eyes of all. If for the destruction of this universe of animate and inanimate, mobile and immobile creatures, there happeneth a terrific tempest or stony shower of loud roar, I can always, from compassion for created beings, stop it before the eyes of all. When the waters ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... I think we could have no hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's picture. There is more of imagination in it—that power which draws all things to one,—which makes things animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects, and their accessories, take one color and serve to one effect. Everything in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. Every part is full of "strange images of death." It is perfectly ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... would have liberty to attempt anything, scarcely ventures at the present day even to try timidly to follow him. Meanwhile England, France, and the whole of Europe demand of the drama pleasures and emotions that can no longer be supplied by the inanimate representation of a world that has ceased to exist. The classical system had its origin in the life of its time: that time has passed; its image subsists in brilliant colors in its works, but can no more be reproduced. Near the monuments of past ages, the monuments of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... ever on like some relentless monster rushing from its lair. But the Cheddar gorge, though majestic and awe-inspiring, is not of great extent. Soon the valley widened, the road took longer sweeps to round each frowning buttress, and at last emerged, with a quality of inanimate breathlessness, on to the bleak and desolate ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... of these principles. Without tiring, he watches life in all of its phases. He uses a large canvas for his studies of inanimate nature, as well as of individuals in particular and the masses in general. That is why his work gives us such an ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... sat in dusk shadow, pretending to stitch away, but scarcely able to see. The lamp was placed on the stove, near which my husband, for it was he, stood and warmed himself. By-and-by he turned round, and looked all over the room, taking us in with about the same degree of interest as the inanimate furniture. Amante, cross-legged, fronting him, stooped over her work, whistling softly all the while. He turned again to the stove, impatiently rubbing his hands. He had finished his wine and galette, and wanted to ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... their attention was the dead body of a female, reclining on a bed in an attitude of deep interest and attention. Her countenance retained the freshness of life: but a contraction of the limbs showed that her form was inanimate. Seated on the floor was the corpse of an apparently young man, holding a steel in one hand and a flint in the other, as if in the act of striking fire upon some tinder which lay beside him. In the fore-part of the vessel several ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... generis, which is but another paraphrase for life. Or if they are themselves at once both the excitant and the excitability, I miss the connecting link between this imaginary ether and the visible body, which then becomes no otherwise distinguished from inanimate matter, than by its juxtaposition in mere space, with an heterogeneous inmate, the cycle of whose actions revolves within itself. Besides which I should think that I was confounding metaphors and realities most absurdly, if I imagined that I had a greater ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... "that not only people, but animals, plants, stones, buildings, and utensils have shades also. But a wonderful thing the shade of an inanimate object is not dead, it possesses life, moves, goes from place to place, it even thinks and expresses thought through various signs, most ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus
... The next day the fury of the storm seemed to have somewhat abated. The sea was still running high, and breaking over the almost unrecognizable hulk stranded on the beach. With the aid of a glass, sailors on the other ships could see the inanimate forms of the crew lashed to the rigging. It was determined to make a vigorous attempt to save them. The first boat sent out on the errand of mercy was watched eagerly from all the vessels. Now it would be seen raised high ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... that sorrow could To ease her woes give utterance, loud had wail'd In wild lament; all spark of reason fled, Her bosom tearing, through the world she roam'd. And now his limbs inanimate she sought; Then for his whiten'd bones: his bones she found, On banks far distant from his home inhum'd. Prone on his tomb her form she flung, and pour'd Her tears in floods upon the graven lines: And with ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... depopulated heaven, and the progress of equality had reduced each individual to smaller and better known proportions, the poets, not yet aware of what they could substitute for the great themes which were departing together with the aristocracy, turned their eyes to inanimate nature. As they lost sight of gods and heroes, they set themselves to describe streams and mountains. Thence originated in the last century, that kind of poetry which has been called, by way of distinction, the descriptive. Some have thought that this sort of delineation, embellished ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... is to be found in the judgments we pass upon conscious beings, bodies with minds; and it could never have been drawn if men had not taken into consideration the relations of minds to the changes in the physical world. As carried over to inanimate things it is a transferred distinction; and its transference to this field is not strictly justifiable, as ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... of the Quakers, that they are a cold and inanimate people; and that they have neither the ordinary affection, nor the gradation of affection, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... sentiment and imagination cannot be entertained or interested by a dry detail of such transactions as admit of no warmth, no colouring, no embellishment, a detail which serves only to exhibit an inanimate picture of tasteless ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... declaration of war. When I had read it, I drew my sword, and, as I ran my eye along its cold, sharp blade from hilt to point, I thought how strange was its power to let out a man's life, and turn him, in a moment, into a heap of inanimate carrion. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... body. In order to throw light upon its conception of this physical body, occult science at first directs attention to a phenomenon which confronts all observers of life like a great riddle,—the phenomenon of death,—and in connection with it, points to so-called inanimate nature, the mineral kingdom. We are thus referred to facts, which it devolves on occult science to explain, and to which an important part of this work must be devoted. But to begin with, only a few points will be touched upon, by way ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... method of indicating beforehand, either by inflexion of the personal pronouns, which form the terminations of the verb, or by an intercalated suffix, the nature and the relation of its object and its subject, and of distinguishing whether the object be animate or inanimate, of the masculine or the feminine gender, simple or in complex number. It is on account of this general analogy of structure,—it is because American languages which have no words in common (for instance, the Mexican and the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... minutes, even after the conveyal of an apparently inanimate body downstairs, before his wife first made clear signs of intelligence; and even these were little more than grotesque expressions of fear—rolling eyes and exclamations. It was another quarter ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... and inanimate objects are also greatly reverenced by the Blackfeet, and presents are made ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... a state of collapse that silenced all scruples. Mrs. Treacher—a powerfully-built woman—caught up the all but inanimate lady in both arms, and bore her into the passage, nodding to Miss Gabriel to unhitch from its nail a lamp which hung, backed by a tin reflector, just within ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... were, of course, the main thing, after all. She was with us all day long; he, from the time he stopped writing, early in the afternoon, till our bed-time. They answered all our questions about things animate and inanimate, physical and metaphysical; and that must have taken time, for our curiosity was magnificent; and "The Old Boy," my father records, "asked me today what were sensible questions—I suppose with a view to asking me some." They superintended our projections ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... for art as much nobler than that of sculptor or painter as the destinies of human life and society are higher than those of any inanimate object, even though carved by Phidias or painted by Raphael. It is, above all, an art that should touch by its inspiration the gallantry of the whole student class. The very breath of it is the shaping and directing of those conditions out of which may emerge a society in which the ...
— The Conflict between Private Monopoly and Good Citizenship • John Graham Brooks
... with the pretty blue-flowered ware that her mother had been so proud of. She seemed to feel tears in her heart when she laid the plates, but none sprang to her eyes. Somehow, handling these familiar inanimate things was the acutest torture. Presently she smelled eggs burning. She realized that her father was burning up the eggs, in his utter ignorance of cookery. She thought privately that she didn't believe but she could cook the eggs, but she dared not go out in the kitchen. Her father, in his anxiety, ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... to trace Her former pupils, now a lordly race; Whom when she sees rich robes and furs bedeck, She marks the pride which once she strove to check. A Burgess comes, and she remembers well How hard her task to make his worship spell; Cold, selfish, dull, inanimate, unkind, 'Twas but by anger he display'd a mind: Now civil, smiling, complaisant, and gay, The world has worn th' unsocial crust away: That sullen spirit now a softness wears, And, save by fits, e'en dulness disappears: But still ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... becomes the companion of man—his friend and his teacher! In the conditions which we have traced in its rocks, there could only be seen preparation for his existence;—the characters which enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily—in all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human beings look upon and deal with, it ministers ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... could relish a bloodless victory over an inanimate rival. Then she said softly, "Arthur, what I am going to tell ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... made about it now and again. They bore the seared outward aspect of an entirely different mental condition from that with which they came in contact now. What is that subtle, mocking change that comes over even the inanimate things that we have not seen since we were happy, and now meet again in grief? It is like a horrible inversion of the golden touch given to Midas. To Gore, during those days, the darkness fell upon every fresh thing to which he went back. ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... where we sat exhibited a curious instance of the effect produced upon inanimate things when subjected to the contact of persons who differ widely from each other in taste. You smile, dear lady, at the complicated form of expression. I mean merely that if two people who like very different things live in the same room, each of them will ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... divinity-schools may refuse to "skip" in unison, and may butt and batter each other about the doctrine and origin of human depravity, all will join devoutly in the credo, I believe in the total depravity of inanimate things. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... men, with their wider knowledge, to be palpably false and absurd. This holds good most obviously in regard to his observation of external nature. While he often knows a good deal about the natural objects, whether animals, plants, or inanimate things, on which he is immediately dependent for his subsistence, the extent of country with which he is acquainted is commonly but small, and he has little or no opportunity of correcting the conclusions which he bases on his observation of it by a comparison with other parts of the world. But ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... down the rescued boys, who were quite insensible from their long immersion; when Rover, at length satisfied that his young master was ashore and in safe hands, was persuaded to loose his grip of Bob's collar, contenting himself by venting his joy in a series of bounds and barks around his inanimate form and licking ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Senegal, Nepal, and Madras, whose praises have been sung more than once. The beauty and grace of these delicate creatures, with their taper active limbs, and the soft expression of their heads, may be faintly gathered even from these inanimate stuffed skins with the glassy eyes instead of "the soft blue" celebrated by the poet. Grouped hereabouts are also the four-horned antelope of India; the pigmy antelope from the coast of Guinea; and the madoka from Abyssinia. Before leaving this room, or ante-room, to the great zoological sections ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... American?" asked Madame Le Fort. "Is it possible that he is not in love with that fascinating young creature? Or are all your countrymen so cold and inanimate? Elle est ravissante, adorable! I ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... shield his protege from their pernicious effect. Strewing on the ground a few armfuls of hay, taken from the nearest of the stacks, around which the hungry cattle now gathered, eager for their food, he extended on it the yet inanimate form of the youth, embracing the body in order to impart to it the benefit of animal heat and in this position, his head being slightly raised, eagerly endeavored to discern through the darkness not only what might be seen on the opposite shore, ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... next few seconds I had the seemingly inanimate maiden safely deposited in the inside of the barouche and myself sitting by her side. The driver cracked his whip, and whilst I, happy but exhausted, was mopping my streaming forehead the chaise ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... With all accepted moral beings, and these alone, He deals by way of covenant. Thus, after some manner, he dealt with angels in glory. Thus he dealt with man unfallen. Thus he deals with sinners redeemed. For sustaining the dignity of a covenant relation to him, inanimate and unintelligent creation are not adapted; but for not standing in that, they are not dishonoured. Angels in light, acquiescing in God's law, were at least virtually in covenant with him. Some of them proudly sinned, and fell from their high confederation. They took counsel ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... sped along, the tired yellow sun slipped down behind the hills like a penny-into-the-slot machine, and the early April twilight touched all inanimate objects with its own drab lack of coloring. I had no fear of losing my way in the darkness—I had too much locality sense for that—but the possibilities of my being ambushed appeared too many to be pleasant. A hurrying man, who is also heavily-laden, cannot ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... were concerted up to the time of meeting in Dock Square, it was evident the plan of operations had not been carried further than that, and the excited ones looked about eagerly for the enemy, but, seeing none, began to vent their fury on inanimate objects. ...
— Under the Liberty Tree - A Story of The 'Boston Massacre' • James Otis
... striking on the sharp corner of a stone, which started the blood trickling down her fair white brow. The woman swooned. Sight of blood touched the heart of George Waters, and, stooping, he raised the inanimate form in his arms, as tenderly as if she had been an infant, and bore her to a public ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... PENTORRENS. The PENTORRENS' are related, by old cavalier stock, to the Dukes of Mandeville, whose present ducal descendant combines the elegance of an Esterhazy with the intellect of an Argyle. That a scion of such blood as this has reduced a fellow-being to a condition of inanimate protoplasm, is to be regretted for his sake; but more for that of a country in which the philosophy of COMTE finds in a corrupt radical pantarchy all-sufficient first-cause of whatsoever is rotten in the State of Denmark." The Times said: "We give no details of the Burnstableville ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 23, September 3, 1870 • Various
... winter, and the Christians' Christmas was not far off, the soft airs seemed to be whispering all the sweet messages of the ardent spring that smiles over Eastern lands. This was a world of young rapture, not careless, but softly intense with joy. All things animate and inanimate were surely singing a love-song, effortless because it flowed from the very core of a heart ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... agit'—it is active, it is itself. While we are governed by outward temptations, by the casual pleasures, by the fortunes or the misfortunes of life, we are but instruments, yielding ourselves to be acted upon as the animal is acted on by its appetites, or the inanimate matter by the laws which bind it; we are slaves—instruments, it may be, of some higher purpose in the order of nature, but in ourselves nothing; instruments which are employed for a special work, and which are consumed in ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... makes its way everywhere, springing from the hands of woman. When the dwelling is cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift finds a way to make order and puts care and art into everything in her house, puts a soul into the inanimate, and gives those subtle and winsome touches to which the most brutish of human beings is sensible. But in China woman does nothing of this. Her life is unaesthetic to the last degree. No happy improvisations or touches of the stamp of personality enter her home; one cannot trace the touches of ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things, when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... used in the formation of figurative names; for example, kaun-engro, an ear-fellow, or creature with ears, serving to denote a hare; ruk-engro, or ruko-mengro, a tree-fellow, denoting a squirrel; it is also occasionally used in names for inanimate objects, as pov-engro, an earth-thing ...
— Romano Lavo-Lil - Title: Romany Dictionary - Title: Gypsy Dictionary • George Borrow
... made to the inanimate clay which yesterday influenced those who still trembled lest the spirit of the dead war-chief would haunt them. The richest cloth enrobed his body, and, a short distance from the village, he was placed upon ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... forth. The shoes had been carefully blacked, but a thin skin of mould had gathered over them. They looked like Lemuel Shackford. They had taken a position habitual with him. Richard was struck by the subtile irony which lay in these inanimate things. That a man's hat should outlast the man, and have a jaunty expression of triumph! That a dead ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... mesmerizer could so affect another living being, can you suppose that a mesmerizer could also affect inanimate objects: move ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various
... something has been done for posterity. Their houses are of stone, and built for duration, not for show. If a German builds a house, its walls are twice as thick as others—if he puts down a gate-post, it is sure to be nearly as thick as it is long. Every thing about him, animate and inanimate, partakes of this character of solidity. His wife even is a jolly, portly dame, his children chubby rogues, with legs shaped like little old-fashioned mahogany bannisters—his barns as big as fortresses—his horses like mammoths—his cattle enormous—and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... in dogmatical terms, it was neither one nor the other; at length the wiser magistrates of the town agreed to send it as a present to their august monarch Lewis the XIVth; and if you have a mind to see an inanimate woman who has made such a noise in the world, you will find her at Versailles, without any other notice taken of her or the quarrels about her, than the following words written (I think) upon her pedestal, La Venus d'Arles. This ended the dispute, as I must ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... quickness. In order to prove that there was no mistake respecting the degree of heat indicated by the thermometer, and that the air which they breathed was capable of producing all the well-known effects of such a heat on inanimate matter, they placed some eggs and a beef-steak upon a tin frame near the thermometer, but more distant from the furnace than from the wall of the room. In the space of twenty minutes the eggs were roasted quite hard, and in forty-seven minutes the ...
— The Miracle Mongers, an Expos • Harry Houdini
... said in regard to the production of new species by physico-chemical means may be repeated with still more justification in regard to the second problem of transformation, namely the making of living from inanimate matter. The purely morphological imitations of bacteria or cells which physicists have now and then proclaimed as artificially produced living beings; or the plays on words by which, e.g. the regeneration of broken crystals and the regeneration of lost limbs by a crustacean were declared identical, ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... and spit upon. After that how much will they learn of him? Nor would it be long ere the old fear would return—with this difference, perhaps, that instead of trembling before a live energy, they would tremble before powers which formerly they regarded as inanimate, and have now endowed with souls after the imagination of their fears. Then would spiritual chaos with all its monsters be come again. God being what he is, a God who loves righteousness; a God who, rather than do an unfair thing, would lay down his Godhead, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... moment Willy, who had eluded the vigilance of old Adams, who was occupied in supporting the inanimate Ellen, pushed his way between the legs of the marines, who were drawn up in ranks on the quarter-deck, and, running to his father, laid hold of the loose sailor's trousers in which he was attired, and looked anxiously and inquisitively in his face. Peters's voice faltered; he attempted to continue ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... need of forgiveness, if we have brought on such extremity," said the uncle, trying to raise the lifeless head of their inanimate victim. ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... to inquire whether there has been any reviling in the sense of the statute. Who was intended to be protected against injurious language? Reasonable beings only, certainly. Assuredly not the delicate feelings of horses, or cows, or pigs, and if so, much less those of an inanimate object, like a book. Now, it will be recollected that the language uttered characterized the contents of a book, not Mr. Davenport. The words were consistent with the supposition that the prisoner cherished the highest respect for ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words, "You are not very ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... attractive of each other in the mind; and the perception of any object naturally leads to the idea of another, which was connected with it either in time or place, or which can be compared or contrasted with it. Hence arises our attachment to inanimate objects; hence also, in some degree, the love of our country, and the emotion with which we contemplate the celebrated scenes of antiquity. Hence a picture directs our thoughts to the original: and, as cold and darkness suggest forcibly the ideas of heat and light, he, who feels ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... the providence of a wise and beneficent Being must be our great stay and support under all afflictions and perplexities upon earth—and that there are indications of his power and goodness in all the aspects of the visible universe, whether living or inanimate—every part of which should therefore be regarded with love and reverence, as exponents of those great attributes. We can testify, at least, that these salutary and important truths are inculcated at far greater length, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the features of Jesus, which were so calm, so joyous compared with him who looked silently and dully from the wall beside Him. And with my habit, formed during the long years of solitude, of addressing inanimate things aloud, I ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... is difficult to explain, but the fact is undeniable. Experience shews that the human voice can imitate the voice of all men and of all inferior animals. The sound of musical instruments, and even noises from the contact of inanimate substances, have been accurately imitated. The mimicry of animals is notorious; and Dr. Burney (Musical Travels) mentions one who imitated a flute and violin, so as to deceive ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... rendered. After the story has been read in this way, if thought advisable it can be played informally and simply, with no attempt at costuming or theatric effects. It will often add to the interest of the play to have some of the children represent certain of the inanimate objects of the scene, as the forest, the town gate, a door, etc. Occasionally, for the "open day," or as a special exercise, a favorite play may be given by the children with the simplest kind ...
— Children's Classics In Dramatic Form • Augusta Stevenson
... ideas consist in images which are formed in us by contact with external bodies, persuade themselves that the ideas of those things, whereof we can form no mental picture, are not ideas, but only figments, which we invent by the free decree of our will; they thus regard ideas as though they were inanimate pictures on a panel, and, filled with this misconception, do not see that an idea, inasmuch as it is an idea, involves an affirmation or negation. Again, those who confuse words with ideas, or with the affirmation which an idea involves, think that they can wish something contrary to what they ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... man, therefore, in his turn, rained down upon the inanimate soles of the ex-pasha, such fearful blows as resounded through the place, and made ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... find a smooth terrace ornamented with statues and vases, to be used as a promenade. There are straight walks and avenues between hedges and trees and shrubs—cyprus, laurel, box, and other manageable plants—cut to the shape of beasts and birds and inanimate objects. There are flower-beds—of the rose, the crocus, the wallflower, the narcissus, the violet, but not, for example, the tulip—laid out in geometrical patterns. There are trellis-work arbours ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... both old fools, Mr. Sharpe; but—we will talk this over with Lady Mainwaring. Come—" There was evidently a slight struggle near the chair over some inanimate object. But the next moment the Baronet's voice rose, persuasively, "Really, I must insist upon relieving you of your ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... To all appearances Alwyn was DEAD—any physician would have certified the fact, though how he had come by his death there was no evidence to show. And in that condition, ... stirless, breathless ... white as marble, cold and inanimate as stone, Heliobas left him. Not in indifference, but in sure knowledge—knowledge far beyond all mere medical science—that the senseless clay would in due time again arise to life and motion; that the casket was but temporarily bereft of its jewel,—and that the jewel ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. 'All vice is nothing more than error and mistake' (i. 31). {205} 'We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and judge' (i. 57). 'Justice . . . is coincident with utility' ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... and characters, one thought after another is hastily used and hastily dismissed, as if he were putting his own powers to the test or trying the effect of various kinds of objects on his readers; his most ambitious flights, in the shape of allegories and the like, are stiff and inanimate; and his favourite field of literary criticism is touched so slightly, as to show that he still wanted confidence in the taste and knowledge of the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... him to his cell, they dumped their inanimate prisoner on a chair in the porter's lodge.... The porter brought vinegar. They rubbed Butler-Vinson's temples with it. A jailor slapped his hands. In vain! The prisoner showed no signs ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... as I have struggled to interpret it in this book, seems to present itself as an unfathomable universe entirely made up of personalities. What we call inanimate substances are all of them the bodies, or portions of the bodies, of living personalities. The immense gulf, popularly made between the animate and the inanimate, thus turns out to be an unfounded illusion; and the whole universe reveals itself as an unfathomable series, or congeries, ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... her, unless he could have left his Heart at a Distance from his Body: Which made him take a fatal Resolution of returning to Seville in Disguise, where he wander'd about the Convent every Night like a Ghost (for indeed his Soul was within, while his inanimate Trunk was without) till at last he found Means to convey a Letter to her, which both surprized and delighted her. The Messenger that brought it her was one of her Mother-in-Law's Maids, whom he had known before, and met accidentally one Night as he was going his Rounds, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... describe the shameless impudence that the famine brought on men in their eating inanimate things, while I am going to relate a matter of fact, the like to which no history relates, either among the Greeks or barbarians? It is horrible to speak of it and incredible when heard. I had indeed willingly omitted this calamity of ours, that I might not seem to deliver ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... idolatry. At first sight what do we find in the opinions of that ancient world? No trace of the divine unity. Adoration is dispersed over a thousand different beings. Not only are the heavenly bodies adored and the powers of nature, but men, animals, and inanimate objects. The feeling of the holiness of God is not less wanting, it would seem, than the idea of His unity. Religion serves as a pretext for the unchaining of human passions. This is the case unfortunately with religion ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... has any reference to inorganic nature. Therefore, with the charm or the loveliness of landscapes, of earth and sea and sky, of pebbles, crystals, and so forth, we have at present nothing to do. How it is that so many inanimate objects are invested with beauty—why it is that beauty attaches to architecture, music, poetry, and many other things—these are questions which do not specially concern the biologist. If they are ever to receive any satisfactory explanation ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... of active men, however, have a variety corresponding to that of the subjects on which they are occupied. A sagacity applied to external and inanimate nature, forms one species of capacity; that which is turned to society and human affairs, another. Reputation for parts in any scene is equivocal, till we know by what kind of exertion that reputation is gained. No more can be said, in commending men of the greatest abilities, than that they ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... of this view it may be pointed out that beating or scourging is inflicted on inanimate objects expressly for the purpose indicated in the text. Thus the Indians of Costa Rica hold that there are two kinds of ceremonial uncleanness, nya and bu-ku-ru. Anything that has been connected with a death ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... consequence of them. The vitality which in other authors goes toward intellectual development, produced in him strength and intensity of imagination. Everything which his fancy touched it invested with life and beauty. It divined the secret soul of bird and beast and inanimate things. His hens and ducks and donkeys speak as hens and ducks and donkeys would speak if they could speak. Their temperaments and characters are scrupulously respected. Even shirt-collars, gingerbread men, darning-needles, flowers, and sunbeams, he endowed with physiognomies ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions. Does Humanity weep at these painful separations from every thing, animate and inanimate, with which the young heart has become entwined? Far from it. It is rather a source of joy that our country affords scope where our young population may range unconstrained in body or in mind, developing the power and faculties of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Andrew Jackson • Andrew Jackson
... had a scab on his nose, sent for the mason to take it off. The mason, however, declined to try, alleging that the success did not depend so much upon the skill of the operator as upon the mental control of the patient by which the physical frame became as it were a perfectly inanimate object. ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... and nervously one watches the shifting clouds near noon, and how remorsely they sometimes close up their dense masses just at the critical moment, shutting out from us the narrowly-watched face of the sun! One is foolish enough sometimes almost to feel a momentary resentment against inanimate nature—weak ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... address to a person or thing, absent or dead, is an apostrophe, and when an inanimate object is assumed to be alive or an animate object is assumed to be raised to a higher plane of existence it is said to be by personification. Examples of the latter figure are "death's menace," "laugh of morn." In the line "Lucidity of soul unlocks the lips" are both ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does nature live: Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud! And would we aught behold, of higher worth, Than that inanimate cold world allowed To the poor loveless ever-anxious crowd, Ah! from the soul itself must issue forth, A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud Enveloping the earth— And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... all life. He saw a row of large black portfolios on low supports, a sewing bag spilled its contents from a chair, a table bore a tin tobacco jar and the empty skin of a plantain. Then his gaze rested upon the floor, on a thin, inanimate body in crumpled alpaca trousers and dark jacket, with a peaked, congested face upturned toward the pale ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is in the power of a single felicitous word in poetry, toward making a perfect picture to the mind of the reader! It often invests an inanimate object with almost actual life, and makes the landscape a sentient thing. Here are a few lines that live in our memory—from PROCTOR, BARRY CORNWALL, if we do not mistake—which are eminently in illustration of this. The poet ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... of Life by Transmission. The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... vanishing away at the very moment of all when she had most need of it. What must the King of Bucharia feel, when, instead of the lively and beautiful LALLA ROOKH, whom the poets of Delhi had described as more perfect than the divinest images in the house of AZOR,[342] he should receive a pale and inanimate victim, upon whose cheek neither health nor pleasure bloomed, and from whose eyes Love had fled,—to ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... woman who had spent so many hours here. On the dressing table, with its splendid length doubled in the mirror, was the great fan that her hand had idly wielded, only a few days ago, in an hour of domestic felicity and happiness. And the inanimate plumes, that Harriet picked up and idly unfurled, had played their little part in the drama that had ended that bright scene ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... he stood beside Harry Squires in the cellar below the kitchen. There was a smell of gunpowder on the close, still air. They looked down upon the black, inanimate form of ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... There begins a sort of "festival of life" at which even insects sing, a tortoise comes on the scene with certain sacramental Latin words, and even, if I remember aright, a mineral sings about something that is a quite inanimate object. In fact, they all sing continually, or if they converse, it is simply to abuse one another vaguely, but again with a tinge of higher meaning. At last the scene is changed again; a wilderness appears, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... dragging minutes after he was gone the other man remained as he stood, motionless as a bronze statue, as an inanimate thing. The kerosene lamp was burning low now and sputtered dismally; but he did not notice, did not hear. For the third time, tremulous against the background of night and of silence, came the wail of the lonely little captive. It was a kindred ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... although a good deal agitated when her husband's almost inanimate and bloody form was carried in and laid on the bed, was by no means overcome with alarm. She, like the wives of St. Just miners generally, was too well accustomed to hear of accidents and to see their results, to give way to wild fears before she had ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... was wrapping the inanimate figure in the cloaks, and placing it gently in the hammock, as we should call it, that, suspended by strong cords from above, had assisted him in his descent to the boat. Then at a given signal this hammock, with its human load, was slowly and steadily drawn ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... thought a letter came from you— You did not love me any more, it said. What breathless grief!—my love not true, not true ... I was afraid of people, and afraid Of things inanimate—the wind that blew, The clock, the wooden chair; and so I strayed From home, but could not stray from grief, I knew. And then at dawn I woke, and wept, and prayed, And knew my blessed love was still the same;— And yet I sit and moan upon the bed For that dream-creature's ...
— Eyes of Youth - A Book of Verse by Padraic Colum, Shane Leslie, A.O. • Various
... expressed their sympathy for the delay she had been subjected to. The meal was a most merry one except to Baptista. She had desired privacy, and there was none; and to break the news was already a greater difficulty than it had been at first. Everything around her, animate and inanimate, great and small, insisted that she had come home to be married; and she could not get a chance to ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
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