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More "Receptive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... standpoint, the act of hypnotism had been accomplished. In his nervous and overfatigued state, added to his susceptibility to quick hypnosis, he was now directly under the influence of Captain Clinton's stronger will, directing his weaker will. He was completely receptive. The past seemed all a blur on his mind. He saw the flash of steel and the police captain's angry, determined-looking face. He felt he was powerless to resist that will any longer. He stepped back and gave a shudder, averting his eyes from the blinding ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... by for an adviser. I would set forward as prince a man of a good, medium understanding, lively rather than deep; a man of courtly manner, possessed of the double art to ingratiate and to command; receptive, accommodating, seductive. I have been observing you since your first entrance. Well, sir, were I a subject of Gruenewald I should pray Heaven to set upon the seat of government just ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... other spiritual forces which we might have named, and which would have manifested the same incontestable supremacy: there is the energy of meekness, that spirit of docility which communes with the Almighty in hallowed and receptive awe: there is the boundless vitality of love which lives on through midnight after midnight, unfainting and unspent: there is the inexhaustible energy of faith which hold on and out amid the massed hostilities of all its foes. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... squirrel sits chirruping familiarly on the edge of the verandah with his tail in the air and some uncracked pericarp in his uplifted hands, the kite circles aloft and whistles a shrill and mournful note, the sparrows chatter, the crow clears his throat, the minas scream discordantly, and Baby's soft, receptive nature thus absorbs an Indian language. Very soon Baby will think from right to left, and will lisp in the luxuriant bloom of Oriental hyperbole. [Presently, when Baby grows a little older, Baby will say to the Bearer, through his sweet little nose, "Arreh! ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... the population still hopeful of salvation. And then, because of the panic, the frantic scurry to save things once valuable and now only valued, no one noticed when a betraying wind blew seeds beyond the town, over the river, to find receptive soil on the Wisconsin side. The seeds germinated, the clump flourished. It cut the highway and reached down the banks into the Mississippi, waiting. And while it waited it built up greater bulk for itself, behind and beside. Each day it pushed a little farther toward ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... and another called the "receiver"—or names corresponding to these. The sender fixes in his mind a strong impression of the name or picture to be transmitted, and then makes a positive effort of the will to transmit the same to the receiver. The receiver assumes a passive receptive mental attitude, and then reports the word or image that comes into his mind. The more complex tests embody these same ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... of body was one she had caught from Grom, when he was groping for a solution to some problem. And now it seemed as if she had caught his attitude of mind as well. Into her brain, for the moment passive and receptive, flashed an idea, she knew not whence. It was as if it had been whispered to her. She picked up a spear, jabbed its stone head firmly into the lump of meat, and thrust the meat into the edge of the fire, as far as it could go without burning the ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... modified but remodelled and rebuilt from the groundwork to the coping-stone. One of the first needs of the nation is the education, physical and spiritual, of the new generation. Patriotic sentiment must be engrafted on the receptive soul of the child, and its range of sympathy widened and deepened. The duty of self-abnegation for the welfare of the community must be inculcated, together with new conceptions of personal dignity and worth. To the domestic sentiment ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... series of ascending metamorphoses, which is called nature. Personality by means of thought, recovers in inward profundity what it has lost in extension, and makes up for the rich accumulations of receptive passivity by the enormous privilege of that empire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by confusing and suppressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the severity of the conditions attached to the higher existence; but conscious and voluntary thought ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... stucco, he looked further at the Telegraph. He was rather surprised to find more than a column of enticing palaces, each in the finest position in London; London, in fact, seemed to be one unique, glorious position. And it was so welcome, so receptive, so wishful to make a speciality of your comfort, your food, your bath, your sanitation! He remembered the old boarding-houses of the eighties. Now all was changed, for the better. The Telegraph was full of the better, crammed and packed with tight columns ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... of the log houses and forts, the meeting of Puritans with the neighboring Indians, with their curious costumes, homes, customs and occupations, introduce other phases of life that put the child in a receptive mood for the reading of colonial history, Indian legends ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... commiserated, in not seeing that she herself was a greater loser than he, that to return his love would not be a concession but an acquisition. Most men are content to love, to compel women to receive their love; they prefer the passive, the receptive attitude in the woman, and are even bored by being actively loved in return; for love is exacting, and the male is impatient of exaction. Adelaide did not understand just this broad but subtle difference between Dory and "most men"—that ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... with and likened to the electric motor. Just as the motor is recharged, or receives its energy from some external source, just so, I believe, is the human nervous system recharged from without, during the hours of sleep. It is placed into a peculiar, receptive condition, in which this "recharging" process takes place. Our energy is derived through sleep, and not from food. Food merely replaces broken-down tissue (and, if you will, the animal heat) but never supplies or creates its vital energy. This depends upon its nervous mechanism, and upon sleep, ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... great capacity for work." Capacity is receptive; ability, potential. A sponge has capacity for water; the hand, ability to squeeze ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... His confidence fairly rattled the wire. His words annihilated space grandly and leaped into the old man's receptive ear with sizzling and electric effect. Mr. Crown, triumphant, was glad to inform others that he was making ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... offered him kindness! She clung to the idea of mockery because it was the only tangible thing she could pluck from her confusion. Thus when she began the descent of the companionway and ran into Dennison coming up her mood was not receptive to reproaches. ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... she said to herself, "she is not unamiable, but she is utterly mindless. What advantages she might have derived from intercourse with me, if she had possessed a receptive nature! But my highest gifts are thrown away upon her. She will go through life in lamentable ignorance of all that is of deepest import in man's past and future. She has no more ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... making fun of the mummers there was a new tone in him of arrogance and disdain. He used always to be genial and kindly even to those he laughed at; now he was openly contemptuous. The truth is that his extraordinarily receptive mind went with an even more abnormal receptivity of character: unlike most men of marked ability, he took colour from his associates. In this as in love of courtesies and dislike of coarse words he was curiously feminine. Intercourse with Beardsley, ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... far-reaching. He didn't wish her to be stupid. On the contrary, it was because she was clever that she had pleased him. But he expected her intelligence to operate altogether in his favour, and so far from desiring her mind to be a blank he had flattered himself that it would be richly receptive. He had expected his wife to feel with him and for him, to enter into his opinions, his ambitions, his preferences; and Isabel was obliged to confess that this was no great insolence on the part of a man so accomplished and a husband originally at least so tender. But ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... less strenuous would do," he said, mischievously—"a pretty amourette?—just one of those gay, frivolous, Louis XV affairs with some daintily receptive girl, not really improper, but only ultra fashionable. Do you think that would help ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... launching forth on an amusing anecdote. But there was no laughter at the end of it. The Indians were never given to mirth in their debauches; both Bill and Virginia were far indeed from a receptive humor. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... explained, and its dedication formally made. The tribute to Mr. Hoag is as well rendered as it is merited. The editorial note on amateur criticism is sound and kindly; the author voicing her protests in a manner which disarms them of malice, and putting us in a receptive attitude. Personally, the present critic is in complete agreement with the remarks on poetical elision and inversions; but we are confident that those of our board who hold different views, will accept the dicta ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... appropriately enough, one may go out and kill something. But his fine days are the best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse—even to dream; in fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear, luminous ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the product and the result of the psychical action of a certain substance called brain matter, and not the product and the result of the action of an essence or force unconnected with, or outside of, brain; and, furthermore, when we know that these lower animals have receptive ganglia analogous to those possessed by man, analogical deductions force us to the conclusion that these animals should possess mental emotions and functions similar to those ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... stem of his pipe. What was all this to him? Why should he bother his head about a woman he had known but a few hours? Ah, why lie to himself? He knew what Elsa, usually quick and receptive, did not know, that he was not afraid of her, but terribly afraid of himself. For things ripen quickly in the East, men and women, souls and deeds. And he was something like the pariah-dog; spoken kindly to, it attached itself immediately ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... captured tire with his best ex-coachman manner and a look in the brighter of his reddened eyes that was meant to be suggestive to the extent of a silver coin or two and receptive up ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... contributed a great gift to Science Fiction readers in offering this magazine to the receptive public.—Theodore L. Page, 2361 ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... many evenings, walking soberly Along our street all dappled with rich sun, I please myself with words, and happily Time rhymes to footfalls, planning how they run; And yet, when midnight comes, and paper lies Clean, white, receptive, all that one can ask, Alas for drowsy spirit, weary eyes And traitor hand that ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... about any of them," said Mrs. Parsons, with a cold sniff intended to be conclusive. Nor did Littleton's efforts to explain that elaboration in a private residence was liable to detract from architectural dignity and to produce the effect of vulgarity fall upon receptive soil. The rich man's wife listened in stony silence, at times raising her lorgnette to examine as a curiosity this young man who was telling her—an American woman who had travelled around the world and seen everything to be seen—how she ought to build her own house. The upshot ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... was calling to be released. It was useless to struggle against it, and deafen my ears to the cry. It must be given voice. I felt my soul condemning me as an echoer and imitator of men, as one whose every thought becomes coloured with others' views. Like a sponge I was readily receptive. Let a little mental pressure be applied and I gave back the identical thoughts hardly shaded by inward feelings. This was ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... psychic power will cheat them of insight and poise; for minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still, can seldom or never be hushed to ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... achievement and satisfaction on the other, was not the struggle which Byron experienced in himself or desired to depict in his mysterious hierarch of the powers of nature. "It was the Staubach and the Jungfrau, and something else," not the influence of Faust on a receptive listener, which called up a new theme, and struck out a fresh well-spring of the imagination. The motif of Manfred is remorse—eternal suffering for inexpiable crime. The sufferer is for ever buoyed up with the hope that there is relief somewhere in nature, beyond nature, above ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... protested Aunt Jerusha. "Do not project an unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little Methy into a receptive mood. He is ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... beloved parents were my only companions, playmates, teachers and confidants. I was papa's own girl. He was very proud of me and wished me to be with him as much as possible. He never wearied in the endless task of answering my questions, always so skillfully directing them by suggestions, that in my receptive mind there was soon unfolded a clear conception of the outlines of the different branches of all useful knowledge. When I was four years of age I knew the alphabet perfectly and could spell and construct a great number ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... vegetables and excluding the dalry products, "Yogi" breathing, and "sitting in the silence." That is, sitting in darkness, in seclusion or in company with others, while keeping the mind in a passive, receptive condition for extraneous impressions. These practices tend to develop very dangerous phases of abnormal and subjective psychism, such as clairvoyance, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... strangely touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... list is by no means complete, it shows that Roosevelt's receptive and sleepless mind fastened on the full circle of questions which interested American life, so far as that is controlled or directed by national legislation. Some of the laws passed were simply readjustments—new statutes on old matters. Other laws were new, embodying the first attempt to ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... triumph in the spiritual contest as well as in the battle of tanks and howitzers, unless we overthrow the idols which successive generations of great teachers and preachers have imposed on a susceptible, receptive, and docile people, there will be no early settlement, nor, however long belated, can there ever be a ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... they were sitting out on the lawn at Fraylingay one day after dinner, as was their wont in the summer—he, on this occasion, under the influence of a good cigar, mellow in mind and moral in sentiment, but inclining to be didactic for the moment because the coffee was late; she in a receptive mood, ready to gather silently, and store with care, in her capacious memory any precept that might fall from his lips, to be taken out ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... We of the white race are the survivors and the descendants of the thousands of generations of survivors in the war with the micro- organisms. Whenever one of us was born with a constitution peculiarly receptive to these minute enemies, such a one promptly died. Only those of us survived who could withstand them. We who are alive are the immune, the fit—the ones best constituted to live in a world of hostile micro-organisms. The poor Marquesans had undergone ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... then, to the details. I had been for several months, whether wisely or unwisely doth not appear, a link in one of those human chain rings supposed to be as peculiarly receptive of extra and super and ultra mundane facts as a legislative 'ring' is of the loose change of the lobby; and had sought in vain for personal contact with the world to come, when one afternoon a streak of the 'od' lightning suddenly ran down my right ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive. "Why did you land your ship on this ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... deriding Clinton's Ditch; angry boatmen anxious to ram the paddle wheels of Fulton's Clermont, which threatened their monopoly. Such opposition has always been an incident of progress; and even in this new country, receptive as it was to new ideas, the Washingtons, the Fitches, the Fultons, the Coopers, and the Whitneys, who saw visions and dreamed dreams, all had to face scepticism and hostility from those whom ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... and intolerant in discussion, both in public and private. I grew broadly tolerant and receptive toward the views of others. I had been nervous and irritable, coming home two or three times a week with a sick headache induced, as I then supposed, by dyspepsia and catarrh. I grew serene and gentle, and the physical ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... in England until the war clouds lowered, and as he talked of his boyish days there, and of the sights and festivities of London town, he found in Caleb Parish and his daughter receptive listeners, but in young Doane a stiff-necked ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to the Silence. Stillness is one thing and the Silence is another. One may quiet himself physically and not be still, and he may be still without entering the Silence. When one becomes physically and mentally at rest, he is apt to become receptive to psychic influences; and when these are not desired it is advisable to protect oneself while mentally negative. One may affirm his Oneness with God, his being surrounded and protected by the divine Goodness, and may symbolize this by enveloping himself ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... Lord Rosebery ten minutes on his legs; Lord Selborne's unctuous dronings had disappeared into the irrevocable and vast distances; in short, the moribund Chamber was alive, vivacious, and receptive. And when he had got them to this point Lord Rosebery took the serious part of his work seriously in hand. Not that he attempted lofty appeal. On the contrary, rarely throughout the speech did he raise his voice above that clear, penetrating, but eminently self-restrained tone which is ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... great,' the internal Light, Monitor, Guide, Rest, waiting to be seen, recognised, and known in every heart; not depending on the powers of Nature for enlightenment and instruction, but itself enlightening and instructing: not merely a receptive, but the motive power of Nature; which bestows itself upon Nature, and only receives from it that which it bestows. Is it not, as he says farther on, better 'to see great truths,' even if not so strictly ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... monotonously along. His sister was equally occupied with uneasy reflections, and Bluebell seemed as spell-bound as the rest. For one soul deeply moved and agitated often affects by electricity another in a receptive condition. Does not the atmosphere in a tempestuous mood thrill and ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... imagination, qualities proper to the child, become weak and passive. The home now is only a preparation for school. In it, young people growing up, are accustomed to receive services, without performing any on their part. They are trained to be always receptive instead of giving something in return. Then people are surprised at a youthful generation, selfish and unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions before their elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions, ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... Examinations, examinations by teachers who understand this very fine art, in which the student is obliged to restate, apply, and use the principles of his subject, are of the utmost value in keeping the mind active and not simply receptive. They are just as good and as vitally necessary as examination papers which merely demand definitions and lists and bald facts are bad. And then there might be discussions—if the Professor were clever enough to conduct them. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... and for heaven's sake try for once to be receptive. I am speaking not only for the welfare of my daughter Louise but for Beth and Patricia. Your nieces are charming girls, all three. With the advantages you have given them they may well become ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... seeking nor avoiding individual members of the smoking-room group, Lanyard permitted himself to be drawn into their company, and sat among them amiably receptive. But this profited him scantily; there was no further talk of the Lone Wolf; he was not again aware of that ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... into an attitude of receptivity towards that aspect of things which suggests representation in line. Their acquired sensitiveness in this respect is expressed in the learned character of their touch in drawing. Painters cultivate a similarly receptive attitude towards nature, but lay themselves open to receive a different impression of it. We might say of du Maurier that by the time he tried to apply himself to painting he had become constitutionally a black-and-white artist. Moreover, his impaired vision compromised the more complex ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... of heaven and by means of an angel there. The Divine in the whole heaven and the Divine in an angel is the same; therefore even the whole heaven may appear as one angel. So is it with the church, and with a man of the church. The greatest form receptive of the Divine is the whole heaven together with the whole church; the least is an angel of heaven and a man of the church. Sometimes an entire society of heaven has appeared to me as one angel-man; and it ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... not going too far to assert that you have never yet really watched a motion picture. You have witnessed many, but only the playwright and the theatrical man may be said to watch plays, whether on the stage or on the screen, with every faculty alert and receptive, ready to pounce on any suggestion, any bit of stage business, any scenic effect, or any situation, that they may legitimately copy or enlarge upon for their respective uses. This keen attitude is partly a matter of inborn dramatic instinct, but it is even more a matter of training and habit—therefore ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... most truly delightful holes of a picturesque course," said Booverman, taking out an approaching cleek for his second shot. "Nothing is more artistic than the tiny little patch of putting-green under the shaggy branches of the willows. The receptive graveyard to the right gives a certain pathos to it, a splendid, quiet note in contrast to the feeling of the swift, hungry river to the left, which will now receive and carry from my outstretched hand this little white floater that will ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... of Soapy's receptive state of mind and the influences about the old church wrought a sudden and wonderful change in his soul. He viewed with swift horror the pit into which he had tumbled, the degraded days, unworthy ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... again, to his couch on the dry clover; and he thought not even of the Hindoo king. Mrs. Rolfston's school of theology was not of the sort which worries one with puzzling things, and he had been in a receptive mood. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... when the tropics were finally left behind, he carried with him in his memory their profusion of colour, an ever-ready palette on which to draw. Assuredly it was a fortunate chance that took this lover of sunlight and space and splendor, in his most receptive years, to regions where they superabound. Perhaps, had he been confined to gloomier climates, he ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... characteristics of the three great nations which, in the period between Descartes and Kant, participated most productively in the work of philosophy,—the Italians, with their receptive temperament and so active in many fields, exerted a decisive influence on its development and progress in the transition period alone,—it will be seen that the Frenchman tends chiefly to acuteness, the Englishman to clearness and simplicity, the German to profundity of thought. France is ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... we would remind our readers of the marvel of the combination in Shakspere of such a high degree of two faculties, one of which is generally altogether inferior to the other: the faculties of reception and production. Rarely do we find that great receptive power, brought into operation either by reading or by observation, is combined with originality of thought. Some hungers are quite satisfied by taking in what others have thought and felt and done. By the assimilation ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... Loutherbourg to put trust in this arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible—the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife declared themselves clairvoyants. Other painters of the period were ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... rich humour, the speaker: "madame la comtesse" was abruptly convulsed with laughter; the chubby gentleman roared; Mr. Phinuit looked up from the carte with an enquiring, receptive smile; the waiter grinned broadly. But the cause of all this merriment wore only an expression of slightly pained bewilderment on his death-mask ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... deferential and humiliated silence. Each of them was mysteriously lowered in his own estimation, and knew that he had been made to seem futile and foolish in the eyes of his fellows. They were all conscious, too, that the clerk had been acutely receptive of Judge Pike's reading of them; that he was reviving from his own squelchedness through the later snubbing of the colonel; also that he might further seek to recover his poise by an attack on them for cluttering up ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... a mechanism of its own, without any conscious effort of the will, or even against it. Our inward experiences were thus arranged in three separate classes, the passive sense, or what the School-men call the merely receptive quality of the mind; the voluntary; and the spontaneous, which holds the middle place between both. But it is not in human nature to meditate on any mode of action, without inquiring after the law that governs it; and in the explanation of the spontaneous movements of our being, the metaphysician ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... hallucinations, shared by several persons at once, and perhaps not perceived by others who are present. Mr. Tylor, it is true, asserts that 'in civilised countries a rumour of some one having seen a phantom is enough to bring a sight of it to others whose minds are in a properly receptive state.' But this is arguing in a circle; What is 'a properly receptive state'? If illness, overwork, 'expectant attention,' make 'a properly receptive state,' I should have seen several phantoms in several 'haunted houses.' But the only thing of the sort I ever saw occurred when I was thinking ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... infancy to strength, I chose for the students of Kensington, in a lecture since published, two characteristic examples of early art, of equal skill; but in the one case, skill which was progressive—in the other, skill which was at pause. In the one case, it was work receptive of correction—hungry for correction; and in the other, work which inherently rejected correction. I chose for them a corrigible Eve, and an incorrigible Angel, and I grieve to say[236] that the incorrigible Angel was also ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... similar olfactory and gustatory end organs; or the nerve may conduct efferent impressions, and terminate in a gland which it excites to secretion, in a muscle end-plate, or in fact, anywhere, where kataboly can be set going and energy disengaged. We may now briefly advert to the receptive nerve ends. ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... she welcomed the return of the children, which delayed the words that were trembling on his lips. He was ready, she was not; and he walked homeward at her side silent and depressed, feeling that the receptive, responsive spring was later in her ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... his undivided attention to the customer. If the salesman is speaking, he should speak clearly, directly, concisely, and understandingly; if he is listening, he should listen interestedly and thoroughly, with all his powers alive and receptive. ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... study of popular manners; the history of a young workman, sober and chaste, as handsome as a girl, with the mind of a virgin, a sensitive soul. He is a carver, and works well. At night, near his mother, whom he loves, he studies, he reads books. In his mind, simple and receptive, ideas lodge themselves like bullets in a wall. He has no desires. He has neither the passions nor the vices that attach us to life. He is solitary and pure. Endowed with strong virtues, he becomes conceited. He lives among miserable people. He sees suffering. He has devotion ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... for a receptive spirit is fully and clearly displayed by Petrarch—one of the first truly modern men. That clear soul—who first collected from the literature of all countries evidence of the origin and progress of the sense of natural beauty, and himself, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... all directions, and whenever it impinges upon another mental body in a passive or receptive condition it communicates to it something of its own vibration. This does not convey a definite complete idea, as does the thought-form, but it tends to produce a thought of the same character as itself. For ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... tranquil and uniform was the life which we are now retracing, and at the same time so receptive of any noble influence which opportunity might bring, that a real epoch is marked in Wordsworth's poetical career by the mere re-reading of some Latin authors in 1814-16 with a view to preparing his eldest son for the University. Among the poets whom he thus studied was one ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... passive attitude towards the Universal Will and then of taking up a calm, positive attitude towards the phenomenal world—which is a projection of the lower nature and hence must be handled masterfully, fearlessly and confidently. Be positive to the external world. Be negative and receptive to the Lord's Will-force. Remember this. This brings me to the supremest and most solid truth contained in the Science of prayer. The praying mind, by its mere attitude of faith and earnest expectation, opens itself out to the tremendous inflow of Divine Energy. ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji
... Alberto (such was his name) was of so noble a temper that, being now nigh upon seventy years of age, and all but devoid of natural heat of body, he was yet receptive of the flames of love; and having at an assembly seen a very beautiful widow lady, Madonna Malgherida de' Ghisolieri, as some say, and being charmed with her beyond measure, was, notwithstanding his age, no less ardently enamoured ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... of grave, overbearing indifference once well known and much dreaded by the better sort of thieves. Chief Inspector Heat, though what is called a man, was not a smiling animal. But his inward state was that of satisfaction at the passively receptive attitude of the Assistant Commissioner, ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... the land was green, and the sea lay broad and blue, its breast swelling to the evening sun. The air blew sweet over field and cliff, add the music of the incoming tide was heard below the pine-fringed bank. Caius, however, was not in the receptive mind which appreciates outward things. His attention was not thoroughly aroused from himself till the sound of harsh voices struck ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... Advena knew no faltering or fluttering, none of the baser nervous betrayals. It was all one great delight to her, her discovery and her knowledge and her love for him. It came to her almost in a logical development; it found her grave, calm, and receptive. She had even a private formula of gratitude that the thing which happened to everybody, and happened to so many people irrelevantly, should arrive with her in such a glorious defensible, demonstrable sequence. Toward him it gave her a kind of glad secret advantage; he was loved ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... all his heart, the experience of many an ardent soul in those spirit searching days. Growing up happily under the care of the simple monks of Beaulieu he had never looked beyond their somewhat mechanical routine, accepted everything implicitly, and gone on acquiring knowledge with the receptive spirit but dormant thought of studious boyhood as yet unawakened, thinking that the studious clerical life to which every one destined him would only be a continuation of the same, as indeed it had been to his master, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... liked Lizzie Flower first-rate; and she declared that he was the brightest and most receptive pupil she ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... in the course of a few weeks, would you not advocate opening negotiations for peace? And were I to show the Emperor of Germany that his great army could be destroyed in even less time, would he not be more receptive than we now ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... Connie, I have received the world with open hands, a loving heart, a receptive soul. And I got gloriously filled up, too, let me tell you. Connie, shun the little gay-backed cards that bear diamonds and hearts and spades. Connie, flee from the ice-cold bottles that bubble to meet your lips. Connie, turn a cold shoulder to the gilded youths who sing when the night ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... miss Vavasor quite so much as he hoped she might, or as perhaps he believed she did. She had been interested in him mainly because she found him both receptive and capable of development in the matter of music—ready to understand, that is, and willing to be taught. To have such a man listen with respect to every word she said, never denying, defending or justifying what she might point out as a fault, but setting himself at once to the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... poisonous to humans and can be used for food. At the same time, they're approaching the problem from the other side, and the Jellies are men and women whose glandular structure has been altered in an effort to make their physiology more receptive to native Martian vegetation. If they succeed, of course, Marscorp has just as complete a monopoly over such a food supply as it does over imports from Earth, but at considerably ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... policy as light dawned upon his mind and experience taught him wisdom. Perhaps the most remarkable characteristics of this man,—opinionated and strong-headed as he undoubtedly is,—are to be found in the receptive quality of his mind, by which he is open to new ideas, and in the steady courage with which he affirms and stands by his convictions when once he has by reasoning arrived at them. It took thirteen years of parliamentary strife before the Peelites, whom he led, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... which reduced all knowledge to the accidental and passively receptive quality of the organs of sense and which asserted, as its fundamental maxim, that "Science ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... words from the other seemed to meet a receptive ear. The first speaker nodded energetically. His satisfaction was all too evident. From his appearance he was expecting nothing short ...
— Boy Scouts in the North Sea - The Mystery of a Sub • G. Harvey Ralphson
... as much as their attire. Orde's worn and wrinkled around the eyes, and grizzled at the temples, was the harder and more square of the two, and it was with something like envy that the owner looked at the comfortable outlines of Pagett's blandly receptive countenance, the clear skin, the untroubled eye, and the mobile, ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... fatigue us with the latter, but never with Nature in her varying moods, with the peculiarities of races, or with the manners and customs of each new locality and country. The delight in natural objects grows by experience in every cultivated and receptive mind. The rugged architecture of lofty mountains, the aspect of tumbling waterfalls, noble rivers, glowing sunsets, broad land and sea-views—each of these has a special, never-tiring ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... ease in Nature, Master of all or mistress of all, aplomb in the midst of irrational things, Imbued as they, passive, receptive, silent as they, Finding my occupation, poverty, notoriety, foibles, crimes, less important than I thought, Me toward the Mexican sea, or in the Mannahatta or the Tennessee, or far north or inland, A river man, or a man of the woods or ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... to the more pleasing memory of the girl's frank sympathy, and he told himself, with deep and convincing earnestness, that next time they met he must guard his unruly tongue, else it might run away with him again, and find her in less receptive mood. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... about the Church of England returned; and in this condition of mind he found himself outside a small Roman Catholic church dedicated to St. Joseph, where hopeful of gaining the Divine guidance within he passed through the door. It may be that he was in a less receptive mood than he thought, for what impressed him most was the Anglican atmosphere of this Italian outpost. The stale perfume of incense on stone could not eclipse that authentic perfume of respectability which has been acquired by so many Roman Catholic ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... overwhelming and most painful. It was, as well as I can describe it, a deficiency in the egoistic sentiment of individuality. About one half of the sensitive surface of my skin was gone, and thus much of relation to the outer world destroyed. As a consequence, a large part of the receptive central organs must be out of employ, and, like other idle things, degenerating rapidly. Moreover, all the great central ganglia, which give rise to movements in the limbs, were also eternally at rest. ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... This receptive faculty, for power it cannot be called, is neither voluntary nor constant. The appearances have no dependence upon choice: they cannot be summoned, detained, or recalled. The impression is sudden, and ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... another thing to be considered. I believe that the bird, like creatures in other classes, has his receptive period, his time to learn, and that, like some mammals, he learns everything he needs to know in his first year or two; and that, having acquired his proper song, he adds little or nothing to it thereafter, although the song may increase in power and brilliance when the bird ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... commanding gaze of Leonardo, when the Senator Contarini resumed the speech which had been so strangely interrupted. The enthusiasm and determination of the morning had returned; the words fell upon a receptive and positive atmosphere. The opinions of the distinguished Senator carried great weight, so loyal and catholic was he known to be; and above the portal of the Contarini many times the Lion of St. ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... avail himself of Nature's offer. His constitution was made up of very simple particulars; was one which, rare in the spring-time of civilizations, seems to grow abundant as a nation gets older, individuality fades, and education spreads; that is, his brain had extraordinary receptive powers, and no great creativeness. Quickly acquiring any kind of knowledge he saw around him, and having a plastic adaptability more common in woman than in man, he changed colour like a chameleon as the society he found himself in assumed ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do Overlook the sun and the stars and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter into me, and I become public ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... exordium is to dispose the auditors to be favorable to us in the other parts of the discourse. This, as most authors agree, is accomplished by making them friendly, attentive, and receptive, tho due regard should be paid to these three particulars throughout the whole ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... pleasure for fineness of texture was to them an imitation of the luminous body of the deity shining from behind its dark robes; and ivory afterwards is employed in their best statues for its yet more soft and flesh-like brightness, receptive also of the most delicate colour—(therefore to this day the favourite ground of miniature painters). In like manner, the existence of quarries of peach-coloured marble within twelve miles of Verona, and of white ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... sculptor. He is to make a bust of me. What better legacy can I leave to the world than a bust of van Manderpootz, sculptured from life? Perhaps I shall present it to the city, perhaps to the university. I would have given it to the Royal Society if they had been a little more receptive, if they—if—if!" The last in ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... of food and other household supplies. Granted one no longer expects to run around the corner for a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs that may have been left off the morning shopping lists, just how far away is the nearest grocer? Is he at all receptive to the idea of making an occasional delivery in the outlying districts? How about the rubbish collector, if any; the milkman; the purveyors of ice, coal and wood? Are there a lighting system in the vicinity, telephone facilities, and so forth? These last need ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... grandfathers. It was the fashion then to say that Nature—capitalised—took the brush from the hand of the painter, meaning some old duffer who saw varnish instead of clear colour, and painted the picture for him. Sorolla is receptive; he does not attempt to impose upon nature an arbitrary pattern, but he sees nature with his own eyes, modified by the thousand subtle experiences in which he has steeped his brain. He has the tact of omission very well developed. After years of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... gathering as it were into himself all he could of the bitterness that he knew she carried at her heart, and then turned away to the window, realising the greatness of her trouble and yearning to do that very thing which unconsciously by mere action of his receptive ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... faculties (perception and reflection) are mute upon the subject: they bear no testimony to facts; they show no proof. Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would, therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals,the development of Humanity. With him suspension of ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... her solution of the problem proposed to her. The most intellectual gladly conversed with one whose knowledge, however rich and varied, was always with her only the means of new acquisition. Meantime her mind was purely receptive. She had no ambition to propound a theory, or to write her own name on any book, or plant, or opinion. Her delight in books was not tainted by any wish to shine, or any appetite for praise or influence. She seldom and unwillingly used a pen, and ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... is, however, a great mistake to suppose that a stupid child necessarily implies one that is in any sense deficient mentally. The dull schoolboy often proves in after life to be the brilliant man. All that his dulness need be taken to signify is that his mind is not receptive to the subjects which are being forced upon it. Linnaeus was very stupid at Latin until an enlightened physician, who was aware of his passion for botanical study, suggested his reading Plinius; and although he may not have imbibed very accurate information about natural history from that ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... agricultural banks on the Schulze-Delitzsch and Raiffeisen systems would soon overspread the land. Credit and co-operative groupings for the purchase of seed, fertilisers and implements, are the twin pillars of rural industry. Indian ryots are quite as receptive of new ideas as English farmers. They bought many thousands of little iron sugar mills, placed on the market a generation back by some English speculators, and will adopt any improvements of practical value if the price is brought within ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... few words and no tears. The force and suddenness of his emotion and her own had overborne her into this strange unmeant confession; but her mood was unlike his,—it was merely receptive. She listened to his unavailing regrets, but told him little of her ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lighten and soften, and for once his mind would feel exultant that it moved with hers on equal terms—nay, that he was teacher and she taught. Whenever there emerged in him the signs of that demonic something that makes greatness she would be receptive, eager, humble even. But again his commoner, coarser side, his mere lack of breeding, would reappear; and she would fall back on her cold or gentle defensiveness. Thus protected by what his wrath called 'airs,' she was ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... so reasonable and receptive, that Granice's self-confidence returned. Here was a sensible man—a man who knew his business—it would be easy enough to make him see through that ridiculous alibi! Granice offered Mr. Hewson a cigar, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... to realize, while looking at her placid and happy face, that Maarda had ever been a mother of sorrows, but the healing of a wounded heart oftentimes leaves a light like that of a benediction on a receptive face, and Maarda's countenance held something greater than beauty, something more like lovableness, than any ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... about the sixth level, highly receptive but not at all selective, he strolled up one street and down another. He was not attentive to detail yet; he was trying to get the broad aspects, the "feel" ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... letters, certainly, and many; yet, in the matter of character portrayal, what are they alongside of the talk? And also, more pertinent, what to Boswell was even the talk, compared with the intercourse to which the talk was incident? In this he immersed himself and his strong receptive powers, absorbing the impression which he has so skilfully reproduced. Such apprehension as Boswell thus gained for himself is no neutral acquirement; it is a working force, instinctively selective from that on which it feeds, and intuitive ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... singular things about suggestion is that it is rarely a fixed quantity. The mind that is receptive to the authority of a certain person may prove inflexible to another; moods and environments that produce hypnosis readily in one instance may be entirely inoperative in another; and some minds can scarcely ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... know—what is, nevertheless, a fact—that the most effective moment for making resolves is in the comatose calm which precedes going to sleep. The entire organism is then in a passive state, and more permanently receptive of the imprint of volition than at any other period of the twenty-four hours. If regularly at that moment the man says clearly and imperiously to himself, "I will not allow my business to preoccupy me at home; ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... is something boisterous and piratic in Burly's manner of talk which suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out Pistol'd, and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was in flights, always rising and finally sublime; Stephens' was argumentative with an elegant smoothness, often flowing in sweeping, majestic waves; Toombs' was an engulfing stream of impetuous force, with the roar of thunder. Hill was receptive, elastic, and full of the future; Stephens was philosophical, adaptable, and full of the past; Toombs was inexhaustible, original, inflexible, and full of the now. It was Hill's special forte to close a campaign; Stephens' ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... atmosphere they created and left behind. Is it possible that subtile** distillations of personality penetrate and saturate inanimate things, so that aromas imperceptible to the sense are given off for ages and affect all who come in receptive mood within their influence? It is quite likely that what we feel when we stand within the shadow of a great soul is all subjective, that our emotions are but the workings of our imaginations stirred by suggestive surroundings; but who ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... delightful way. She was 'open to all emotions as they came'—in fact, she was a fool who was wise because she has retained her power of happiness, while the hard Rebecca has arrived at hell, 'the hell of having all outward forces open, but all receptive ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... that does not stand before God, now and here, in the ordinary daily life, does not even live at all, in any true sense. "I am come that ye might have life," said Jesus, "and have it more abundantly." It is only as one holds himself receptive to the divine currents that he has life, and it rests with himself to have it "more abundantly" every day ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... stout, portly old lady. She had twinkling good-humored eyes, a mouth which smiled whenever she looked at a child, and a constant habit of putting her hand into her pocket and taking out a lollipop. This lollipop found its way straight into the receptive mouth of any small creature of the human race who ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... servant, as easily as he had provided himself with a new abode. A foreign waiter at the hotel—a gray-haired Frenchman of the old school, reputed to be the most ill-tempered servant in the house—had felt the genial influence of Amelius with the receptive readiness of his race. Here was a young Englishman, who spoke to him as easily and pleasantly as if he was speaking to a friend—who heard him relate his little grievances, and never took advantage of that circumstance to turn ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... problem in mathematics or a puzzling legal question, or even to remember some refractory word in a foreign language which would not remain in the memory. After a certain amount of effort in many of these cases, further exertion is injurious, the mind or receptive power seems to be seized—as if nauseated—with spasmodic rejections. In such a case pass the question by, but on going to bed, think it over and will to understand it on the morrow. It will often ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... toast, Sengoun looked about him pleasantly, receptive, ready for any eventuality. And observing no symptoms of any eventuality whatever, he suggested ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... Albert's promise, the Calvin lumber was not delivered on time. The Reverend gentleman called to ask why. His manner was anything but receptive so ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... girl leaves school she is hardly old enough to enter service, and too often in the year or so that elapses before she 'goes out' much mischief is done. She is then at an age when the mind is peculiarly receptive, and the ways of the young labourers with whom she is thrown into contact are not very refined. Her first essay at 'service' is often as day-nursemaid at some adjacent farmhouse, taking care of the younger children in the day, and returning ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... verities, became more and more indistinct. The soothsayers of the long past had been forbidden by Nature to doubt that which was the lore of the camp. Was it that Nature re-asserted her influence—that the essences of the scene, subtle and pervasive, had recurred, creating a receptive spirit, so deep a religion of assent that shadow and substance intermingled to my bewilderment? I was permitted to be a sensitive percipient in the midst of the ashes of shiftless folk who had passed away, catching but ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... shadows. Their curiosity, it appeared to him, was something more than the excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a strange room; yet, so far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely kept his mind quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part should communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the value of ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... while Harris sought out new homestead land and Arthurs proceeded with the development of his farm. It was McCrae, whose interest in every member of the expedition was that of a father, that dropped the germ of this suggestion into Arthurs' receptive ear, and it was with paternal satisfaction he found the young couples speedily work out for themselves the arrangements which he had planned ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... was cunning. From hour to hour, growing more restive, it employed devices of craft and subtlety. As when Merton Gill, carefree to the best of his knowledge, strolling lightly to another point of interest, graciously receptive to the pleasant life about him, would suddenly discover that a part of his mind without superintendence had for some moments been composing a letter, something that ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... will cheat them of insight and poise; for minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still, can seldom or never be hushed ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... turn over an edition of Shaftsbury, and try to read it with the mind of this merry and receptive printer's boy, will perceive how entirely captivating it must have been to him. The raillery that was always the raillery of a gentleman; the irony so delicate as really to deceive some men who passed for acute; the fine urbanity that pervades ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... mouth, clean cut, full, firm and finely modelled in the lips. His nose was straight, high in the nostril and sensitive. He resembled his brother, Daniel, but stood three inches taller, and his brow was fuller and loftier. His expression in repose appeared frank and receptive; but to-day his face wore a look half anxious, half ferocious. He was clad in tweed knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket, of different pattern but similar material. His tie was light blue and fastened with a gold pin modelled in the shape of a hunting-horn. He bore ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... be divided into four classes, each class marking an advance in receptive power on the part of the listener and poetic subtlety on that of the composer. We may liken the first stage to that of the savage Indians who depict their exploits in war and peace on the rocks, fragments of bone, ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... ancient and indefeasible right to existence. They, with their ancestors and near relatives, constitute Literature,—without which the human race would be little better than savages. For the effect of pure literature upon a receptive mind is something more than can be definitely stated. Like sunshine upon a landscape, it is a kind of miracle. It demands from its disciple almost as much as it gives him, and is never revealed save to the disinterested and loving eye. In our best moments, it touches us most deeply; ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... time we were in possession of such a thing as our own mind in India. It was living. It thought, it felt, it expressed itself. It was receptive as well as productive. That this mind could be of any use in the process, or in the end, of our education was overlooked by our modern educational dispensation. We are provided with buildings and books and other magnificent burdens calculated to suppress ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... wound: great debts are like cannon, of loud noise, but little danger. You must therefore be enabled to discharge petty debts, that you may have leisure, with security to struggle with the rest." "Sir," said he to the patient and receptive Boswell, "get as much peace of mind as you can, and keep within your income, and you ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... at school, and astonishes the world before he has reached his majority. The change in the author's position is, indeed, equally marked in a different way. The youthful heroes of Disraeli's early novels are creative; in his later they become chiefly receptive. Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming show their genius by insubordination; Coningsby and Tancred learn wisdom by sitting at the feet of Sidonia; and Lothair reduces himself so completely to a mere 'passive bucket' to be pumped ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... from these virtues or powers the Soul is produced more or less pure; and according to its purity there descends into it the virtue or power of the possible or passive intellect, as it is called, and as it has been spoken of. And if it happen that through the purity of the receptive Soul the intellectual power is indeed separate and absolute, free from all corporeal shadow, the Divine Goodness multiplies in it, as in a thing sufficient to receive that good gift; and then it multiplies in the Soul of this intelligent being, according as it can receive it; and this is that ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... in order to secure not only a greater and more independent individual efficiency, but also a deeper and more lasting influence on the men; but this influence of the superiors must always remain limited if it cannot count on finding in the men a receptive and intelligent material. This fact is especially clear when we grasp the claims which modern war will make on the individual fighter. In order to meet these demands fully, the people ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... with the English people and with English life. His was one of those receptive natures which enjoy whatever is wholesome and sunny. In spite of his bodily pain, he entertained a lively hope of coming out of it in the spring, and did not realize his true condition. He merely said, "I have overworked myself, and must lay by or I shall break down ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... sail that evening, her destination being Miami and the West Coast where Portlaw desired to do some tarpon fishing and Wayward had railroad interests. Malcourt, always in a receptive attitude, was quite ready to go anywhere when invited. Otherwise he preferred a ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... possible because the heavens and the earth are so visibly united in the fellowship of common life; the one pouring down a measureless and penetrating tide of vitality, the other eagerly, worshipfully receptive. Nature has no more inspiring truth for us than this constant and complete enfolding of our life by a higher and vaster life, this unbroken play of a diviner purpose and force through us. Nothing is lost, nothing really dies; all things are conserved ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... her. And directly he paused, Dora, who had dropped her silks again in her sudden astonishment, burst into questions. How old was his sister? Was she in Manchester? Had she a trade? Her soul was full of a warm, unexpected joy, her manner was eager—receptive. He took up his parable and told the story of his childhood and Louie's at the farm. His black eye kindled as he looked past Dora into the past—into the bosom of the Scout. Owing partly to an imaginative gift, partly to his ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... honestly believe so. We must ascend to a much earlier period to be able to judge their conduct accurately. It was when the claims of Jesus were first submitted to them that they went astray. He, being such as He was, could only have been welcomed and appreciated by expectant, receptive, holy minds. The ecclesiastical authorities of Judaea in that age were anything but expectant, receptive and holy. They were totally incapable of understanding Him, and saw no beauty that they should desire Him. As He often told them Himself, ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... tranquillising, more beneficent, than even the mood of disinterested study. In the world to which sincerity would condemn him, only the worst elements of his character found nourishment and range; here he was humanised, made receptive of all gentle sympathies. Heroism might point him to an unending struggle with adverse conditions, but how was heroism possible without faith? Absolute faith he had none; he was essentially a negativist, guided by the mere relations ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... 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 receptive period: ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... somewhat compromised the movement and has diminished its direct influence. However, business men have been stirred up. They have become accustomed to using the words "science" and "business" in the same sentence. They are in a receptive attitude for ideas. The indirect influence ...
— Higher Education and Business Standards • Willard Eugene Hotchkiss
... fine, noble piano performance, and of a simple, pure, well-taught style of singing, and also understand the characteristics of the performer, much more quickly than they do. The sensibility and appreciation of beauty with the public is less prejudiced, less spurious, more receptive, and more artless. Its perceptions are not disturbed by theories, by a desire to criticise, and many other secondary matters. The public do not take a biassed or stilted view. The admiration for Jenny Lind is a striking proof of this, as is also the appreciation ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... clad with branches from head to foot, yet not in the faintest degree heavy or bunchy, it towers in unassuming majesty, drooping as if unaffected with the aspiring tendencies of its race, loving the ground while transparently conscious of heaven and joyously receptive of its blessings, reaching out its branches like sensitive tentacles, feeling the light and reveling in it. No other of our alpine conifers so finely veils its strength. Its delicate branches yield to ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... matter that way, it was no good arguing with him. The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old. Privately I thought it lucky that he had associated with him some one of a more receptive type ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... a right eagerly to ask: On this strongly marked temperament, so delicately imaginative and so keenly logical, so receptive and so retentive, a type alike of the philosopher and the poet, the scholar and the musician—on such a contemplative genius, what were the effects of so great and so constant indulgence in a drug noted for its power of heightening and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... hour maybe while the curlew called, and then have Dancing Town take form and color before his eyes, hold it until every detail was visible, and then fade gently out as twilight fades into night. He had thought to be prepared and receptive. ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... which is equal to the squares of those sides containing the right angle. The perpendicular (three) is the Male, Osiris, the originating principle ([Greek: arche]); the base (four) is the Female, Isis, the receptive principle ([Greek: hypodoche]); and the Hypotenuse (five) is the offspring of both, Horus, the product ([Greek: apotelesma])." The central feature of this triangle, upon which its property is based, is the Right Angle. The Greeks gave to this Right Angle the name of Gnomon (meaning ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... student on the throne, though I would have one near by for an adviser. I would set forward as prince a man of a good, medium understanding, lively rather than deep; a man of courtly manner, possessed of the double art to ingratiate and to command; receptive, accommodating, seductive. I have been observing you since your first entrance. Well, sir, were I a subject of Gruenewald I should pray Heaven to set upon the seat of government just ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that it will not fight for its life!" And Diogenes, seeing a lad drinking water out of the palm of his hand, threw away the cup which he kept in his wallet. So much does attention and assiduous practice make people perceptive and receptive of what contributes to virtue from any source. And this is the case still more with those who mix discourses with actions, who not only, to use the language of Thucydides,[270] "exercise themselves in the presence of danger," but also in regard to pleasures and ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... matters of principle, to his virile self-assertion. She would be less a woman, and he less a man, were any other result possible. Deep down in the very roots of the idea of sex we come on that prime antithesis,—the male, active and aggressive; the female, sedentary, passive, and receptive. ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... had all along had an ideal in her own mind of the invalid old lady, Mr. White's mother, to whom she was to be very good, and who was to be her mother's companion. She pictured her as her own mother would be, a good deal older and feebler, in a gentle, receptive, patient old age. Of so repellent, aggressive, unlovely an old woman as this she had had no conception. It would be hard to do justice in words to Mrs. White's capacity to be disagreeable when she chose. She had gray eyes, which, though they had a very ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... gentlemen who preferred listening, I have been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly justified. But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good listener. If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren. If, when I am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story, I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Calcutta. I have friendly relations with his family, and some one there will care for all letters that come to me from Europe. Dear friend, I hope to find you the same de Marsay on my return,—the man who scoffs at everything and yet is receptive of the feelings of others when they accord with the grandeur he is conscious of in himself. You stay in Paris, friend; but when you read these words, I shall be ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... inspires happy thought and desire, And the heart cannot fail to rejoice, As it makes the glad spirit receptive and quick ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... truer appreciation of that peculiar keeping of the churches which the stranger is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender of the hapless mendicants at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt and old. Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which, though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving, and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized as facts again. I, for instance, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Doctor shifted his pillow. "An extremely nice girl, I believe. Exceedingly sympathetic and attentive to all my wants, and receptive to a remarkable degree. She has been reading to me daily, and I find rather an unusual mind, undisciplined of course, but ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... of 1918 there were assembled around his drafting-board an interested and receptive audience of four—Peters, an ensign attached to the "lighter-than-air" section; Madden, a pilot on his way up from Italy to the Northern Bombing Group; Erskine, a lieutenant in the Operations Division; and Matthews, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... as regards the receptive function. Then there is another function in the intellectual life of a Nation, that of spontaneous flow, that going out of its life by which the world is enriched. When the Nation has lost this power, when it merely receives, but cannot give out, then its ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... considerably. But they had left me untouched. Indeed they were other men's adventures, not mine. Except for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not matured me. I was as young as before. Inconceivably young—still beautifully unthinking—infinitely receptive. ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... but with none the less energy and persistence. Among other things, he visited Daniel Webster at Marshfield to urge him to accept the nomination for Vice President. The great statesman recalled Weed's similar errand in 1839, and the memory of Harrison's sudden death now softened him into a receptive mood; but the inopportune coming of Fletcher Webster, who reported that his father's cause was making tremendous progress, changed consent into disapproval, and for the second time in ten years Webster lost the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... admitted to Spenser the following afternoon, she faced him guiltily—for the thoughts Brent had set to bubbling and boiling in her. And her guilt showed in the tone of her greeting, in the reluctance and forced intensity of her kiss and embrace. She had compressed into the five most receptive years of a human being's life an experience that was, for one of her intelligence and education, equal to many times five years of ordinary life. And this experience had developed her instinct for concealing her deep feelings into a fixed habit. But it had not made her a liar—had ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... find his law within himself, be the source of his own activity, not passive or receptive, but ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... addition, broadened his mental outlook in a remarkable manner. Foreign travel, a wider acquaintance with differing types of humanity, and, above all, a newly-won acquaintance with the contemporary literature of other countries, made a deep impression upon Bjornson's vigorously receptive mind. He browsed voraciously upon the works of foreign writers. Herbert Spencer, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Taine, Max-Mueller, formed a portion of his mental pabulum at this time—and the result was a significant alteration of mental ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... in really good spirits by the time Lord Rosebery ten minutes on his legs; Lord Selborne's unctuous dronings had disappeared into the irrevocable and vast distances; in short, the moribund Chamber was alive, vivacious, and receptive. And when he had got them to this point Lord Rosebery took the serious part of his work seriously in hand. Not that he attempted lofty appeal. On the contrary, rarely throughout the speech did he raise his voice above ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... agents work directly with Mexican fascist groups, and have undertaken to carry the brunt of spreading anti-democratic propaganda to turn popular sentiment against the "Colossus of the North," and to develop a receptive attitude toward ...
— Secret Armies - The New Technique of Nazi Warfare • John L. Spivak
... suits well enough with this impression. He will roar you down, he will bury his face in his hands, he will undergo passions of revolt and agony; and meanwhile his attitude of mind is really both conciliatory and receptive; and after Pistol has been out-Pistol'd,[16] and the welkin rung for hours, you begin to perceive a certain subsidence in these spring torrents, points of agreement issue, and you end arm-in-arm, and in a glow of mutual admiration. The outcry only serves ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Swabia and Switzerland, he met Gassner and witnessed some of his cures. Mesmer claimed that they were performed by his newly discovered magnetism. He arrived in Paris in 1778 and found this city more receptive to his arts. He at first established himself in an humble quarter of the city and began to expound his theory. The following year he published a paper in which he summed up his claims in twenty-seven assertions ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... The hour was propitious. They were all "worked up." The night, perhaps, played upon them after "La Grande Jeanne" had done her part. Crayford was obviously in his softest, most receptive mood. Alston was expansive, was in a gloriously hopeful condition. The opera was mentioned again. By whom? Surely by the hour or the night! It had to be mentioned, and inevitably was. Crayford was sympathetic, spoke almost with emotion—a liqueur-glass ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... in my tenth year, the imitative faculty got the upper hand, and nothing seemed so attractive as to be what I was expected to be. If there was a doubt now, it lay in the other direction; it seemed hardly normal that so young a child should appear so receptive and so apt. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... thing is I thought I was going to broaden Jean, to show her what a narrow little Puritan she is, bound in the Old Testament thrall of her Great-aunt Alison—but not a bit of it. She is very receptive, delighted to be told about people and clothes, cities, theatres, pictures, but on what she calls 'serious things' she is an absolute rock. It is like finding a Roundhead delighting in Royalist sports and plays, or a Royalist chanting Roundhead ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... indeed a wonderful teacher! The player, however, must divine how to be receptive, how to enter into the master's thought, or it may go hard with him. If he does not understand, nor grasp the master's words he may suffer terribly during the ordeal of the lessons. I have witnessed such scenes! Those ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... good plan to strike while the iron is hot;' and as the people at Colant were in an interested and receptive state, I put off other things which had been appointed, and made arrangements to return to the battle-field as soon as possible. My people were much excited to hear what I was able to tell them of my three days' ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... poetic activity, he was to derive his inspiration from other sources. The most fruitful and important of these was unquestionably his intercourse with Wordsworth, from whom, although there was doubtless a reciprocation of influence between them, his much more receptive nature took a far deeper impression than it made. [1] At the time of their meeting he had already for some three years been acquainted with Wordsworth's works as a poet, and it speaks highly for his discrimination that he was able to discern the great ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... just lately had suffered so much from the disadvantage of not "following his own head, and so being much more correct in judgment than following the opinion of others," that his head was not at all in a receptive state; and like all who have doubted about being right, and found the doubt wrong, he was hardened into the merits of his own conclusion. "Why have I gone on a goose-chase?" he asked; "because I have twice ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... the problem proposed to her. The most intellectual gladly conversed with one whose knowledge, however rich and varied, was always with her only the means of new acquisition. Meantime her mind was purely receptive. She had no ambition to propound a theory, or to write her own name on any book, or plant, or opinion. Her delight in books was not tainted by any wish to shine, or any appetite for praise or influence. She seldom and unwillingly used a pen, ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... broad and blue, its breast swelling to the evening sun. The air blew sweet over field and cliff, add the music of the incoming tide was heard below the pine-fringed bank. Caius, however, was not in the receptive mind which appreciates outward things. His attention was not thoroughly aroused from himself till the sound of harsh voices struck ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... the instructor was ignorant of the topography of the country, the temper of the people among whom he was to labor, and, more important still, when he was totally ignorant of the particular class upon whom he was to operate—ignorant of their temperament, receptive capacity and peculiar, aye, unique, idiosyncrasies. Thus thousands upon thousands of dollars were expended upon the erection and endowment of "colleges" in many localities where ordinary common schools were unknown. Each college was, therefore, necessarily ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... indeed, learn all this at that time; but she had her receptive mind opened to the first lessons of the glorious truth on than ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne
... was a woman of unusual intellect bordering upon genius. There were no means of higher education at that period, but her father, who was an eminent lawyer, and her grandfather, a judge, finding her so receptive, educated her with the care that was given to boys who were intended for a professional life. She was well versed in the literature of the time of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne, and, with a retentive memory, ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew
... am lucky, tremendously lucky," he hastened to declare, laughing a little wryly. "Such a journey is a liberal education in itself, knocking the insularity out of a man—if he has any receptive faculty that is—and ridding him of all manner of stodgy prejudices. I don't the least undervalue my good fortune.—But you talk of remembering. That's stretching a point surely. You must have been a mere baby, my dear ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... are willing to let Him guide and lead. The trouble with many sceptics is their self-conceit. They know more than the Almighty! and they do not come in a teachable spirit. But the moment a man comes in a receptive spirit he is blessed; for "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... revealed to the impressive, penetrating, and commanding gaze of Leonardo, when the Senator Contarini resumed the speech which had been so strangely interrupted. The enthusiasm and determination of the morning had returned; the words fell upon a receptive and positive atmosphere. The opinions of the distinguished Senator carried great weight, so loyal and catholic was he known to be; and above the portal of the Contarini many times the Lion of ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... petals of light upon darkness. From Nature's brimming cup I drink a thousand scents; At noon the wizard sun stirs the hot soil under the pines. I take the top stone of the wall in my hands And the sun in my heart; I feel the rippling land extend to right and left, Bearing up a receptive surface to my uncertain feet; I clamber up the hill and beyond the grassy sweep; I encounter a chaos of tumbled rocks. Piles of shadow they seem, huddling close to the land. Here they are scattered like ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... of points possible, and is raising passivity to the highest exponent on the side of feeling; secondly, in procuring for the determining faculty the greatest possible amount of independence, in relation to the receptive power, and in raising activity to the highest degree on the side of reason. By the union of these two qualities man will associate the highest degree of self-spontaneity (autonomy) and of freedom with the fullest plenitude of existence, and instead of abandoning himself to the world so as to get ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... an amazingly self-satisfied toiler who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became more and more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched in his tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic, less receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he was compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His personal gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to become both obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost souls grew too intricate ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... his head lovingly on the sofa-cushion, and discussed the enjoyment of the day with his skilled appreciation of music. Geraldine's receptive power was not inferior to his own, though she had none of that of expression, nor of the science in which he was trained. He was like another being from the merry rattle he was at other times; and she had more glimpses than she ever had before of the high nature and deep ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... pull. Livestock and proper land use are natural companions. Another ally and companion in this whole movement should be good walnut trees in every pasture, a few nut trees in every farm lot, in the fence row and corner of the farm. I am sure that our educational agencies would be very receptive to putting more emphasis on this sound and fundamental practice. Good pasture lands, clear streams, plenty of trees for shade are all important and real assets to any farm. Shade produced by a ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... intellectual faculties (perception and reflection) are mute upon the subject: they bear no testimony to facts; they show no proof. Even the instinctive sense of our kind is here dumb. We may believe what we are taught: we can know nothing. He would, therefore, cultivate that receptive mood which, marching under the shadow of mighty events, leads to the highest of goals,the development of Humanity. With him suspension of judgment ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... arch-juggler? Can it have been that from the painter's native Strasbourg had come to him unimpeachable accounts of Cagliostro's feats during his stay there, which had preceded his nefarious expedition to Paris? But the artist is ever excitable, receptive, impressible—the ready prey of the dealer in illusion and trickery. De Loutherbourg is soon at the feet of the quack Gamaliel; soon he is proclaiming himself an inspired physician, practising mesmerism. Cosway and his wife ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... views concerning the most probable cause of appendicitis, which I found myself able to do with some eloquence, reciting among other details that even though the metal dust might be of an almost microscopic fineness, it could still do a mischief to one's appendix. The press chap appeared wholly receptive to my views, and, after securing details of my plan to smarten Red Gap with a restaurant of real distinction, he asked so civilly for a photographic portrait of myself that I was unable to refuse him. The thing ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... hindered from receiving them while occupied with sensible things. Hence Gregory says (Dial. iv, 26) that "the soul, at the approach of death, foresees certain future things, by reason of the subtlety of its nature," inasmuch as it is receptive even of slight impressions. Or again, it knows future things by a revelation of the angels; but not by its own power, because according to Augustine (Gen. ad lit. xii, 13), "if this were so, it would be able to foreknow the future whenever it willed," which ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... people who definitely set themselves to see something, but have no idea what the something will be, and no control over the sight after the visions have begun—psychic Micawbers, who put themselves into a receptive condition, and then simply wait for something to turn up. Many trance-mediums would come under this heading; they either in some way hypnotize themselves or are hypnotized by some "spirit-guide," and then they describe ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... public opinion by sensational writing of questionable veracity, cannot be too strongly condemned, it is none the less true that it requires not merely a touch of literary genius, but also a lively and receptive imagination to tell a perfectly truthful tale in such a manner as to arrest the attention, to excite the wayward imagination and to guide the thoughts of the vast majority of those who will scan the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... mission which the photoplay may have in our community is that of esthetic cultivation. No art reaches a larger audience daily, no esthetic influence finds spectators in a more receptive frame of mind. On the other hand no training demands a more persistent and planful arousing of the mind than the esthetic training, and never is progress more difficult than when the teacher adjusts himself to the mere liking ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... touching about words so candid, and a draught of philosophy that has been pressed from such wild and bitter-sweet fruit. The message it contains is one to sink deep, penetrating and enriching whatever receptive soul it touches. This man's words are incandescent. Many of us feel that he is breathing into a language, grown trite from hackneyed usage, the ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... pointed no finger of scorn to my broken life. She uttered no reproaches. She took me as I was, and for three years our life together has been to me one long unbroken harmony. Our tastes were very similar. She was well read, receptive, a charming companion. Ennui was a word of which I have forgotten the meaning. And it seemed so with her, too, for she grew younger ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... He had come to it from the reading of his Bible instead of the reading of the morning paper, and from prayer instead of from thoughts of his business or a yawning stroll through his library. His mind was receptive of the best things in the service. He entered into it with the solemn feeling that it was ...
— Robert Hardy's Seven Days - A Dream and Its Consequences • Charles Monroe Sheldon
... rather persuasive than just; and that though my "language" may be good, I am an unsafe guide in art criticism, is, like many other popular estimates in such matters, not merely untrue, but precisely the reverse of the truth; it is truth, like reflections in water, distorted much by the shaking receptive surface, and in every particular, upside down. For my "language," until within the last six or seven years, was loose, obscure, and more or less feeble; and still, though I have tried hard to mend it, the best I can do is inferior to much contemporary work. No description that ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... it, it is absurd to expect a child to talk sensibly and rationally on the mental diet of 'moo-moos' and 'choo-choos' served out to them. Our Professor of Metaphysics and Ideology in our Child Study Course says that nothing is so receptive and plastic as the Mind of a Little Child, and that it is perfectly appalling how we fill it with trivial absurdities that haven't even the virtue of being accurate. So that's why we're trying to be so careful with Baby. You didn't mind my ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... somewhat rapidly-acquired and long-retained fancies concerning the clean and unclean, upon which Jews and Mussulmans lay such curious stress. It was the result of my happening to spend a year in the East, at an age when the brain is very receptive of new ideas, and when I happened to be much impressed by the nobler aspects of Mussulman civilisation, especially, I may say, with the manly conformity of their every-day practice to their creed, which contrasts sharply with what we see among most Europeans, who profess ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... were so arranged that each of the one hundred sections comprising the three thousand feet of receptive surface at the focus of the mirror formed a concentric circle of energy beams; each circle becoming progressively smaller in diameter, so that the energy combined into one hundred concentric circles, one within the other, as it left the rods; but these circles were capable of the necessary focusing ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... it. So, too, the denizens of the world of Astralism. In any of these named worlds there is a material presence—which must be created, if only for a single or periodic purpose. It matters not whether a material presence already created can be receptive of a disembodied soul, or a soul unattached can have a body built up for it or around it; or, again, whether the body of a dead person can be made seeming quick through some diabolic influence manifested in the present, or an inheritance ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... that he and she, and those dear puppets of his own creations, were denizens together of some fairy and ethereal world, wandering through the fascinating maze of imaginative life. It was almost an intoxication, this wonderfully stimulating contact with a mind so receptive, so brilliant, so sympathetic. He forgot his garret, Cicely, the drear past, the passionate warnings of Drexley and Rice. As a weaver of stories he was in his first youth. He had peopled but few worlds with those wonderfully precious creations—the children of the brain. They were ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... his book—a volume of pious meditations. Events had drawn him into a receptive attitude toward religion. He was surprised at ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... hours' sleep every night just robs himself of so much vitality. The loss may not be felt or noticed at present, but the process of sleeping is only Nature's banking system of principal and interest. A mind capable of the fulfilment of its highest duties should be not only receptive to ideas, but quick to comprehend a point. With a fresh mind and a clear brain, a young man has two of the greatest levers of success. These cannot be retained under social indulgences. The dissipation of a night ...
— The Young Man in Business • Edward W. Bok
... true of painting and poetry and sculpture. The feelings which inspire them and the feelings which they arouse in receptive souls are totally independent of ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... not miss Vavasor quite so much as he hoped she might, or as perhaps he believed she did. She had been interested in him mainly because she found him both receptive and capable of development in the matter of music—ready to understand, that is, and willing to be taught. To have such a man listen with respect to every word she said, never denying, defending or justifying what she might point out as a fault, but setting himself at once to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... is visible in his earliest published poems. The greater part of his vacations was spent in his native Lake-country, where his only sister, Dorothy, was the companion of his rambles. She was a woman of large natural endowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and had much to do with the formation and tendency of the poet's mind. It was she who called forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature, and taught an originally harsh and austere imagination to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as the rock fringes itself with ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... to give his opinion on the future of the session now about to begin. To all such questions he replied with more or less extended observations, and sometimes he had the pleasure of finding himself the centre of a group respectfully receptive of his opinions. This success rendered him very inattentive to the telegraphy of his wife, who, watching his various evolutions, made him signs whenever she could catch his eye that she wished ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... teaching. It took all of Don's good nature at times to prevent an open break with Kirkwell. Once the latter accused Don of trying to "ball him up" so that he would play poorly and Don would get the position. The next day, though, he made an awkward apology for that accusation and was quite receptive to Don's criticisms and instructions. But Don's task was no easy one and it grew harder as the season progressed and the second team, especially as to its linemen, failed to develop the ability Mr. Boutelle looked for. ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... upon her, though the world seemed to frown. Flowers had looked shyly and sweetly into her face as if they saw nothing there to criticise. She had plucked a few and fastened them into her breast-pin, and their faint perfume was like a low, soothing voice. She was in a softened and receptive mood, and a kind word, even a kind glance, might have tuned the scale in favor of ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... in those spirit searching days. Growing up happily under the care of the simple monks of Beaulieu he had never looked beyond their somewhat mechanical routine, accepted everything implicitly, and gone on acquiring knowledge with the receptive spirit but dormant thought of studious boyhood as yet unawakened, thinking that the studious clerical life to which every one destined him would only be a continuation of the same, as indeed it had ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the gifts of invention and imagination, qualities proper to the child, become weak and passive. The home now is only a preparation for school. In it, young people growing up, are accustomed to receive services, without performing any on their part. They are trained to be always receptive instead of giving something in return. Then people are surprised at a youthful generation, selfish and unrestrained, pressing forward shamelessly on all occasions before their elders, crudely unresponsive in respect of those attentions, which in earlier generations were ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... collapse, dropped into a chair on her veranda, her faithful Major by her side. He had come to offer help and sympathy as soon as he heard of her distress, and, finding her in such a softened, dependent, and receptive mood, the Major had remained to ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... for which Merker was responsible was the utilization of the slabs and edgings in the construction of fruit trays and boxes. When he approached Welton on the subject, the lumberman was little inclined to be receptive to the idea. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... as the great masculine positive force, the soul as the feminine or receptive force, and the meeting of these two, the "mystic rapture" of the marriage of Divinity and Humanity, as the source ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... classic example of the confinement of a people within its political boundaries is the long isolation of Japan from 1624 to 1854. The pent-up forces there accumulated, in a population which had doubled itself in the interval and which by hard schooling was made receptive to every improved economic method, manifest themselves in the insistent demand for more land which has permeated all the recent policy of Japan. But the history of Japan is exceptional. The rule is that the growing people slowly but continually overflow ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of nature for a receptive spirit is fully and clearly displayed by Petrarch—one of the first truly modern men. That clear soul—who first collected from the literature of all countries evidence of the origin and progress of the sense ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... on for 150 miles through what was practically the enemy's country. Adair, owing to what he likes to term his "usual good fortune," reached the Choctaw country safely and by his adroitness and substantial presents won the friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he found in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach of hospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus created a large proEnglish faction among the Choctaws, and his success seriously impaired French prestige with all the southwestern tribes. ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... aim of the wise was to educate the receptive and all who came to them in the attitude of disciples. This aim corresponded very closely to that of the modern educator. Again the preface to the book of Proverbs clearly ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... that he did not want to speak of France, and wondered why. But Marvin, eager to talk of his favourite study, seized the suggestion in all innocence. He had gone to Paris as he had wandered through life, with the mind of a child, eager, receptive, open to impression. Such minds pass by much that is of value, but to one or two conclusions they bring a perceptive comprehension which is photographic in ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... Mrs. Alexander Whyte's. In the course of these three days He addressed the Theosophical Society, the Esperanto Society, and many of the students, including representatives of almost all parts of the East. He also spoke to two or three other large meetings in the bleak but receptive 'northern Athens.' It is pleasant to add that here, as elsewhere, many seekers came and had private interviews with Him. It was a fruitful season, and He ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... day after dinner, as was their wont in the summer—he, on this occasion, under the influence of a good cigar, mellow in mind and moral in sentiment, but inclining to be didactic for the moment because the coffee was late; she in a receptive mood, ready to gather silently, and store with care, in her capacious memory any precept that might fall from his lips, to be taken out ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... was to see how these two conditions, freedom of elections and liberty of the press, have been brought about. The pupils were thus placed in a receptive attitude to hear the story ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Old Testament, there are the most moving, tender, and simple stories in the New. To the uncorrupted mind, to the unjaded mind, which has not been forced to look on books as mere recitals of exciting adventures, the Acts of the Apostles are full of entrancing episodes. It is very easy for a receptive youth to acquire a taste for St. Paul, and I soon learned that St. Paul was not only one of the greatest of letter writers, but as a figure of history more interesting than Julius Caesar, and certainly more modern. Young people delight in human documents. They ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Art, Italy, Greece, Life, Music, Psyche, Color, Motion, Liberty! Put yourself into a receptive attitude now, and Beauty will speak to you!" And while a satellite ran rosy fingers down a lute, she moved the toe named Beauty to ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... but some one gave his secret away for he was met at the station at Buffalo Center by the entire troop. Chick-chick jumped up on the steps before the train stopped and at peril of life and limb pulled him off the train into the receptive arms of Apple and Matt. Big Tom Scoresby gave him grip for grip in a mighty scout handshake—the only scout who could match him. Goosey hung on to his elbow waiting for his turn. All affectation of reserve disappeared ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... is a gymnasium. Take which figure you choose. Because of this, good talk, following the principle of life, is always directed with a general desire for learning rather than teaching. No good talker is obtrusive, thrusting forward his observation on men and things. He is rather receptive, trying to get at other people's observations; and what he says himself falls from him, as it were, by accident, he unconscious that he is saying anything that is worth while. As the late Professor Harris said, one of the last times I saw him, "There ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... therefore, that strangers who come usually sit in front of me. I have a lively curiosity, and I like to look at them. In the winter there are no strangers, and my mind is, I fancy, at such times, more receptive ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... which artists need, the gods bestowed upon you a face which wins all hearts, even those of women, because it is a mirror of genuine, helpful, womanly kindness, a sincere disposition, and a healthy, receptive mind. To reproduce such a face, not exactly beautiful, and yet bewitching, is the hardest possible task, and Hermon, I repeat it, has succeeded. You are the only one of your noble sex who inspires the motherless man with respect, and for whom he feels more than a fleeting fancy. What does he not ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... that he is a form, which is capable of receiving in itself that which constitutes a man; and thus that he is not born a man, but that he is made a man; and that a man is born such a form as to be an organ receptive of life from God, to the end that he may be a subject into which God may introduce all good, and, by union with himself, may make him eternally blessed. We have perceived from your conversation, that wisdom at this day is so far extinguished or infatuated, that nothing at all is known concerning ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... uplifting. Some people I know employ this morning leisure in scrubbing their consciences clean, thus thriftily making room for the sins of the coming day. But Sarah Brown's conscience was dreadfully receptive, almost magnetic; little sins like smuts lay always deep upon it. There were a few regrettable seconds in every minute she lived, I think, though she never enjoyed the compensations attached to a really considerable sin. Anyway her conscience ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... to every earnest and sincere seeker throughout all the ages. If you will ask yourself, What are the main and abiding thoughts which are embodied in Nature? your conclusion, I think, need not be elaborate and confusing. The question, however, must be asked in a receptive and unprejudiced mood, and not merely by the matter-of-fact intellect. "Every inch of earth, of water, of fire, and of air contains the fundamental principles of the universe, and man is the connecting ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock
... on the stormy path of life, are only loosely connected; and yet the book achieves a unified effect, thanks to the wonderful musical atmosphere which is its element, and to the pivotal position in it of province and city: "Graz, city lost in the expanse of nature, so still, so receptive and yet fulfilled as no other is with soft impressiveness; the green-dreaming, tree-rustling, gentle-singing city of Graz, animate beyond all great cities with the soul of nature." The next novel, The Sons of Haindl (1908), a collection of similar types ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... strength; the other draws us by his alluring charm. Michael Angelo is in painting what Dante and Shakespeare are in poetry, and Beethoven in music; Raphael is like the gentle Spenser and the tender Mozart. Michael Angelo is thoroughly original; Raphael possessed a peculiarly receptive nature, that caught something from all with whom he came into close contact. Michael Angelo strove continually to grow; Raphael struggled for nothing. Michael Angelo's life was sternly lonely and sorrowful; Raphael's bright, happy, and placid. Michael Angelo lived long; Raphael ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt
... martyrdom. The work of the divine Spirit, as he conceives it, exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of prayer, sacrifice, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive. She, too, possesses, not less than the soul of the world, initiatory power, responding with the free gift of a light and heat ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... accidents, of course, in plenty. The Lord took Mrs. Eccles's own uncle from his half-filled basket to another world, for which, as a "tea and coffee totaller," he was no doubt well prepared. The too receptive organisms of unsuspecting infancy suffered in their turn. In short, it was a busy season ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... reflect how much the charm of a locality depends upon our own internal condition? Was she aware that any place, however tame and dull, becomes delightful through the presence of one who creates in us a state receptive ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... in flesh and blood, and no one knew any better than she, herself, the vanity to rout the faults and frailties inherited. She strove the harder to overthrow such imperfections by perfecting and cultivating the maid's receptive mood. She was ever fencing with her in words, working out in detail exchange of thought wherein Katherine might, if 'twere in her, make a clever reply. At times Mistress Penwick would pick up such threads of Janet's teaching ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... infinitum, and which thus enables us to give out to any extent we please. But for wise and effective giving out a strong and enlightened will is an absolute necessity, and therefore we do well to cultivate the will, or the active side of our nature. But we must equally cultivate the receptive side also; and when we do this rightly by seeing in the Infinite Mind the one source of supply, our will-power becomes intensified by the knowledge that the whole power of the Infinite is present to back it up; and with this continual sense of Infinite Power behind us we can go calmly and steadily ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... rejection of self; and such a rejection seems like an extinguishment of the very life. But, if we reject this old, vain life, a new vitality, born of higher and more enduring principles, will at once begin. Remember that we are spiritually organized forms, receptive of life. If the life of selfish and perverted ends becomes inactive, a new, better, and truer life will begin. We must live; for life, inextinguishable life, is the inheritance received from the Creator, who is life eternal ...
— The Good Time Coming • T. S. Arthur
... or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith; honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... existence, and hence they remain as isolated bits of primeval wilderness, hedged about by farms and furrows. The water is the life-blood of the marsh,—drain it, and reed and rush, bird and batrachian, perish or disappear. The marsh, to him who enters it in a receptive mood, holds, besides mosquitoes and stagnation,—melody, the mystery of unknown waters, and the sweetness of ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... on terra firma; in the water the man will be thinking of the ducking in sight and his mind will not be in receptive mood. It is also essential to make him understand a hold thoroughly before ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... dried-up gullies and canals became silver-streaked with the incoming spray, and it needed only a windmill to make the scene as Dutch as a Van Der Neer. Piloti was moody. Something worried him, but as I was not in a very receptive condition, I forbore questioning him. We walked over the closely cut grass until the water was reached. He stopped, tossed ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... effect of moderate doses of alcohol on mental work much difference of opinion exists. Many students find that, instead of helping them in their work, it hinders them. It dulls their receptive faculties. Others, on the contrary, find real help in moderate quantities of wine. These differences of effect would seem to depend greatly on differences in constitutional temperament. It is certainly capable, for a time, of calling some of the mental faculties into increased ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... completely relaxed in body and mind. I am receptive to Nature's harmonious and invigorating vibrations—they dispel the discordant and destructive vibrations of hurry, worry, fear and anger. New life, new health, new strength are entering into me with every breath, pervading my ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... fitting prelude to unknown realms of enchantment. The dreamful calm of the two days' passage obliterates the memory of bygone difficulties and perturbations, the interval between past and future experiences falling like refreshing dew on the weary spirit, and increasing the receptive capacity required for the assimilation of new impressions. The vast extent of the Malay Archipelago, and the stupendous size of the principal islands, comes as a fresh revelation to travellers whose ideas have been limited by vague recollections of schoolroom geography. The seven hundred ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... walking soberly Along our street all dappled with rich sun, I please myself with words, and happily Time rhymes to footfalls, planning how they run; And yet, when midnight comes, and paper lies Clean, white, receptive, all that one can ask, Alas for drowsy spirit, weary eyes And traitor hand that fails ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... before us, it can hardly be deemed surprising that Home should be able to play on the imagination of sitters so sympathetic and receptive as Lords Dunraven and Crawford unquestionably were. To tell the truth, Home's whole career, with its scintillating, melodramatic, and uniformly successful phases is altogether inexplicable unless it be assumed that he possessed the hypnotist's ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... are satisfied with believe and credible just because they keep aloof from each other. Good and well go better together than quick and quickly. The English vocabulary is a rich medley because each English word wants its own castle. Has English long been peculiarly receptive to foreign words because it craves the staking out of as many word areas as possible, or, conversely, has the mechanical imposition of a flood of French and Latin loan-words, unrooted in our earlier tradition, so ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... schools from infancy to strength, I chose for the students of Kensington, in a lecture since published, two characteristic examples of early art, of equal skill; but in the one case, skill which was progressive—in the other, skill which was at pause. In the one case, it was work receptive of correction—hungry for correction; and in the other, work which inherently rejected correction. I chose for them a corrigible Eve, and an incorrigible Angel, and I grieve to say[236] that the incorrigible Angel was also ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... who, however great his vices, was always master of them. From his right cheek-bone to the corner of his mouth ran a scar, very well healed. Instead of detracting from the beauty of his face it added a peculiar fascination. And the American imagination, always receptive of the romantic, might readily and forgivably have pictured villas, maids in durance vile, and sword-thrusts under the moonlight. But the waiter, who had served his time in one or another of the foreign armies, knew that no foil or rapier could have made such a scar; more probably the saber. ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... symposium of discussion were modeled on actual personages. He himself was personified under the dual form of Florestan and Eusebius, the "two souls in his breast"—the former, the fiery iconoclast, impulsive in his judgments and reckless in attacking prejudices; the latter, the mild, genial, receptive dreamer. Master Raro, who stood for Wieck, also typified the calm, speculative side of Schumann's nature. Chiara represented Clara Wieck, and personified the feminine side of art. So the various personages were all modeled after associates of Schumann, and, ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... uniform was the life which we are now retracing, and at the same time so receptive of any noble influence which opportunity might bring, that a real epoch is marked in Wordsworth's poetical career by the mere re-reading of some Latin authors in 1814-16 with a view to preparing his ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Hoag is as well rendered as it is merited. The editorial note on amateur criticism is sound and kindly; the author voicing her protests in a manner which disarms them of malice, and putting us in a receptive attitude. Personally, the present critic is in complete agreement with the remarks on poetical elision and inversions; but we are confident that those of our board who hold different views, will accept the dicta in ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... have made themselves most prominent in these classes within the last twenty years; and this acquaintanceship shades naturally off, in a minor and moderate degree, into those circles of good social standing which are rather liberally receptive than productive of literature and art. The writer cannot profess or affect to be "behind the scenes" of political parties, or to have dived into the minds of the peerage over their wine or of artisans in their workshops. He has conversed freely with many ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
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