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More "Reflective" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... score of impossible trees, turned midday into sunset, with a riot of colors which would have made the Chinese New-year in Canton a drab and sober event in comparison. He hated Flora Desimone, as all Nora's adherents most properly did, but with a hatred wholly reflective ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... new has anything in common with the absolute except that they are all three greater than man; and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods of Abraham, of David, and of Jesus, after first developing into each other, were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflective and modern minds, I reply that although in certain specifically philosophical minds this may have been the case, in minds more properly to be termed religious the development has followed quite another path. The whole history of evangelical Christianity is there to prove it. I propose in these ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... he sat in silence, eyes half closed, lips a bit compressed; a certain sternness, that was always in his countenance, showing plainest when in reflective thought. At last, he smiled. Then he lit another cigarette, took up the letter and the photograph, and put them in the small safe standing behind an ornate screen in the corner—not, however, without another look ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... that springs from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,—a brilliancy like that produced by unblended colors roughly but well laid on. They have, as it were, an organic force which nothing can render. The best of them have the reflective power which gives back light from the mind of the reader. The profounder ones appear to change and glow under contemplation; they re-echo syllables from forgotten voices; they suggest unfathomable ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... moderate means and quiet habits of living, to whom the extreme formalities of the world of fashion will always remain something of an abstraction, and the knowledge of them is not of much practical use except to the few who are reflective enough to infer their own particular rule from any ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... and of awe have presented themselves to all reflective men at all times. They deeply affect the thought, so wholesome and so human, of Homer. They express themselves in that old English pagan's allegory of the bird that flies from the dark into the warm and lighted hall, and from the hall ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... who ever heard of a traitorous lamplighter?); that they commit no crimes against the laws of their country (there being no instance of a murderous or burglarious lamplighter); that they are, in short, notwithstanding their apparently volatile and restless character, a highly moral and reflective people: having among themselves as many traditional observances as the Jews, and being, as a body, if not as old as the hills, at least as old as the streets. It is an article of their creed that the first faint glimmering of true civilisation shone in the first street-light ...
— The Lamplighter • Charles Dickens
... was a very amiable, reflective girl, quiet without being sad, not often indulging in conversation, except when alone with her sister Emma. She was devotedly attached to her uncle and aunt, and was capable of more than she had any idea of herself, for she was of a modest disposition, and thought humbly ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... ready to say, 'All the world is a stage;' or, in the actual words of Plato, 'Let us play as good plays as we can,' though 'we must be sometimes serious, which is not agreeable, but necessary.' These are feelings which have crossed the minds of reflective persons in all ages, and there is no reason to connect the Laws any more than other parts of Plato's writings with the very uncertain narrative of his life, or to imagine that this melancholy tone is attributable to disappointment at having failed ...
— Laws • Plato
... complete, then turns The primal Mover with a smile of joy On such great work of nature, and imbreathes New spirit replete with virtue, that what here Active it finds, to its own substance draws, And forms an individual soul, that lives, And feels, and bends reflective on itself. And that thou less mayst marvel at the word, Mark the sun's heat, how that to wine doth change, Mix'd with the moisture filter'd through the vine. "When Lachesis hath spun the thread, the soul Takes with her both ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... strictly appropriate recognitions rather, as it might seem, of a certain great possibility, which might lie among the conditions of so complex a world. That was a point which could hardly escape so reflective a mind as Gaston's: and at a later period of his life, at the harvest of his own second thoughts, as he pondered on the influence over him of that two-sided thinker, the opinion that things as we find them would bear a certain old-fashioned construction, ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... result of a swift process of unconscious reasoning—for he maintained that what we call intuition is but an instantaneous perception of facts and of their inevitable inferences, too rapid for the reflective part ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... to bind themselves by law to higher codes than they will live up to if not bound. In their reflective moments, when they are deciding how to vote, temptations are less insistent and ideals stronger than when they are confronting concrete situations. To vote for a law which will restrain others, and incidentally ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... to be done soon," said the colonel, who, at the suggestion of his hostess, had lighted a cigarette. He seemed more himself with a cigarette between his fingers to contemplate with a dreamy eye, to turn and twist in reflective idleness. "You will understand that my future movements are uncertain if, as now seems possible, the ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... hid her face from him. She put her hands over her eyes. Her shoulders shook with her sobbing. Cap'n Ira took a reflective pinch of snuff. ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... washing the lunch-dishes in a reflective turn of mind which did away with part of the irksomeness of the task, went into the parlor and sat on a stool ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... caressed it. He often kissed the little naked feet the toes of which, covered with a pellicle through which the blood was seen, were like rosebuds. He was passionately fond of the child. When she tried to speak, or when she fixed her beautiful blue eyes upon some object with that serious, reflective look which seems the dawn of thought, and which she ended with a laugh, he would stay by her side for hours, seeking, with Jordy's help, to understand the reasons (which most people call caprices) underlying the phenomena ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... British nation. For one can scarcely suppose a more perfect combination of all the qualities calculated to form a popular Monarch, in this country, than the natural abilities of the Stuart race, perfected under the able guidance of so reflective a ruler—so accomplished a general—so consummate a statesman, as William. The education which that Monarch had planned for the young Duke of Gloucester shows how enlarged and practical were his views of the acquirements necessary ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... not lack information about him. We like him under that air of youthful seriousness; we see upon his face that dawning gravity in which the blossom of feeling already exists, but its plenitude and maturity are still to come. And in attentively examining our personage we are struck with his reflective and searching glance. We seem to have a glimpse in him of an undefined melancholy. This expression surprises us in this man, who ought to be happy at living and who lacks no pleasures that Fortune ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... fact that they have hitherto, in the most enlightened times, terminated their inductive labours by assigning that unity and correlation which science points out in the universe of things to an ordaining intelligence. We repeat, as a matter of experience, it is as rare in this age to find a reflective man who does not read thought in this unity and correlation of material phenomena, as it would have been, in some rube superstitious period, to discover an individual who refused to see, in any one of the specialities ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... little folks; gossip, plump nurses, as you scold your soldiers. Embroider peaceably, young mothers, making from time to time a little game of your neighbors among yourselves; and you, reflective idlers, look at that charming picture-babies ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... gilded branches. His left arm was resting on the instrument, his chin in his hand, almost concealing his face. He beat the drum slowly with a little stick held in his right hand, and he sat motionless, in a reflective attitude, with his thoughts concentrated on his improvisation, peeping between his fingers at the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... for hearing faint ones. To a hand which has for some time carried a heavy body, small bodies afterwards lifted seem to have lost their weight. Now, the truth at once recognized in these, its extreme manifestations, may be traced throughout. It may be shown that alike in the reflective faculties, in the imagination, in the perceptions of the beautiful, the ludicrous, the sublime, in the sentiments, the instincts, in all the mental powers, however we may classify them-action exhausts; and that in proportion as the action ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... could see nothing offensive to you in any thought there or trace of thought that has been there—but it is hard for you to understand, with all your psychology (and to be reminded of it I have just been looking at the preface of some poems by some Mr. Gurney where he speaks of 'the reflective wisdom of a Wordsworth and the profound psychological utterances of a Browning') it is hard for you to understand what my mental position is after the peculiar experience I have suffered, and what [Greek: ti emoi ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... quiet little pension in the Rue Paul Bert, in Lyons, but her letters were always despairing. Poor Gabrielle was just the same. She still had no other vista in life than her immediate one, and she still in her reflective moments gave vent to that strange ejaculation of those mysterious words: "Red, green and ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... strong natural sense, who had seen nearly the whole terraqueous globe, and could reason of civilized and savage, of Gentile and Jew, of Christian and Moslem. The long night-watches of the sailor are eminently adapted to draw out the reflective faculties of any serious-minded man, however humble or uneducated. Judge, then, what half a century of battling out watches on the ocean must have done for this fine old tar. He was a sort of a sea-Socrates, in his old age "pouring out his last philosophy and life," as sweet Spenser has it; ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... rayless houses, to a certain formal square ghostly with snow-covered statues. Here he ascended the broad steps of a reserved and solid-looking mansion, and pulled a bronze bell-knob, that somewhere within those chaste recesses, after an apparent reflective pause, coldly communicated the fact that a stranger was waiting without—as he ought. Despite the lateness of the hour, there was a slight glow from the windows, clearly not enough to warm the messenger with indications ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... he hailed the discovery as a revelation to promote his improvement in the art of painting. On his return soon after to his father's, he had a box made with one of the sides perforated; and, adverting to the reflective power of the mirror, he contrived, without ever having heard of the instrument, to invent the Camera. Thus furnishing another proof, that although the faculty which enables a man to excel in any particular art or science is a natural endowment, it ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... you are good for propaganda," he resumed, tossing away ash with a reflective air. "But even that has no value within four walls. If Noureddin Ali should come and learn from me how much talking has been done in here, and how little done outside, I can imagine he will not be pleased. Are there no other kahawi?* Why is that story about the Zionists and their offer ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... Devon. Edward, the wit of the family, went to Pembroke College, and is now a clergyman. George also went to Pembroke. He is in orders likewise, and now has the same School, a very flourishing one, which my Father had. He is a man of reflective mind and elegant talent. He possesses learning in a greater degree than any of the family, excepting myself. His manners are grave, and hued over with a tender sadness. In his moral character he approaches every way nearer to perfection than any man ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... was the reflective rejoinder. "We used to be fairly chummy in the old Ann Arbor days, Evan, and yet I never, until a few days ago, knew or guessed that Senator Blount ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... His Word," said John Campbell, reverently. "It is the best of teachers. The generations to whom Scotland owes everything, had no other book. It made her men calm, reflective, courageous unto death. It made her women gentle, faithful, pure, ideal. I remember my mother, Allan; she came from the same school. Her soul lived so much in the Book, that I am sure if an angel had ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... civilised countries. Lost, not in the day-dreams of romance, but in the depths and amongst the mazes of science, it was but seldom that these men of the study and the library found leisure and nerve to escape from seclusion, and to take their share of the duties of active life in which their less reflective brethren were feverishly engaged. And when they attempted the competition, their failure was signal. They presented an extraordinary exhibition of awkward genius and blundering sagacity, and exposed themselves at once to the painful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... great opportunity of altering my answer, if there was cause. So took a hackney and home, and after supper made my wife to read them all over, wherein she is mighty useful to me; and I find them all evasions, and in many things false, and in few, to the full purpose. Little said reflective on me, though W. Pen and J. Minnes do mean me in one or two places, and J. Minnes a little more plainly would lead the Duke of York to question the exactness of my keeping my records; but all to no purpose. My mind is mightily pleased by this, if I can but get time to have a copy taken of ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... only wonder, after all that has occurred, how it has been possible for me to succeed. Certainly, this success has not been due to any vigorous exercise of virtue on my part, but solely to the existence of that cool, reflective reason which lay perdue beneath all the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... reality of the changes should not be obscured by the lack of objects on exhibit. Even so, some of the related equipment survived. For example, the centrifuge used in the butterfat test, discovered in 1890 by Stephen M. Babcock, survived in several forms. Manure spreaders and tree sprayers, reflective of advances in biochemistry, also survived. But these only suggest the more important biological control activities for which these machines and tools served merely as agents ...
— Agricultural Implements and Machines in the Collection of the National Museum of History and Technology • John T. Schlebecker
... Nor did he really belong to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased with its own excitement and entanglement. He was the child of a world which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was tired like Obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes. Sometimes he felt, as in The New Age, the pleasure of the coming life of the world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet. But chiefly he saw the disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to realise ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... two of them strangers to Mary, but the third she recognized as one of the teachers in her old "school"—a thoughtful looking man well past middle age, with a long grey moustache and reflective eyes. "Mr. Edsol, isn't ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... reflective turn of mind, the prudent management of the thoughts is one of the principal means towards the proper government of the temper. As some insects assume the colour of the plant they feed on, so do the thoughts ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... was original and reflective, he had no particular talent. His excellence lay in criticism and observation, often profound, on what came to him every day, and he was valueless in the literary market. A talent of some kind is necessary to genius if it is to be heard. ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... Tennyson were far more sensitive than he. Suffering began to interest him when the wail passed into the fierceness of vindictive passion, as in The Confessional, or into the outward calm of a self-subjugated spirit, as in Any Wife to any Husband, or A Woman's Last Word; or into reflective and speculative, if bitter, retrospect, as in The Worst of It or James Lee's Wife. And happiness, equally,—even the lover's happiness,—needed, to satisfy Browning, to have some leaven of challenging disquiet; the lover must have something to fear, or something to forgive, ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... could evolve. And the author of this tape extrapolated from there. A normal telepathic reception will be accompanied, by a slight feedback. A completely black body, however, will neither radiate nor feed back. It merely absorbs energy and, unless it's super-imposed on a reflective background, it leaves no trace. Since nothing in nature other than a telepathic mind can reflect telepathy, no background would survive for long." He ...
— Indirection • Everett B. Cole
... recollection of her children. They must not bear the weight of this great sorrow in the days of their tender youth, lest the hopefulness and energy they would certainly need in after life should be discouraged and disheartened out of them. Edward is naturally too reflective; he dwells too much on his loss, and evidently begins to ponder already how so many children are to be taken care of without a father. Sensitive Mary feels too deeply the shadow of the cloud which has come over her home; her face reflects back her ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... thing! She ain't six years old, an' she's never been anywhere alone. Do you s'pose I'm goin' to send her a mile to that store?" Mrs. Lennox's tone was full of vehement indignation, but her eyes still met Aunt Maria's with that doubtful and reflective expression. ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... harmony might come home to its inventor as a rich surprise. The reflective historian will find it less[12] surprising, for he will suspect that the applications were in view from the start. What was Leibniz thinking of when the new principle flashed upon him? What was he ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... her friends had all left her. I lay neglected on a sofa, and the pretty girl's brow became thoughtful. Of a sudden she was aroused from a brown study—reflective mood, perhaps, would be a more select phrase—by the unexpected appearance of young Thurston. There was a sort of "Ah! have I caught you alone!" expression about this adventurer's eye, even while he was making his bow, that struck me. I looked for great events, nor was ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... is possible, others maintain that, on many fields, it undoubtedly is the case. It is claimed that, generally speaking, woman is endowed with qualities that man is deficient in, and vice versa: the male method of reasoning is reflective and vigorous, woman's, on the contrary, distinguishes itself by swiftness of perception and quickness of execution. Certain it is that woman finds her way more quickly in complicated situations, and has more tact than man. Ellis, who gathered vast materials upon this ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... the masters here," was the reply. "One cannot afford to pack useless truck over the trail. In a place such as this the mind is naturally reflective, and one craves for things that are ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... corner, stood for a moment in talk, and then went away together. Sam found himself beginning to wonder about the meetings. In the year since he had walked out of the Chicago office his mind had grown more and more reflective. Little things—a smile on the lips of an ill-clad old man mumbling and hurrying past him on the street, or the flutter of a child's hand from the doorway of a farmhouse—had furnished him food for hours of thought. Now he watched with interest ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... walkers from the heat of the summer's sun. It was Aminta's favorite retreat, and thither she came in the morning to paint her sisters, the white Bengal roses, the red cactus and the graceful clematides, which surrounded her charming retreat. There in the evening, pensive and reflective, the young girl suffered her glance to stray over the vast horizon of the sea gilded by the sun's expiring rays. On the day we speak of, Maulear found her reading, or rather seeming to read, for her book rested on her knee, her ivory brow supported by her hand. Her eyes, lifted up to heaven, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... Most of the time we are very much absorbed in busy, outward-looking activity, overwhelmed with engagements and hurry and worry; and then in the midst of this active life there stands the chapel with its summons to us to pause and give the reflective life its chance. That is one of the chief offices of religion in this preposterously busy age. Religion gives one at least a chance to stop and let God speak to him. It sends the multitudes away and takes one up into the solitude of the soul's ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... and his daughter smiled contentedly as she heard him stamping about in the larder. He made but a poor meal, and then, refusing point-blank to assist Annie in moving the piano, went and smoked a very reflective pipe in the garden. ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... John of Gaunt were repeated by Shakespeare with little modulation at that time of his life when his reflective power was at its ripest. The Queen of Britain, Cymbeline's wife, is the personage in whose mouth Shakespeare sets, not perhaps quite appropriately, the latest message in regard to patriotism that he is known to have delivered. ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the smallness of human life, of human aims and efforts, of human emotions, was occupying the busy brain behind his reflective eyes. The scene before him, upon which he had so often looked, never failed to remind him of the greatness of that which lay beyond the ken of man. Somehow it exalted his thoughts to planes to which no association ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Reflective Faculties. (34) Comparison. (35) Causality. The judgment of the phrenologist is determined by the size of the brain in general, and by the size of the organs that have been formulated, and these are estimated ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... after Billy posts his warnin's, an' he's still musin' over 'em mighty reflective, when along projects a Mexican with a pair of burros he's packin' freight on. The Mexican's goin' by the notices witbout payin' the least heed tharto. But this don't do Billy, an' he stands ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... great American poet. His poetry is chiefly reflective and descriptive, and it is remarkable for its elevation, simplicity, and moral earnestness. He lacks dramatic power and skill in narration. Calmness and restraint, the lack of emotional intensity, are also evident in his greatest work. His depths of space are vast, but windless. In The ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Ridiculous, Lee decided, trying to make up his mind whether he might continue playing or return, beaten by November, to the clubhouse. In the end, with numb fingers, he picked up his ball, and walked slowly back over the empty course. The wind, now, was behind him, and increasingly comfortable he grew reflective: ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... that originally had a surplus of energy to spend, over and above practically useful efforts." Does it not follow that when we make the poet spend all his energy in the practically useful effort of running to fires, we prevent him from enjoying the very advantage which made man a reflective being, to say ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... son. Like all children, he was imitative, so had commenced very early to make a collection of insects, and this was sufficient to give him a precocious taste for natural history; but in his character he was earnest and reflective, and very eager for knowledge. Sumichrast took pleasure in the boy's intelligence, and often amused himself by arguing with him. From the flashes of childish humor which he would display on such occasions, my friend sometimes gave him the ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... been said that the work is singularly deficient in sustained choruses. That is true, if we are comparing it with the choruses of Handel's oratorios. But Haydn's style is entirely different from that of Handel. His choruses are designed on a much less imposing scale. They are more reflective or descriptive, much less dramatic. It was not in his way "to strike like a thunderbolt," as Mozart said of Handel. The descriptive effects which he desired to introduce into his orchestration made it necessary that he should throw ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... judgment thwarted, our humanity outraged. But "The Spagnoletto" is, nevertheless, a remarkable production, and pitched in another key from anything the writer has yet given us. Heretofore we have only had quiet, reflective, passive emotion: now we have a storm and sweep of passion for which we were quite unprepared. Ribera's character is charged like a thunder-cloud with dramatic elements. Maria Rosa is the child of her ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... the desk again. The wall-screen went blank, and the light in the little room brightened slowly. Pilch's face was reflective. ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... to have passed through those phases of belief and unbelief —those wild enthusiasms, to be rejected later in life—which generally fall to the lot of young men of talent. Perhaps his reasoning and reflective powers were developed unusually early, so that he sowed his mental wild oats in his boyhood. At any rate, in his garret in 1819 he was the same Balzac that we know in later life. Large-minded and far-seeing—except about his business concerns—he ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... such confidence be cultivated? Mainly by cultivating the habit of turning first to self when reflective thought is required. It is presupposed that we must consult the library and the world about us for raw facts of various kinds, for historical events, scientific data, views of men, descriptions, etc.; but when our own thought is wanted on a topic with which we are ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... at the Melbourne, pompously furnished, and bare of all things that make a room reflective of personality, Mrs. Swink and her daughter were awaiting me on my arrival, and the moment I met the former all the perversity of which I am possessed rose up within me, and for the latter I was conscious of sympathy, based ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... life which bears the name of utilitarianism—the theory which regards pleasure or profit as the aim of man. In its most independent form Hedonism can hardly be said to exist now as a reasoned theory. Carried out to its extreme consequences it reduces man to a mere animal. Hence a type of reflective egoism has taken the place of animal gratification, and the idea of ulterior benefit has succeeded to that of ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... nephews. He presented them separately to the departments and the army as in the direct line of inheritance. This scene must have produced a profound impression upon the younger child, Louis Napoleon, who was so thoughtful, reflective, ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... complexity of life increases, its strains and repressions are multiplied, with the result that any giving way to an impulse contains a slight element of the mischievous or ridiculous; whence, for this reason too, the pleasant is also the comical. In fact, most of the pleasures of highly complex and reflective ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... the Brain," hoping that I could train one side of my head to do these outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and real duties. For Richard Greenough once told me, that, in studying for the statue of Franklin, he found that the left side of the great man's face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling. If you will go and look at the bronze statue, you will find he has repeated this observation there for posterity. The eastern profile is the portrait of the statesman Franklin, the western of Poor Richard. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Rod was actually a giant balloon eight thousand feet in diameter, one-half "silvered" with a greenish reflective surface inside that reflected only that light that could be utilized by the ruby rods at its long focal center; and that absorbed the remainder of the incident solar radiation, dumping it through to its black outside surface, and on into the vastness of space. This half of the big ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sneeringly asks whether we expect to elevate and improve a nation's politics by absorbing such morbid collections and qualities therein. The point is a formidable one, and there will doubtless always be numbers of solid and reflective citizens who will never get over it. Our answer is general, and is involved in the scope and letter of this essay. We believe the ulterior object of political and all other government, (having, of course, provided for the ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and companion the old woman had, was her gray cat. Now, the cat was a middle-aged cat: she had arrived at a time of life when people grow reflective; and she sat by the hearth and reflected very often. What did she reflect about? That is rather a long story. You must know, then, that a few leagues from the old woman's hut, on the other side ...
— Tales From Catland, for Little Kittens • Tabitha Grimalkin
... call it that, either," says Hubbs, runnin' his long fingers reflective through his heavy mop of wavy hair. "I was station agent and dispatcher out at Kayuse Creek the only time we met up—and of all the forsaken, dreary, one-mule towns along the line that was the worst. I'd been there a year and a half, with no signs of ever gettin' out, and ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... and the sides, and the moustache, hanging straight down with an effect recalling the mouth of a seal, was plenteous and defiant—a moustache of character, contradicting the full placidity of the badly shaved chin. Darius Clayhanger had a habit, when reflective or fierce, of biting with his upper teeth as far down as he could on the lower lip; this trick added emphasis to the moustache. He stood, his feet in their clumsy boots planted firmly about sixteen inches apart, his elbows sticking out, and his head bent ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... audiences. He spoke without notes and apparently without effort. There was no rhetoric, no declamation, no display. As one listened, one seemed to hear the genuine thoughts of a singularly clever and reflective man, who had strong prejudices of his own in favour of religion, authority, and property, but was quite unswayed by the prejudices of other people. The general tone of his thought was sombre. Lord Lytton described, with curious exactness, the "massive temple," the "large slouching shoulder," ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... though violent and exceptional in its character. However sudden the occasion from which it arises, it results from antecedent conditions, the general tendency of which should be manifest long before to the statesmen of a nation, and to at least the reflective portion of the people. In such anticipation, such forethought, as in the affairs of common life, lies the best hope of the best solution,—peace by ordinary diplomatic action; peace by timely agreement, while men's heads ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... face was full of trouble. There was a little wrinkle between her reflective brown eyes, and she drew in her under lip after a way ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... and the result has been a biography combining the attractiveness of romance with the reliableness of history, and which, taking a place midway between the 'frescoed galleries' of Thierry, and the 'philosophic watch-tower of Guizot,' has all the pictorial brilliancy of the one, with much of the reflective speculation of ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... out very well, because they relieved each other; but the children, having no relief at all, exhibited decided symptoms of weariness and care. The unthinking part of the parishioners laughed at all this, but the more reflective portion of the inhabitants abstained from expressing any opinion on the subject until that of the curate ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... had presented to his regard a series of scenes well calculated to arouse a thoughtful mind to consideration of the deepest problems, both of politics and religion. What must have been the "long, long thoughts" of a youth, naturally reflective and acutely observant, as he witnessed the break-up of the old order in '48 and the years that followed. In the most impressionable age of life he was driven to contemplate a Europe in solution; the crash ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... farther was, as Cromwell hints, the association of the other Continental Protestant powers with these two Scandinavian kingdoms in a league against Austria and Spain. How exactly this idea accorded with reflective Protestant sentiment everywhere appears from a few sentences in one of Baillie's letters, commenting on the very occurrences that occasioned Cromwell's present despatch. "I am glad," writes Baillie, "that by a Peace, however extorted, the Swedes are free to take course with other enemies. I ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... I don't understand why you should have "nothing to write about" because you have been in bed. Surely you must have accumulated all sorts of reflective ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... it?" said Mrs. Clowes, framing the young face between her hands as Isabel rose up kneeling before her. In the quivering apple-tree shadow Isabel's eyes were very dark, and penetrating and reflective too, as if she had just undergone one of those transitions from childhood to womanhood which are the mark and the charm of her variable age. Laura was puzzled by her judgment of Lawrence Hyde, so keen, yet so wide of the truth as Laura saw it: "excitable" was the last thing that Laura ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... All you workpeople are doing it. Is it not time to think about these things and stop the indiscriminate production of human beings, whose lives you cannot properly maintain? Ought you not to act more like reflective creatures and less like brutes? As if breeding were the whole object of life! How much better for you, my friend, if you had never married at all, than to have had the worry of a wife and children ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... have studied the dynamics of communication and the process by which it occurs are convinced that the monological principle is contradictory to the nature of communication, and as a method is the least effective. Reflective observation of our own learning indicates that communication is most effective when we become a part of the process and meet the message with our own content. Furthermore, the monological principle is not one that was used by our Lord. ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe
... very friendly toward her. He could not help pitying her. Ukridge, he thought, was a very good person to know casually, but a little of him, as his former headmaster had once said in a moody, reflective voice, went a very long way. To be bound to him for life was not the ideal state for a girl. If he had been a girl, he felt, he would as soon ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... put over my painting-room door, "Love, solitude, and painting."' On the last day of the year, according to his wont, Haydon sums up his feelings and impressions of the past twelve months. 'I don't know how it is, but I get less reflective as I get older. I seem to take things as they come without thought. Perhaps being married to my dearest Mary, and having no longer anything to hope in love, I get more content with my lot, which, God knows, is rapturous beyond imagination. Here ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... as from caves, full of a fiery impatient light. His thin lips were never quite without a smile; but it was not a smile in which any pleasure was. He walked slowly, not hurrying, like most of the passengers. He had a reflective look, as if pondering many things. He came up to me suddenly, without introduction or preliminary, and took me by the arm. 'What object had you in talking of these antiquated institutions?' he said. And I saw in his mind the gleam of the thought, which seemed to be ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... of life; the instinct of workmanship acts impulsively and may be satisfied, provisionally, with a proximate purpose. It is only as the apprehended ulterior futility of a given line of action enters the reflective complex of consciousness as an element essentially alien to the normally purposeful trend of the life process that its disquieting and deterrent effect on the consciousness ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... in ages so remote that no record of them survives save our heritage of labor well achieved, some pastoral savage, more reflective and less practical than his brethren, took to star-gazing and noting in his memory certain strange coincidences. Doubtless he was chidden by his tribal leaders who were hard-headed men of affairs, skilled ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... silence, that reflective silence which always overtook him when he found himself one corner of this strange triangle. He could talk to Myra alone. He was never at a loss for words with his wife. Together, they ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a child, but seemed to have matured suddenly into a woman of calm and reflective character, as well as of ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... a touching spectacle, as, indeed, it always is to the reflective mind, to see the new Judge sitting among the wrecks, like "Marius among the Ruins." Fine subject for Sir FREDERICK, P.R.A., ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 8, 1890 • Various
... degree confidence and respect; and the heroism of the chivalrous ages has entered her soul without taking from it any thing of her sex's softness. The military talents of the duke are universally respected, and his lively and reflective conversation continually brings to our recollection that he was formed by the great Frederic. It is by his own and his mother's reputation that the most distinguished men of learning have been attracted to Weimar, and by them Germany, for the first time, has possest a literary ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... phenomena of ascetic philosophy and practice. Each school or tendency developed its own mores to treat the problems of life in its own way. An ascetic policy never is a primary product of the "ways" in which unreflecting men meet the facts of life. It is reflective and derived. It is a secondary stage of faith built on experience and reflection. It is, therefore, dogmatic. It must be sustained by faith in the fundamental pessimistic conviction. It never can be verified by experience. ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... almost classic in outline; features highly intellectual; a piercing, black eye, capable of expressing the fiercest and the tenderest passion and emotion, and a commanding figure and impressive stage address. In his transition from the quiet and reflective passages of a part to fierce and violent outbreaks of passion, his sudden and impetuous manner had in it something of that electrical force and power which made the elder Booth so celebrated, and called up afresh to the memory of men of the preceding generation the presence, voice, and manner ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... their functions may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index of ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... a-thinking on the same thing, sir, when you began a- speaking," observed Jupp thoughtfully, scratching his head in his reflective way as he stood before the vicar cap in hand at the door of the study, where the conference was being held. "I fancied you didn't like me taking him down to the river, or I'd have taught him to swim long ago, ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... for awhile master of his powers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between the accumulating and producing faculties; he writes readily even for the public, without labor, without affectations. Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his control; composition, which represents the practical side of the intellectual life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has developed what he himself calls "a wavering manner, born of doubt ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this mighty square, with its enchanting splendor, its haunting romance, its brilliant if pathetic history. Light, everywhere light; scintillating, dancing, swinging light! Spars and lances of light upon the shivering waters, red and yellow and white! Light, the reflective radiance of jewels and happy eyes! Light, breaking against the pink and white marbles, the columns of porphyry, malachite, basalt, and golden mosaics! Let the would-be traveler dream of it never so well; he will ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... instinct for the cultivation of patience and self-denial —patience in a fruitless activity, and self-denial in the eternal act of mastication without swallowing. It is no more related to these virtues than it is to the habit of the reflective cow in chewing her cud. The cow would never chew gum. The explanation is a more philosophical one, and relates to a great modern social movement. It is to strengthen and develop and make more masculine the lower jaw. The critic who says that this ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... individuality pervades and colors the whole collection. The defect of the serious stories is, that character is introduced, not as thinking, but as the illustration of thought. The persons are ghostly, with a sad lack of flesh and blood. They are phantasmal symbols of a reflective and imaginative analysis of human passions and aspirations. The dialogue, especially, is bookish, as though the personages knew their speech was to be printed, and were careful of the collocation and rhythm of their words. The author throughout is evidently more interested ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... (for though he was not a very young man in 1818, the date of the earliest of the Wordsworth papers, he was a young writer), that of practised and unrestrained vigour (for 1832 represents about his literary zenith), and that of reflective decadence, for by 1842 he had ceased to write habitually, and was already bowed down by mental ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... the blood he had sprung from. His first wedlock was impolitic, and this unpopular; and both were hasty and self-willed, and destructive of all reputation for that dignified prudence, which his elevation to the regency of the most reflective and enlightened nation in Europe demanded for its example and its welfare. This injudicious conduct announced too much imperfection of intellect, not to give every advantage to his political rival the bishop of Winchester, his uncle, who was now struggling for the command ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... may have been clouded towards the last by the mists of disappointment, but to us admiring moderns he is all sunshine. Not the fiery sunshine of summer, but the genial, dignified light of an autumn afternoon when nature seems in most reflective mood. For there was nothing impetuous or ardent in the composition of this good-humoured philosopher; and while he railed so well at the petty sins and vanities of the England in which he dwelt, the satire had naught of venom, malice, ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... points and crater pits. The remaining 4,400,000 square miles are mainly occupied by mountains of the most extraordinary character. Owing partly to roughness of the surface and partly to more brilliant reflective power, the mountainous regions of the moon appear bright in comparison with the ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... that a perfect delusion is to be aimed at,—an opinion which needs no fresh confutation; and the exact opposite to it, brought forward by Dr. Johnson, who supposes the auditors throughout in the full reflective knowledge of the contrary. In evincing the impossibility of delusion, he makes no sufficient allowance for an intermediate state, which I have before distinguished by the term, illusion, and have attempted to illustrate its quality ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... expression; paint the beauty which is indistinguishable from nature but not identical with Nature. They make us see that not she, red in tooth and claw, but that intangible and supernal something-more, is what gives her the cleansing bath of loveliness. No reflective or imaginative person needs to be greatly troubled, therefore, by any purely mechanical or materialistic conception of the universe. They who would commend that view of the cosmos have not only to reckon with philosophical and religious idealism, but also with all the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... Ned, rubbing his shoulder in a reflective sort of way. "I always thought it was something like that. But, at the time I put it down to an explosion, and let it ...
— Tom Swift and his Aerial Warship - or, The Naval Terror of the Seas • Victor Appleton
... in a reflective mood, and as he pointed these things out to me, made some sage and pertinent remarks about the peculiar features of some industries which required large expenditures to operate, all of which were useless in a comparatively ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... communicate about those regions. Should anyone ask, "How can I accept on trust what the occultist tells me, being myself as yet unable to see it?"—such an objection would be groundless, for it is perfectly possible to arrive through mere reflective thinking at the sure conviction that the ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... rule—nay, this in itself is almost sufficient for a good style—is this, that the author should have something to say. Ah! this implies a great deal. The neglect of this rule is a fundamental characteristic of the philosophical, and generally speaking of all the reflective authors in Germany, especially since the time of Fichte. It is obvious that all these writers wish to appear to have something to say, while they have nothing to say. This mannerism was introduced by the pseudo-philosophers of the Universities and may be discerned everywhere, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of being an alien in Dublin had persisted all the time that he had lived there. The Dublin people were gregarious and garrulous, and he was solitary and reflective. Marsh and Galway had taken him to houses where people met and talked without stopping, and much conversation with miscellaneous, casually-encountered people bored Henry. He had no gift for ready talk and he disliked crowds and he was unable to carry on a conversation with ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... proceeds, in both cases, from a reflective deliberative, eminently deliberative, eminently conscious, designing mind; and that the coincidence which is manifest not in the design only, and in the structure, but in the detail to the minutest points ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... Red Riding-Hood on the way or come on Snow White and her seven dwarfs, that is only because you must have taken the wrong turning after you came through the kissing-gate at the bottom of Lovers' Lane. I am a native of Cotterham, and in my more reflective moments I wonder why such an idyllic place should have produced anything so unromantic as myself, His Majesty's Deputy Assistant Acting Inspector for All Sorts of Unexpected Explosives. Cotterham still has a large place in my affections, and it gave me a considerable shock ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 17, 1917 • Various
... this rough, sullen boy—as she had known him—pick up this delicate and swift perception, this reflective judgment, and this odd felicity of expression? It was not possible that it was in him while he was the companion of her husband's servants or the recognized "chum" of the scamp Hooker. No. But if HE could have changed like this, why not Susy? Mrs. Peyton, in the conservatism of her sex, ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... think David Cairns simulated that fine touch, about discovering through his friend, what damage New York was doing him?" Kate Wilkes' manner was lightly reflective. ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... shrugging good-natured shoulders, spoke of the work that lay before him on the burning plains until the terrible summer should drag itself to a close. We had vanquished the details and were smoking in comparative silence one night on the veranda, when he said in his slow reflective way; ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... at Peter while a queer, reflective light gathered in her eyes. At last she said soberly: "Well, I don't know, Peter, that you should make them so very personal ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... to do his bidding. She saw that she had gone far enough. His mood had changed from a reflective to an angry one, and Victor Lamont was a man to fear when ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... English writers to base their political philosophy exclusively upon Anglo-Saxon experience and examples: yet it is strange to find so striking a lesson so lightly touched by the wisest, widest, most reflective, and best-informed, among the political teachers ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... said Poppy, in a reflective tone; "they are all in the dining-room as snug as possible over their high tea. They have shrimps for tea, and a wonderful new kind of paste that Aunt Flint brought in to-day. It's called Gentlemen's Relish, and eats well on hot toast, and I made a lot. Oh, my! won't the ladies go in for ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... a calm, slate-coloured sea—sea that more than any other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes wonderful the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me the mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters of the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical curiosity concerning each other, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... on the face she turned up to him, made an impression on his mind that stayed with him through life. It seemed to him that he had arrived at a kind of culmination, a starting point, and that all the vague shadowy uncertainties that had, in reflective moments, flitted through his mind, were to be brushed away by some act, some word, from the lips of this woman. With a rush he realised how consistently he had been thinking of her and how enormously he had been counting on her falling in with his plans, and ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... quite as well as the sun does. On the occasion here referred to the little jackass stood apart with head hanging down toward the ground, silent and unmoving, and apparently revolving in his own mind something concerning the geology of the Dog Star. He could be a most reflective little beast upon occasion. The boys sat together on a knoll, their heads close together, engaged in earnest and animated and sometimes loud-voiced conversation. There was occasion for their lively interest. They were discussing the Fourth of July. They were ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... grow forth,' show, in the first place, that the Self is the agent in the independent activity which is preceded by the Self's reflection; and, in the second place, that it is the material cause also, since the words 'May I be many' intimate that the reflective desire of multiplying itself has the inward Self for ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... to her, much as she would catch him sleeping when she read to him—but she awoke with a start and a blush at her forgetfulness, which he never did. He was not a man to brood over these things; and, after some reflective pipes and ineffectual rubbings of his head, he "gave it up". How was it possible, indeed, for him to solve the mental enigma when the woman herself was to him a physical riddle? It was extraordinary that the child he ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... to draw the ultimate conclusion from all this that it would be better for Americans were their periodical exodus to Europe to cease. Far from it. That cultivated Americans, and Americans particularly of a more reflective than active mind, should find the relative ease, culture and simplicity of European life more congenial to them than the restless, high-pressure life of America, is quite natural. And if there are no interests or ties to make their presence in their own country imperatively necessary, it is certainly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... Negro governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia, led me to furnish something to meet a felt need. If the Negro slave desired his native land before the Rebellion, will not the free, intelligent, and reflective American Negro turn to Africa with its problems of geography and missions, now that he can contribute something towards the improvement of the condition of humanity? Editors and writers everywhere throughout the world should spell the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... reckoning of actions as either natural or spiritual was too simple and incomplete. Conduct has three stages, not two. Let us get them clearly in mind. At the beginning of life we are at the beck and call of every impulse, not having yet attained reflective command of ourselves. This first stage we may rightly call that of nature or of unconsciousness, and manifestly most of us continue in it to some extent and as regards certain tracts of action throughout life. Then reflection is aroused; we become aware of what we are doing. The many ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... was of a Norse temperament: reflective, thorough, Puritanically correct, and inclined to melancholy; my mother of nondescript exotic blood, beautiful, sensual, naive, at once slovenly and passionate, and of an impulsive and unprincipled mind. Quite without ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... reasoning and reflective process. It is the purely "intellectual" type of mental operation. It deals wholly in abstractions. Abstractions are constructed out ...
— Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World • Warren Hilton
... with carmine to their extremities. Let us not forget Frisky, who, couched in the lap of her mistress, opened her great eyes with all her might, and seemed to observe the different operations of Adrienne's toilette with grave and reflective attention. A silver bell being sounded from without, Florine, at a sign from her mistress, went out and presently returned, bearing a letter upon a small silver-gilt salve. Adrienne, while her women continued fitting on her shoes, dressing her hair, and arranging her in her habiliments, took ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the trees have grown up on Cooper's Hill, which lies between. To the north the church spire on the hill at Harrow stands beautifully up from the horizon; the Wembley Tower, which used to scar the distance, has gone. Eastward lie two familiar towers; and you are reminded of Mr. Max Beerbohm's reflective observation that "the great danger of travelling on the South Eastern Railway is that you might put your head out of the window and catch sight of the Crystal Palace." So much the greater by contrast is the loss of Windsor Castle to the north-west. I have never yet, by ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... state, the loveliest of all pure colors; and secondly, that in the rose there is no shadow, except what is composed of color. All its shadows are fuller in color than its lights, owing to the translucency and reflective power of ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... held her hand and laughed at her frank, often witty, remarks. But then a curious, eager look came into his face, and he became quiet and reflective. He seemed unable to take his eyes from her. And when the girl gently drew her hand from his ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... his way to the door. Spencer was standing in a reflective attitude, with his hands behind his back, gently balancing himself ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the gnosis, or, in its latest christening, 'cosmic consciousness.' All are but expressions of a belief that knowledge arises, words are uttered or actions performed not through conscious ideation or reflective purpose, but through the promptings of a power above or beyond the ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... get in, Teddy," said the little woman, anxiously, after a reflective pause. "They'd ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... simple fact, now suddenly made known to them, that it was possible for a person unusually gifted to deny Christianity; such a denial and haughty abjuration could not but carry itself more profoundly into the reflective mind, even of servants, when the arrow came winged and made buoyant by the gay feathering of so many splendid accomplishments. This general fact was appreciable by those who would forget, and never could have understood, the particular arguments of the infidel. Yet, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... judgments, the object and result of which must be to erase his hated name from the earth. As Faith grew up, his anxieties on her account diminished, but that only left him the wider scope to dwell upon wild imaginations and make himself more the subject of his thoughts. Of a grave and reflective cast of mind, he had even from his early years respected the duties of religion, and now he turned to it for consolation. But the very sources whence he should have derived comfort and peace were fountains ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... kill you," argued Kelley, with a reflective hesitation which wrought his captive to a ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... indifferent before the spectacle of life, which now seems so brutal, so cynical, so heartless; when we have closed up those lower, unreliable instruments of thought which we call feelings, and which have been rendered not only superfluous but harmful by the final growth of our reflective organs. ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... when Guapo climbed up to the rock. Against the sky his tall, lank form could be traced in all its outlines. For some moments he sat in a serious and reflective mood—evidently busy with thoughts about the "poison-trees." His appetite, however, soon got the better of him; and he set to work to prepare his coca supper. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... selfishness of certain grades of social life; the corruption of business methods; the 'false, fairy gold,' of fashionable charities, and 'advanced' thought. Margaret Wentworth is a typical New England girl, reflective, absorbed, full of passionate and repressed intensity under a quiet and apparently cold exterior. The events that group themselves about her life are the natural result of such a character brought into contact with real life. The book cannot ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... that extremes of conduct lead to as little in the daily life as in politics; that everything must be reflected upon and repeatedly tested before its realization is attempted; that only then can progress, even if slow, be made. If he had said, the world belongs to the cautious or reflective person, we should not have found his meaning to ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... as bull-terriers, with their hair combed straight up from their foreheads, which were not commonly very high or broad. The special form of physical life I have been describing gives you a right to expect more delicate perceptions and a more reflective, nature than you commonly find in shaggy-throated men, clad in heavy suits ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... drawing-room mirror. This fancy was strengthened in the course of conversation, by his expatiating on the greatness of Racine. I think he had a volume of the French poet in his hand. His skull was sharply cut and fine; with plenty, according to the phrenologists, both of the reflective and amative organs: and his poetry will bear them out. For a lettered solitude, and a bridal properly got up, both according to law and luxury, commend us to the lovely Gertrude of Wyoming. His face and person were rather on a small scale; his features regular; ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... handed him the great dictionary, and he fingered the dog-eared pages with a critical and reflective air. ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... of his estimate of her character, and with this perception came a broader and deeper realization of her greatness as an actress. Her real self now became more complex than his wildest imagined ideal of her. That this sweet and reflective girl should be the actress was as difficult to understand as that The Baroness should be at heart a good woman. For five minutes he hardly heard what she said, so busy was his mind readjusting itself to this abrupt displacement of values. With ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... leaders were his relations. He possessed a vigorous intellect, great energy of thought and action, overbearing-purpose, and unflinching courage. His information was not extensive, nor his judgment profound, and yet he was a well-educated, well-read, and very thoughtful, reflective man. He was adapted to be the sole leader of an insurrection where the object might be clear, the undertaking desperate, and the work short. His nature was not adapted either to lay an extensive plan, or co-operate with other men of mental power in the execution of such. He was crotchetty ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... connects man with the surrounding universe is the power of reflective contemplation. Whereas desire seizes at once its object, reflection removes it to a distance and renders it inalienably her own by saving it from the greed of passion. The necessity of sense which he obeyed during the period of mere sensations, lessens during ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... by the Nazarites. Fuhrich, one of the fraternity, describes his first impressions: on entering the studio he beheld a tall, spare figure, noble in head, the hair flowing over smooth temples to the shoulders, the forehead reflective, the calm eye "soul-full," the whole aspect that of "inner living." It is added, "at once I felt a soul fulfilment." Yet another artist-disciple, Edwin Speckter,[16] also leaves a graphic record penned in 1831 as follows: "A melancholy and heart-moving impression has Overbeck made upon me: ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... has led me to this place," said Shiraz in his low, reflective tones. "I seek for a little prayer-mat and a few bowls of brass for my food; likewise, a bed for myself, and a bed of lesser value for my companion. Hast ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... add to their account of marriage as the end of a woman's existence—which may be right or it may not—a definition of marriage as an association with a reasonable and reflective being, they would speedily effect a revolution in the present miserable system. To the business of finding a husband a young lady would then add the not less important business of making herself a rational person, instead of a more or less tastefully ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Branscome? Well, I have no obedient Ariel to play will-o'-the-wisp with such gentry; yet I would have led them a very pretty dance. But the ladies—the ladies, to be sure! We cannot expose them to dangers, nor even to alarms. We must use more summary methods." He stood for a moment or two reflective, tapping his snuff-box. "Mr. Goodfellow is a ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... on the desk again. The wall-screen went blank, and the light in the little room brightened slowly. Pilch's face was reflective. ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... jutting over a group of elms, or the glint of light on a stream, or pale haystacks dotted round the disorderly yard of a grange—the tillage and the quiet dwellings of close on a thousand years. On all this Lawrence Hyde looked with the reflective smile of an alien. It touched him, but to revolt. More than a child of the soil he felt the charm of its tranquillity, but he felt it also as an oppression, a limitation: an ordered littleness from which world-interests were excluded. He was a lover of art and a cosmopolitan, and though ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... a reflective look on his face. He tilted his chair back and ran his hand through ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... little hypocrisies with a view to their effect on the public. He was anxious to be supposed to handle a large correspondence, and took pains to sort his mail in public, fingering a number of letters in his leather case with a reflective air, as if he were considering what replies they demanded, although their worn envelopes revealed them to the most casual observation as at least a ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... S. I can recall no lunar formation which presents an appearance at all like this: one is impressed with the idea that it has resulted from the collapse of the upper portion of the wall, and the flow of some viscous material over the wreck and down the inner slope. The difference between the reflective power of this matter, whatever may be its nature, and the broad bright declivities of the inner slopes, are beautifully displayed at sunset. The cross-valleys are more easily traced under low morning illumination; but to appreciate the actual structure of the wall, it should be observed ...
— The Moon - A Full Description and Map of its Principal Physical Features • Thomas Gwyn Elger
... authorities to the truth of Kate's narrative as may save all readers from my fair Westmoreland friend's disaster,—it remains to give such an answer, as without further research can be given, to a question pretty sure of arising in all reflective readers' thoughts— namely, does there anywhere survive a portrait of Kate? I answer—and it would be both mortifying and perplexing if I could not— Yes. One such portrait there is confessedly; and seven years ago this was to be found at Aix-la-Chapelle, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Purchase. It is the old story of the Sibyl's books. No British Government will ever again offer such terms to the Irish landlords as they refused to accept from Mr. Gladstone. On the other hand, Home Rule is inevitable. Can any reflective person really suppose that the democracy of Great Britain will consent to refuse to share with the Irish people the boon of self-government which will be offered to themselves next year? Any attempt to exclude the Irish from the benefits of such a scheme, after all the promises of the ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... things without practical uses. The merely aesthetic, like rhyme and fireworks, is not the only subject that can engage a playful fancy or be planned with a premonition of beautiful effects. Architecture may be useful, sculpture commemorative, poetry reflective, even, music, by its expression, religious or martial. In a word, practical exigencies, in calling forth the arts, give them moral functions which it is a pleasure to see them fulfil. Works may not be aesthetic in their ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... yet I please myself with the hope, that, in the annals of your dominion, which shall be written after the extinction of recent prejudices, this term of its administration will appear not the least conducive to the interests of the Company, nor the least reflective of the honor of the British name: and allow me to suggest the instructive reflection of what good might have been done, and what evil prevented, had due support been given to that administration which has performed such eminent and ...
— The Works Of The Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... display the usual lyric variety. There are songs of delight in Nature; a multitude of love poems of all moods; many pastorals, in which, generally, the pastoral conventions sit lightly on the genuine poetical feeling; occasional patriotic outbursts; and some reflective and religious poems. In stanza structure the number of forms is unusually great, but in most cases stanzas are internally varied and have a large admixture of short, ringing or musing, lines. The lyrics were published sometimes in collections by single authors, sometimes ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... compositions display more clearly this typical and reflective character than that of the Raising of Lazarus. Later designers dwell on vulgar conditions of wonder or horror, such as they could conceive likely to attend the resuscitation of a corpse; but with ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... the obstacle. As Saint Thomas expressed it, the Prime Motor, Who was nothing else than God, intervened to decide the channel of the current. The only difference between man and a vegetable was the reflex action of the complicated mirror which was called mind, and the mark of mind was reflective absorption or choice. The apparent freedom was an illusion arising from the extreme delicacy of the machine, but the motive power was in fact the same—that ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... experience," said Handy, still in a reflective mood, "will be the appearance of that tough stage carpenter who threatened to compel you to describe the beauties of your palace by Lake Como with sky borders and wings, with a supply of delicacies from his humble ...
— A Pirate of Parts • Richard Neville
... expression"—(im hoechsten Grade gisntreich.) In his manner there was something remarkably calm and cool, almost phlegmatic. He spoke with great slowness and deliberation, but often with much point, and a great deal of reflective wit. He was thus a thorough German in his temperament; so at least as Englishmen and Frenchmen, of a more nimble blood, delight to picture the Rhenish Teut, not always in the most complimentary contrast with themselves. As it is, his merit shines forth only so much the more, that being a German ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... heat of the summer's sun. It was Aminta's favorite retreat, and thither she came in the morning to paint her sisters, the white Bengal roses, the red cactus and the graceful clematides, which surrounded her charming retreat. There in the evening, pensive and reflective, the young girl suffered her glance to stray over the vast horizon of the sea gilded by the sun's expiring rays. On the day we speak of, Maulear found her reading, or rather seeming to read, for her book rested on her knee, her ivory brow supported by her hand. Her eyes, lifted ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... always hold 'themselves' up to the multitude as the instruments producing all those marvellous conversions which they relate. No instance is recorded in their Saints' Calendar of any sinner resolving, in consequence of a reflective and serious perusal of the Scriptures, to lead a new life. No instance of a daily perusal of the Bible producing a daily progress in virtuous habits. No, the 'Gospel' has no such effect.—It is always the 'Gospel Preacher' who works ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... his brother George were just the kind of persons to feel strongly such sensations. Both were reflective, imaginative, educated young men, and, as the light from the wax candle flashed upon their faces, it was evident how deeply they felt the situation in ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... John Campbell, reverently. "It is the best of teachers. The generations to whom Scotland owes everything, had no other book. It made her men calm, reflective, courageous unto death. It made her women gentle, faithful, pure, ideal. I remember my mother, Allan; she came from the same school. Her soul lived so much in the Book, that I am sure if an angel had suddenly ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... short and seemingly became reflective. Instantly, as was their wont whenever the Sheriff spoke, all eyes fixed themselves upon him. Indeed, it needed but a second glance at this cool, deliberate individual to see how great was his influence upon them. He was tall,—fully six feet one,—thin, and angular; ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... manner of Goldsmith, and among the longer pieces were "The Fate of Amy," "Address to Plenty in Winter," "Summer Morning," "Summer Evening," and "Crazy Nell." The minor pieces included the sonnet "To the Primrose," already quoted, "My love, thou art a Nosegay sweet," and "What is Life?", a reflective poem produced under circumstances with which the reader has been made acquainted. The compositions last named are inserted here as examples of Clare's style at this ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... country, scouring woods, climbing mountains, and fording rivers, having with your usual improvidence neglected to furnish yourself with stout boots, then a "horrid chasm," or series of chasms, yawning in the only pair that are of any use to you, presents a spectacle which no reflective mind ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... and not murder 'em, eh?' said Alderman Cute to the heir of Bowley, aged twelve. 'Sweet boy! We shall have this little gentleman in Parliament now,' said the Alderman, holding him by the shoulders, and looking as reflective as he could, 'before we know where we are. We shall hear of his successes at the poll; his speeches in the House; his overtures from Governments; his brilliant achievements of all kinds; ah! we shall make our little orations about him in the Common Council, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... opportunity of altering my answer, if there was cause. After supper made my wife to read them all over, wherein she is mighty useful to me: and I find them all evasions, and in many things false, and in few to the full purpose. Little said reflective on me; though W. Pen and J. Minnes do mean me in one or two places, and J. Minnes a little more plainly would lead the Duke of York to question the exactness of my keeping my records; but all to no purpose. My mind is mightily pleased by this, if I can ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... which Dickens and Thackeray were the greater lights was Bulwer Lytton,—versatile; subjective in genius; sentimental, and yet not sensational; reflective, yet not always sound in morals; learned in general literature, but a charlatan in scientific knowledge; worldly in his spirit, but not a pagan; an inquisitive student, seeking to penetrate the mysteries ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... open admiration. "You are a genius and a duck," she exclaimed; then, after a reflective pause, she murmured, "Very likely he met with an accident just before he ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... no reply. But again a look, half-chagrined, half-reflective, puckered his brow, which was smooth, white, and boyish under his straight, fair hair; whereas the rest of the face was subtly lined, and browned as though by travel and varied living. The nose and mouth, though not handsome, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mrs. Tennison wrote to me from the quiet little pension in the Rue Paul Bert, in Lyons, but her letters were always despairing. Poor Gabrielle was just the same. She still had no other vista in life than her immediate one, and she still in her reflective moments gave vent to that strange ejaculation of those mysterious words: "Red, green and gold! Red, ...
— The Stretton Street Affair • William Le Queux
... was actually a giant balloon eight thousand feet in diameter, one-half "silvered" with a greenish reflective surface inside that reflected only that light that could be utilized by the ruby rods at its long focal center; and that absorbed the remainder of the incident solar radiation, dumping it through to its black outside surface, and on into the vastness of space. This half of the big balloon was the ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... fanciful than real, at once attracted attention. Everything was simple, graceful, and rich, without being tropically luxuriant; the paintings appeared to be often of airy, winged, or white-robed figures, that suggested a reflective and not unimaginative mind in the one who had chosen them. This was the leader whom Mr. Calhoun's fervent political metaphysics and his own ambition for place and power had misled. His conversation was remarkable in manner for perfect unostentatiousness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... grave and reflective more than once over the likeness of this young Adrian to Hamilton, his father, especially in his faculty for talking nonsense. Some people seemed to think his verses good. Perhaps the two things were not incompatible. Hamilton had never written verses, as far as ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... and so represent experience that we for the first time make it ours, they had only a loose and troubled possession. They beheld or took part in great events, but there was no answerable commotion in their reflective being; and they passed throughout turbulent epochs in a sort of ghostly quiet and abstraction. Feeling seems to have been strangely disproportioned to the occasion, and words were laughably trivial and scanty to set forth the feeling even such as it was. Juvenal des ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service. Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy. England and we, our army ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... young lady in her first season, with the will of a Titan, and a mind like a crown-glass mirror, and you have Nathaniel Hawthorne. While he was in a state of observation, the expression of his face reflected everything that was going on about him; in his reflective moods, it was like looking in at the window of a dark room, or perhaps a picture-gallery; and if any accident disturbed him his look was something like ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... used, do not say:[,] 'Is a question asked?' but, 'Does the sentence ask a question?'"—Churchill's Gram., p. 368. "They put their huge inarticulate question, 'What do you mean to do with us?' in a manner audible to every reflective soul in the kingdom."—Carlyle's Past and Present, p. 16. "An adverb may be generally known, by its answering to the question, How? how much? when? or where? as, in the phrase, 'He reads correctly,' the answer to the question, How does he read? is correctly."—L. Murray's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... between the blood of Franconia and the blood of Clotilda; the same outline of person was there,—her delicate countenance, finely moulded bust, smoothly converging shoulders. There was the same Grecian cast of face, the same soft, reflective eyes,—filling a smile with sweetness, and again with deep-felt sorrow. The same sensitive nature, ready to yield forth love and tenderness, or to press onward the more impassioned affections, was visible in ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... you complain so?" asked Inez, watching him with reflective eyes. "The end would be much gentler than that which you righteous folk mete out to many more honest men, yes, and women too. For my part, I think that the Senor Bernaldez gives good counsel. Better that you should die, who are but one, than all of us and others, for ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... positive I had seen the dog on the ground in front of me, I might have thought it was an hallucination; but hallucinations are never so vivid nor so lasting—moreover, other people have had similar experiences with the same dog. And why not? Dogs, on the whole, are every whit as reasoning and reflective as the bulk of human beings! And how much nobler! Compare, for a moment, the dogs you know—no matter whether mastiffs, retrievers, dachshunds, poodles, or even Pekinese, with your acquaintances—with the people you see everywhere ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... heads. Whatever disturbs the healthful isolation of the nervous system is prosperous to metaphysics, because it attracts the mental attention to the organism through which thought is carried on. Numerous are the instances of men who would never have been heard of as thinkers or as reflective poets, if they had had sufficient muscular ballast to pull against their teeming brains. The consequence of the disproportion has been that the superfluous brain has exhaled, as a mere necessity.[A] ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... diplomacy, its intrigues, lawsuits, favours, disgrace, expulsions, its atmosphere of scandal, occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for the eighteenth century than for the conditions of our own time, she assented with a smile, but a moment after went on in a reflective tone: "Charlatanism?—yes, in a certain measure. Still, times are changed. There are forces now which were non-existent in the eighteenth century. I should not be surprised if she were more dangerous than an Englishman would be willing to believe. And what's more, she is looked upon as really ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... as this conclusion is stated by Spinoza, and harshly as it is thrust by him against the moral sense of the reader, he could not himself find a perfect rest therein. Nothing can impart this to the reflective and inquiring mind but truth. Hence, even Spinoza finds himself constrained to speak of the duty of love to God, and so forth; all of which, according to his own conclusion, is ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... (careless, unconcerned); a figurative use of remissus, taken from a bow when it is not stretched. [316] 'As they, being few, less missed in throwing their darts among the many.' The deponent frustari here has a reflective meaning, 'to exert one's self in vain,' 'to deceive one's self,' and must be conceived to come from the active frustrare, 'to frustrate.' [317] 'Then, indeed (in truth), they showed,' &c. Respecting vero in the apodosis, see note on ...
— De Bello Catilinario et Jugurthino • Caius Sallustii Crispi (Sallustius)
... German style. People say the book is very deep: but it appears to me that the meaning seems deep from lying under mystical language. There is no repose, nor equable movement in it: all cut up into short sentences half reflective, half narrative; so that one labours through it as vessels do through what is called a short sea—small, contrary going waves caused by shallows, and straits, and meeting tides, etc. I like to sail before the wind over the surface of an even-rolling eloquence, like that of Bacon or the ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... painting-room door, "Love, solitude, and painting."' On the last day of the year, according to his wont, Haydon sums up his feelings and impressions of the past twelve months. 'I don't know how it is, but I get less reflective as I get older. I seem to take things as they come without thought. Perhaps being married to my dearest Mary, and having no longer anything to hope in love, I get more content with my lot, which, God knows, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... like a loving angel, had been God's instrument of penitence and peace to him. He had come to himself again, in solitude, by nights, as a man awakened from a feverish dream; and the hallowing ministrations of her company by day had blest reflective solitude with sympathy ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... a little embarrassed and not at first lifting his bent head. When, after an instant, he did so, he found the beautiful calm eyes full upon him. But no self-consciousness there. She turned away, gentle and reflective, and was walking on when some quick summons seemed to reach her. She stopped quite still again, as if seized suddenly by a detaining hand. Her own hands dropped straight at her sides, and the rusty shawl hung free. A second time she turned, the Boy thought to him again; ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... George, a much leaner and slightly taller man, with dark, blurry, reflective eyes and a thin, largely vanished growth of brownish-black hair which contrasted strangely with the egg-shaped whiteness of his bald head. "Yes, he's a nice young man. It's a wonder his father don't take him ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... possess a high order of intellectual endowments, the unhealthy element seems to impart force and piquancy to their mental manifestations, and thus increase the embarrassment touching the true character of their mental constitution. When the defect appears in the reflective powers, it is often regarded as insanity, though not more correctly than if it were confined to the emotions and feelings. The man who goes through life creditably performing his part, but feeling, all the while, that everybody with whom he has any relations is endeavoring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... and literary career of our poet. A remarkable poet cannot but have been a remarkable man. Suppose we take a man with native benevolence amounting almost to folly; but little cunning, caution, or veneration; good perceptive, but better reflective faculties; and a dominant love of the beautiful;—and toss him into the focus of civilization in the age of Louis XIV. It is an interesting problem to find out what will become of him. Such is the problem worked ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... of cognition immediate, I must not, however, be supposed to be placing them on the same logical level. It is plain, indeed, to a reflective mind that, though each may be called immediate in this superficial sense, there are perceptible differences in the degree of their immediacy. Thus it is manifest, after a moment's reflection, that expectation, so far as it is just, is not primarily immediate in the sense ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... writhing grim figures of snakes in one's boots, and the intervening rusty rim of the hat that was not in the original prospect takes a snake-like—But stay! Is this the rim of my own hat tumbled all awry? I' mushbe! A few reflective moments, not unrelieved by hiccups, mush be d'voted ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... mixture of awe and gladness. I was very conscious, during that long voyage by sail, of the presence and majesty of the Maker. I felt, standing on the deck of the "Beagle," as if I were surrounded by some awful but beneficent power. The grandeur of the sea must make a reflective man religious, as its weirdness might breed superstition in the youthful, or ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... natural sense, who had seen nearly the whole terraqueous globe, and could reason of civilized and savage, of Gentile and Jew, of Christian and Moslem. The long night-watches of the sailor are eminently adapted to draw out the reflective faculties of any serious-minded man, however humble or uneducated. Judge, then, what half a century of battling out watches on the ocean must have done for this fine old tar. He was a sort of a sea-Socrates, in his ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... shell and kernel, the precious vessel and yet more precious wine that it contains." Trench, Notes on the Parables, chap. 1. A good illustration of this we have in the tales of Grecian mythology, once received by the masses of the people as literally true; but which "a later and more reflective age than that in which the mythus had birth" learned to regard as only the vehicle of certain ideas respecting deity. The myth, as thus defined, does not come within the sphere of biblical interpretation. The historic ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... observer in all ranks of society—especially the lower and more interesting ones—has always been to Frank Reynolds a matter of reflective amusement. The comedy of life affords him never-failing entertainment, for the world can never be dull to the man with the saving grace of humour and a quizzical interest in his fellow men. All is fish that comes to his net, for whether he touches off the ...
— Frank Reynolds, R.I. • A.E. Johnson
... that did not comfort him. He was not thinking about the land itself, but about the men who had been driven from it fifty years before. His desire was not for reform, but for restitution, and that was past the power of any Government. I went to bed in the loft in a sad, reflective mood, considering how in speeding our newfangled plough we must break down a multitude of molehills and how desirable and unreplaceable was the life ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... Even poems and works of art have been produced by some Raphael or Milton at a comparatively early season of life, and have not given shame to the author at a later age; though this is the exception, not the rule. But the purely reflective essay belongs emphatically to maturer life. Your twenty-four years have evidently been worth more to you than the longest life to most men; but my judgment is that you should give your genius more time yet, and should wait upon it with more labor. This is ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... something else seemed to weigh upon his small mind. He eyed his father with a reflective look, then looked down at his own small hands and slender limbs (his legs were cased ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... the reflective reader that Ralph Touchett should have seen less of his cousin since her marriage than he had done before that event—an event of which he took such a view as could hardly prove a confirmation of intimacy. He had uttered his thought, as we ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... a sigh, but did not say anything to the tramp that he may have had in his mind, and which possibly Wandering Lu might have resented. The man had continued his meal and was in something of a reflective frame of mind apparently. Hugh supposed he was wondering what he was going to do after coming so far in hopes of finding a snug nest for the remainder of his idle days, and meeting ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... sufficient for a good style—is this, that the author should have something to say. Ah! this implies a great deal. The neglect of this rule is a fundamental characteristic of the philosophical, and generally speaking of all the reflective authors in Germany, especially since the time of Fichte. It is obvious that all these writers wish to appear to have something to say, while they have nothing to say. This mannerism was introduced by the pseudo-philosophers of the Universities and may be discerned ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... got quiet then, and I watched her gather them checkens up, an' take 'em into the house. Then when she came out an' see me again, she says, 'Light you right out o' here, you imp o' Satan! I fair hates the sight o' you.' So I lit out. Say, Eve," he added, after a reflective pause, "why does folks all hate ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... invented a telescope, which discovers objects by reflection, and not by refraction. Telescopes of this new kind are very hard to make, and their use is not easy; but, according to the English, a reflective telescope of but five feet has the same effect as another of a hundred ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased with its own excitement and entanglement. He was the child of a world which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was tired like Obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes. Sometimes he felt, as in The New Age, the pleasure of the coming life of the world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet. But chiefly he saw the disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to realise that it was the trouble and ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... hope, for any reflective man to draw the conclusion that, since we desired no unpleasantness with the butler (a man between fifty and sixty, and notoriously incorruptible), our only plan was to make an entrance upstairs by the long window at the end of the picture ...
— Wandering Heath • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "The reflective mind must be permitted to use its mighty wings unimpeded," cried the Syrian eagerly. "Leave the settlement of minor ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... London, but we only went to another and quieter inn, seeking peace and the absence of fear. I may say we found it, and, in a chair before a good fire, I again took my comfort. Paddy sat on the floor, toasting his shins. The warmth passed him into a reflective mood. ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... quadrants, or 180 deg., in the case of diamond, is condensed into an angular space of 47 deg.22' (twice 23 deg.42') by refraction. Coupled with its great refraction, are the great dispersive and great reflective powers of diamond; hence the extraordinary radiance of the gem, both as regards white light ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... flat, clay land of Egypt; and their towering height, their immovable firmness, their cool shade, their safe shelter, spoke to him of the unalterable might and impregnable defence which he had found in God. So there is in this name the same devout, reflective laying-hold upon experience which we have observed in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... vernal airs attunes her varied strains; And Itylus sounds warbling o'er the plains; Young Itylus, his parents' darling joy! Whom chance misled the mother to destroy; Now doom'd a wakeful bird to wail the beauteous boy. So in nocturnal solitude forlorn, A sad variety of woes I mourn! My mind, reflective, in a thorny maze Devious from care to care incessant strays. Now, wavering doubt succeeds to long despair; Shall I my virgin nuptial vow revere; And, joining to my son's my menial train, Partake ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... Curry trudged across the infield in the wake of the good horse Elisha. Another owner, on the day of an important race, might have been nervous or worried; the patriarch maintained his customary calm; his head was bent at a reflective angle, and he nibbled at a straw. Certain gentlemen, speculatively inclined, would have given much more than a penny for the old man's thoughts; having bought them at any price, they ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... story handed down, Painted my knights from those around, But placed them on poetic ground. The ample brow, too smooth for guile; The careless, fearless, open smile; The shaded and yet arching eye, At once reflective, kind, and shy; The undesigning, dauntless look,— Became to me a living book. I read the character conceal'd, Flash'd on by chance, or never known Even to bosoms like its own; Shrinking before a step intrude; Touch, look, and whisper, all too rude; Unsunn'd and fairest when ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... these outside jobs, and the other to do my intimate and real duties. For Richard Greenough once told me, that, in studying for the statue of Franklin, he found that the left side of the great man's face was philosophic and reflective, and the right side funny and smiling. If you will go and look at the bronze statue, you will find he has repeated this observation there for posterity. The eastern profile is the portrait of the statesman Franklin, the western of Poor Richard. But Dr. Wigan does not go into these ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... have become widely recognized quite rapidly after the original strip, a fact which testifies to Dilbert's huge popularity among hackers. All too many find the perverse incentives and Kafkaesque atmosphere of Dilbert's mythical workplace reflective ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... performed the same offices for the baby. Then there was breakfast, from which Mr. Cavendish rose yawning to go to bed, where, before dropping off to sleep, he played with the baby. This left Mrs. Cavendish in full command of her floating dooryard. She smoked a reflective pipe, watching the river between puffs, and occasionally lending a hand at the sweeps. Later the family wash engaged her. It had neither beginning nor end, but serialized itself from day to day. Connie was already proficient at the tubs. It ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... pensive, moral tone of his poetry renders it attractive to many persons. He gives expression to the sad, reflective moods that are apt, especially in time of suffering or disappointment, to come to most of us. The moral sense of the American people is strong; and sometimes a comforting though commonplace truth from Nature is more pleasing than the most exquisite ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... coeval with the earliest traditions, and antedates all records, is an attestation as significant as any monumental marble. No hallucination theory, no gradual rise and growth of hope in the minds of a reflective few, can account for that solid primeval monument. But what occurred, the reality in distinctness from any legendary accretions, we shall be better able to conclude, when the truth shall have been threshed out concerning the reality, at present strongly attested, and as strongly ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton
... very poor cows," said Polly, in a reflective tone; "or else they don't give down their milk. I understood you to say, Dotty, that Ruth ...
— Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's • Sophie May
... He accounted his enemies those who envied him, and those who could not be reconciled to his glory and the influence of his name. Amidst all these anxieties Bonaparte was outwardly calm, though he was moody and reflective. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... ready to challenge a man because he looks grave. 'You don't see the witticism, sir?' 'No, sir, but I see what you meant.' Then I am what we call ticketed as a fellow without esprit. But, in fact," said Klesmer, suddenly dropping from his quick narrative to a reflective tone, with an impressive frown, "I am very sensible to ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... feed upon the superannuated chaff and dry husks of repentance; yet sometimes I remember with pleasure the hounds and horses, which I kept in the days of my prodigality. I find nothing new, nor anything that has so much of the gloss and dazzle of novelty, as may rebound in narrative, and cast a reflective glimmer across the channel. Something I will say about people that you and I know. Fenwick is still in debt, and the Professor has not done making love to his new spouse. I think he never looks into an almanack, or he would have found by the calendar that the honeymoon was extinct a moon ago. ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... conflict be then for those who, with slight purses and few allies, find themselves pitted against the powerful of the earth? Discouragement, in weak natures, soon turns to envy, and the spectacle of human unkindness has driven many a reflective, delicate soul to say that the companionship of his fellow-men is unlovely, not to be admired, and difficult, at times, not to hate. In disgust of the world—where one has been wounded, or where one has wounded others—(wounded vanity and remorse are alike bitter in ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... the little mirror which hung upon the wall. He gazed straight into it, examining with frowning face the reflection which he witnessed. He ran a hand across the gray-tinged hair, turned up a corner of the mustache with a reflective finger, man-fashion, and looked eagerly, searchingly, at the face which confronted him. It was a face slightly lined, a trifle tired. He stood there thinking, questioning this image. As he ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... raising on the one hand a cheerful, and on the other a melancholy feeling. To our thought, the associations connected with the return of the herds from the fields at sunset are best fitted to awaken that quiet, reflective state of mind which is most congenial to the mood of the elegiac poet. To another, these associations may be of such a character as to produce ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... of fascination which some men exercise on women is one of those mysteries which science should investigate before it does anything else," said the Duke, in a reflective tone. "Now I come to think of it, I had much better have spent my time on that investigation than on that tedious journey to the South Pole. All the same, I'm deucedly sorry for that woman, Victoire. She looks such a ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... whittled on dry-goods boxes at the sidewalk's edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own. But now, sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... The reflective pieces are certainly of more interest now (though they seem to have satisfied the poet less) than the gallery of airy fairy Lilians, Adelines, Rosalinds, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... associations. On all with whom she came in contact Mrs. Fletcher produced the impression of a character singularly round and complete. Something of the same influence is felt in the perusal of her unaffected narrative, and with readers of a reflective turn may prove a sufficient compensation for the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... might continue playing or return, beaten by November, to the clubhouse. In the end, with numb fingers, he picked up his ball, and walked slowly back over the empty course. The wind, now, was behind him, and increasingly comfortable he grew reflective: ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is by our reflective and reasoning powers, with which we seem to be exclusively endowed, that we know that it is injurious, first to others and then to ourselves, to resist the social instinct which governs us, and which we call JUSTICE. It is our reason which teaches us that the selfish man, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... her apartment, than to submit to a yoke she was not disposed to bear. This species of exile increased my attachment to her, by that natural inclination which excites me to approach the wretched, I found her mind metaphysical and reflective, although at times a little sophistical; her conversation, which was by no means that of a young woman coming from a convent, had for me the greatest attractions; yet she was not twenty years of age. Her complexion was seducingly fair; her figure ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... used to look offended or distressed, and say Sie geniren sich gewiss. This is a difficult phrase to translate, because the idea is one that has never taken root in the English mind, Sich geniren, however, is a reflective verb, a corruption of the French verb se gener, and what they meant was that you really wanted a third potato dumpling but did not like to say so. Whether your reluctance was supposed to proceed from your distrust of your ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... rather statesmen than orators; their cautious and reflective language weighed only on the reason; they sought for the mean between liberty and monarchy, and believed they had found it in the system of the Two Houses of English Legislature. The moderes of the two parties listened to them respectfully; like all half parties and half talents, they ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... eternal life, change themselves for us into grotesque fables, like those of Tartarus and the Elysian fields, although we do not disclose the true opinion of our hearts, because we think it more advisable to keep the people in outward decency by means of these images. Or if we are less reflective, and ourselves fettered by the bands of authority, then we sink, ourselves, to the true plebeian level, by believing that which, so understood, would be foolish fable; and by finding, in those purely spiritual indications, nothing but the promise of a continuance, to all eternity, of the same miserable ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... County, North Carolina, made an arduous journey to the pleasing valley of the Watauga. Robertson, who was born in Brunswick County, Virginia, June 28, 1742, of excellent Scotch-Irish ancestry, was a noteworthy figure of a certain type—quiet, reflective, conservative, wise, a firm believer in the basic principles of civil Liberty and the right of local self-government. Robertson spent some time with a man named Honeycut in the Watauga region, raised ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... of the strong position of the fort they were aware that it would give them severe work to capture. Still it was to be done, and no one doubted that it would be done, whatever might be the sacrifice. The more reflective had their minds fully occupied, and all were in a state of anxiety on account of their captain, and the persons he had risked his own safety to rescue from destruction. Adair, who heard what Ben had cried out, had little hopes that he would succeed, and was afraid also ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... estimate of his musical knowledge together with his having derived pleasure from listening to the sounds of the bagpipes. If a performance on those droning instruments was in the Doctor's mind when he said that the reflective powers need not be exercised in performing on a musical instrument, there might be some truth in the observation. The labour of thinking, however, cannot be dispensed with in connection with playing most musical instruments, and ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... chancellor, who, in his disgrace, would not resign his charge. M. de Maupeou possessed one of those firm and superior minds, which, in spite of all obstacles, change the face of empires. Ardent, yet cool; bold, but reflective; the clamors of the populace did not astonish, nor did any obstacles arrest him. He went on in the direct path which his will chalked out. Quitting the magistracy, he became its most implacable enemy, and after a deadly combat ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... and t, "I" or "me"; d-akus-t, "it see I" I see it; d-arrai-t, "it follows me." The demonstratives are used as articles: gazt-en-or, "this younger one"; andre-ori, "this lady at some distance." The reflective "self" is expressed by buru, "head." The relative does not exist, and in its place is used as a kind of verbal participle with the ending n: doa, "he goes"; doana, "he who is going"; in the modern Basque, however, by imitation of French or Spanish, the interrogative ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... expansion are nearly always those that feel most deeply, for the deeper the feeling, the less it tends to express itself. Thence we have that charming shamefastness, that veiled and exquisite sobriety, equally far removed from the sentimental rhetoric too familiar to the Latin races, and the reflective simplicity of Germany, which are so admirably displayed in the ballads published by M. de la Villemarque. The apparent reserve of the Celtic peoples, often taken for coldness, is due to this inward timidity which makes them believe that a feeling loses half its value if it be expressed; ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... these men treated this very Bible? I, who indeed prize and reverence this sacred library, as of all outward means and conservatives of Christian faith and practice the surest and the most reflective of the inward Word; I, who hold that the Bible contains the religion of Christians, but who dare not say that whatever is contained in the Bible is the Christian religion, and who shrink from all question respecting the comparative worth and efficacy of the written Word as weighed against the preaching ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... decay into one, are converted into a museum of antiquities—silent despositories of memorials of the dead. Sadly one loiters through their deserted halls. They present one of the most interesting sights of Paris. In the reflective mind they awaken emotions which the ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... by the increase of what must become a degenerate offspring. (To the Chorus) All you workpeople are doing it. Is it not time to think about these things and stop the indiscriminate production of human beings, whose lives you cannot properly maintain? Ought you not to act more like reflective creatures and less like brutes? As if breeding were the whole object of life! How much better for you, my friend, if you had never married at all, than to have had the worry of a wife and ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... singularly stubborn, heavy as lead and, like lead, most difficult to move. Such being the case, it would have been truly absurd to exact from them much in the way of mental exertion; having short memories, dense intelligence, feeble reflective powers, they recoiled with repugnance from any occupation that demanded close study or deep thought. Had the abhorred effort been extorted from them by injudicious and arbitrary measures on the part ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... a conspicuous writer in the Quarterly Review but, as his enemies thought, a renegade bought by pensions. It is, I hope, needless to defend him against this charge. He was simply an impatient man of generous instincts and no reflective power, who had in his youth caught the revolutionary fever, and, as he grew up, developed the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... transition from home to the school may be easy, he should first occupy himself with those topics and studies that are presented to the eye and to the ear, and may be mastered, so as to produce the sensation that follows achievement with only a moderate use of the reasoning and reflective faculties. Among these are reading, writing, music, and drawing. This is also the time when object lessons may be given with great advantage. The forms and names of geometrical solids may be taught. Exercises may be introduced tending to develop those ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
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