"Proneness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... idolatry, and that the image of the cross is as much an image as the image of Him who hung thereon. And in all this the Jew is right, if we are to obey the commandment of God. Yet the Jew forgets that a thousand years of trial were requisite to cure his ancestors of their proneness to idols. After their first mission, accomplished in the birth of Christ, God has preserved them a perpetual witness against paganism. But so subtle is this sin, that we find ourselves setting up sensuous representations, while we point ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... negatived by spells and charms. We who still hang on our walls at Christmas the mystic holly, are unconsciously perpetuating an old-world custom connected with belief in the efficacy of the magical circle to protect us against evil spirits. And in our concern about luck, our proneness to believe in omens, the influence of colours and numbers, in dreams and in prophetic warnings, we retain as much of the spirit as the poetry of the ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... reappeared among us. I looked into her eyes, but saw no tear. There was something which seemed strangely haughty in her air, and yet it was the air of woe. A Spanish and an Indian grief, which would not visibly lament. Pride's height in vain abased to proneness on the rack; ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... the unfriendly are friendly to thee; For no good and evil supremely thou hast blended in one by decree. For all thy decree is one ever—a Word that endureth for aye, Which mortals, rebellious, endeavor to flee from and shun to obey— Ill-fated, that, worn with proneness for the lord-ship of goodly things, Neither hear nor behold, in its oneness, the law that divinity brings; Which men with reason obeying, might attain unto glorious life, No longer aimlessly straying in the paths of ignoble strife. There are men with a zeal unblest, that are wearied ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... without than from within, and hence there is apt to be a dryness of surface, a lack of that sheen, that spontaneous warm emanation, which, in good original work, comes from free inward impulsion. To counteract, in so far as may be, this proneness to a mechanical inflexibility, the translator should keep himself free to wield boldly and with full swing his own native speech. By his line-for-line allegiance, Mr. Longfellow forfeits much of this freedom. He is too intent on the words; he sacrifices the ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
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