"Fetish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a force of nature was to assimilate other forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he could conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... It was a savage fetish that a warrior must be proof against the alluring ways of pretty maidens; that he must place his honor far above the temptations of self-indulgence and indolence. Cold, hunger, and personal hardship did not count with ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... Democrat." Another was inscribed: "Unconditional Republicanism." In the white light of to-day the truth that an invariable partisan is an occasional lunatic becomes impressively apparent. Party under increasing civilization is a factor, not a fetish. It is a means, not an end. It is an instrument, not an idol. Man is its master, not its slave. Not that men will cease to act on party lines. Party lines are the true divisional boundary between schools of thought. No commission is needed to discover or to establish those lines. They ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... wife, his children, his bonne, and his kitchen wench issued forth, oblivious alike of dull care and of bombarding Prussians, to enjoy themselves after their wont by gossiping and lolling in the sun. The Strasburg fetish had its usual crowd of admirers. Every bench in the Champs Elysees was occupied. Guitars twanged, organs were ground, merry-go-rounds were in full swing, and had it not been that here and there some regiment was drilling, one would have supposed oneself in some country fair. There ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... over the Spanish people. The same storm of wild, unreasoning loyalty which had followed Ferdinand's reappearance in Spain followed the overthrow of the Constitution. The mass of the Spaniards were ignorant of the very meaning of political liberty: they adored the King as a savage adores his fetish: their passions were at the call of a priesthood as brutish and unscrupulous as that which in 1798 had excited the Lazzaroni of Naples against the Republicans of Southern Italy. No sooner had Ferdinand set the example, by ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... The chiefs are of mixed blood, but the people are almost black. They are supposed to accept the religion of the Hindus, but are in reality deplorably ignorant and superstitious. Their priests are a sort of compound of a Brahmin priest and a negro fetish man, and among their principal duties is that of charming away tigers from the villages by means of incantations. There, as in other parts of India, were a few wandering fakirs, who enjoyed an immense reputation ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... problem which confronted him. There was something fascinating as well as terrible in his exposition of a battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according to the methods of science—calculating the ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... she knew that any dreadful deed was possible in the darkness of the secluded streets outside the house, in the garden below, or in the house itself. But she did not despair. It was easier to win money by keeping within the law than by breaking it. The Beg was a rogue, but money was his fetish, and Marishka's ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... Smith and Rodier appropriating as trophies several spears and bows and arrows, and also some of the fetish charms hung at the entrance to the huts. The crew, having satisfied their hunger, hunted through the village for loot, and grumbled when they found nothing that they considered worthy the consideration of British sailormen. Then Rodier took ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... or god.' If there are reasoners so feeble, they must be left to the punishment inflicted by Mr. Muller. On the other hand, students who regard the growth of the idea of power, which is the predicate of every fetish, as a slow process, as the result of various impressions and trains of early half-conscious reasoning, cannot be disposed of by the charge that they think that 'every human being was miraculously endowed' with any concept whatever. They, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... a solemn service, when he shut himself up to compose. Beth had stepped away from the old forms by this time. She had escaped from the bondage of the letter that killeth into the realm of the spirit that giveth life. It is not faith in any particular fetish that makes a mind religious, but the quality of reverence. Churches Beth had come to look upon, not with distrust, but with indifference, as an ineffectual experiment of man's. She could find no evidence of a holier ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... laws can save the game is to-day the curse of all our game birds, mammals and fishes! It is a fraud, a delusion and a snare. That miserable fetish has been worshipped much too long. Our game is being exterminated, everywhere, by blind insistence upon "open seasons," and solemn reliance upon "legal bag-limits." If a majority of the people of America ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... but of well-bleached blue dungaree? The spotless shirt, how paltry a detail when a light singlet is the only wear? Of what trifling worth dapper boots to feet made leathery by contact with the clean, crisp, oatmeal-coloured sand. Here is no fetish about clothes; little concern for what we shall eat or what we shall drink. The man who has to observe the least of the ordinances of style knows not liberty. He is a slave; his dress betrayeth him and proclaims him base. There may be degrees of baseness. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... affection that fortified her—beyond her first gently tolerant glance at the boy there had been only indifference in her pale, composed face—and the lawyer was at last brought to the surprising conclusion that Fletcher's granddaughter was seeking to build herself a fetish of the mere idle bond of blood. The hopeless gallantry of the girl moved him to a vague feeling of pity, and he spoke presently with a chivalrous desire of making her ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Come set pore niggah free. Him no tell Massa Huggin. Him no kill pore black darkie. Iss, Caesar tell um," he whispered now, with his lips so close that the lad felt the hot breath hiss into his ear. "Dat Obeah, massa. Dat black man's Obeah. Come along now Caesar know. Find fetish. Plenty many black boy ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... Ages"; the ancient culture was dead. Eight centuries of submergence with strange mysterious upfloatings were its fate until the Renascence, when its fragments were recovered, and soon did more harm than good to the fetish-worshipping peoples of Europe. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... Eddy-worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the cult. Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, thought it be only a memorial spoon, is holy and is eagerly and passionately and gratefully bought by the disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house. I say bought, for the Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it has for sale. And the terms are cash; and not cash only but cash in advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar. Not a spiritual ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fragments: not a dozen free-standing marble statues have come down to us in their pristine condition. The quarrymen were beset by students and collectors anxious to obtain inscriptions. Traders in forgeries supplied what the diggers could not produce. Classical art became a fetish.[124] The noble qualities of antiquity were blighted by the imitators, whose inventive powers were atrophied, while their skill and knowledge left nothing to be desired. Excluding the Cosmati, Rome was the mother of no period or movement of art excepting the Rococo. As for Donatello himself, ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... animal among the Aztecs, as the Anubis-jackal was among the Egyptians. Humboldt found in Mexico the tomb of a coyote, which had been carefully interred with an earthen vase, and a number of the little cast-bronze bells which I noticed in the last chapter. The Mexicans used actually to make a kind of fetish—or charm—of a jackal's skin, prepared in a peculiar way, and called by the same name, nezahualcoyotl, and very likely they do so still. From this fetish the king's name was, no doubt, borrowed; and it is not improbable that the whole story of the king's walking ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... or magicians of the nation—numbering in all something over a hundred— all of whom were then in Gwanda for the purposes of the ceremony, would assemble at sunset that same evening in a sort of fetish house; and there, under the leadership and direction of one Machenga, the head or chief witch doctor, would perform certain mysterious rites, and submit themselves to a certain mysterious form of treatment, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, "was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows of the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... himself as one having a mission upon earth, even before he had received the revelations which announced him as a prophet chosen of Allah, for he long brooded over the things of the spirit, and although he had not, up to his fortieth year, openly protested against the fetish worship of the Kureysh, yet he was regarded as one who had a different idea of worship from that of the men with whom he came ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... both the State and the Portuguese have started large farms for breeding European cattle which thrive here satisfactorily. Higher up a solitary rock overhangs the left bank. This is known as Fetish Rock from the legend that the natives used to throw live people from it into the river as sacrifices. This is possibly true but there is little evidence to show that the natives of the Congo ever sacrificed either living or dead to propitiate anyone ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... Scotland, where the witch was cut or 'scotched' on the face and forehead. Cutting off secretly a lock of the hair of the accused, burning the thatch of her roof and the thing bewitched; these are a few of the least offensive or obscene practices in counter-charming.[146] In what degree or kind the Fetish-charms of the African savages are more ridiculous or disgusting than those popular in England 200 years ago, it would ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... the marks of my slavery," he replied, bitterly. "They were a set of hideous brutes; and the fetish they worshipped was cruelty. I carry about me other marks that must go with me to my grave; but there is no need to dwell on these horrors. He sent His angel to deliver me," he continued, reverently; "and again ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... said the man in black; "better reject his words than his image: no religion can exist long which rejects a good bodily image. Why, the very negro barbarians of High Barbary could give you a lesson on that point; they have their fetish images, to which they look for help in their afflictions; they have likewise a high priest, whom ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... those twenty-eight folios of blasphemy, only three sentences were from my own pen, and two of them were extracted from long articles. One was a jocose reference to the Jewish tribal god, who, as Keunen allows, was carried about, probably as a stone fetish, in that wooden box known as the "ark of the covenant." Another occurred in a long review of Jules Soury's remarkable book on the subject of Jesus Christ's hallucinations and eccentricities, in which he endeavors to show that the Prophet of ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... did not say what I had intended. I was thinking that in the old days McCord had made rather a fetish of touching nothing stronger than beer. Neither had he been of the shoulder-clapping sort. "So you've ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... that interdining or intermarrying is necessary for national growth, is a superstition borrowed from the West. Eating is a process just as vital as the other sanitary necessities of life. And if mankind had not, much to its harm, made of eating a fetish and indulgence we would have performed the operation of eating in private even as one performs the other necessary functions of life in private. Indeed the highest culture in Hinduism regards eating in that light and there are thousands ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... historians, poets, and sculptors, while entirely ignorant of science and philosophy, that their philosophic puerilities are worthy of adoration in the 19th century, a superstition which makes a fetish of the writings of Plato and Aristotle, has been tolerated long enough, and as no one has attempted to give a critical estimate of this effete literature since Lord Bacon did something in that way, I shall not much longer postpone ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... without being more than normally cynical; she was rich without being either frugal or extravagant. Her independence was inherent and not acquired. She had laid down certain laws for herself to follow; and that these often clashed with the laws of convention, which are fetish to those who divide society into three classes, only mildly amused her. Right from wrong she ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... few, however, of his original Mongolian warriors followed Timour in the invasion of India. His armies latterly appear to have consisted chiefly of Turcomans and Persians. It was to obtain popularity amongst these soldiery that he abandoned his old religion, a kind of fetish, or ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... the most heroic. I have always been a friend to hero-worship, it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilised people—the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism—it is mere fetish; the savages of West Africa are all spirit- worshippers. But there is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race, and the true hero is the benefactor. Brahma, Jupiter, Bacchus, were all benefactors, and, therefore, entitled to the worship of their respective ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... transformation of the theological. The human mind, in framing a class of objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a divinity. The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish. ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... very ridiculous, considering that I am merely the rector of a fashionable London church, but there was a time when I felt almost intoxicated by my wife's worship of me, and by my domination over the crowds who came to hear me preach. Domination! That was my fetish! That was what led me to—oh, sometimes I think it must ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... denominational rubric of "Animists" and numbering about 8-1/2 millions, have survived to the present day in remote hills and jungles without being absorbed into the Hindu social system, and have preserved their primitive beliefs, in which fetish worship, and magic are the dominant elements. Low as is their social status, it is but little lower than that of the Panchamas who have obtained a footing on the nethermost rung of the social ladder of Hinduism without being admitted to any sort of contact ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... mid-day regions, and the evil-scented wind from the north, which in old Persian religious belief blew to meet pure and wicked souls after death (Tylor's Primitive Culture, vol. II. pp. 98, 99). Mr. Tylor mentions also the Fanti negroes' belief that the men and animals they sacrifice to the local fetish are carried away in a whirlwind imperceptibly to the ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... been pointed out in a dream, or met in a lucky hour and associated with good fortune, or they may (like a tree with an unexplained stir in its branches, as reported by Kohl) have seemed to show signs of life by spontaneous movements; in fact, a thing may be what Europeans call a fetish for scores of reasons. For our present purpose, as Mr. Tylor says, 'to class an object as a fetish demands explicit statement that a spirit is considered as embodied in it, or acting through it, or communicating by it, or, at least, that the people it belongs to do habitually ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... fellows in Congress, who never smelt powder, abused the soldiers. Those fellows would have been the first to run. Others, still worse, to show their abject flunkeyism to Scott, and to humbug the public at large about their intimacy with this fetish, make speeches in his defence. Scott broadly prepared the defeat, and now, through the mouths of flunkeys and spit-lickers,[2] he attempts to throw the fault on the thus ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... deification, apotheosis. Associated Words: liturgies, liturgy, ritual, cult, fetish, fetishism, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... electorate of Brandenburg coincided in one person. All men of education know, and all men whatsoever feel, what influence an historical origin will have upon national outlook. East Prussia, therefore, remains to-day something of a political fetish. Its towns may be called colonies of the Germans, the birthplaces or the residences of men famous in the German story. Its country-sides, although still largely inhabited by a population of servile memories and habits not thoroughly welded with their masters, do not ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... with the loss of but two days of liberty—or anyway, so Trencher firmly believed. But because it had left his custody for no more than an hour his pictures were now in the Gallery, and Murtha had learned the secret of Trencher's one temperamental weakness, one fetish. ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... replied. "He must not know, or the plans of the Naya may be thwarted. Our enemies have arranged to strike their blow three moons from now, but ere that we shall be back in Mo, and they will find that they go only to their graves. Kouaga has made fetish for the son of his royal mistress, and has come to ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending "the mechanical God of Paley," as this does the fetish of the savage. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... a positive benefit. If the time were devoted to acquiring a more thorough understanding of our mother tongue it would be more creditable. To give time to translating good Latin into poor English is paying an extravagant homage to a fetish. Training in the ancient languages must be long-continued and far-reaching, or it seems to be of little value. The needs of culture cannot be satisfied by mere discipline any more than they can be satisfied by merely utilitarian ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst
... Brace, a nebba heer anybody pray in de fashun you 'peak 'bout. Ob coas, I hab heer de nigga talk to da Fetish, de which I, tho' I be a nigga maseff, nebba belieb'd in. Dis child no belieb in anyting he no see, an' he see many ting he ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... denunciation await that man who stands unawed before it, seeing in it but an ugly little idol. And I guess what will be dealt out to him who not only refuses to bow the head, but openly scoffs. And yet I am going to scoff and say ugly words about this fetish of ours. I am going to say that it represents ignorance, hides and causes hypocrisy, stands in the way of progress, drags low the standard of individual excellence, perpetuates many ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... eternal Louis business is getting to be a ridiculous nuisance. Nothing can be done, no plans can be made, without some veto connected with that animal's whims or convenience being imposed. If you were a priest in attendance on some African fetish you couldn't set up a more elaborate code of restrictions. I believe you'd ask the Government to put off a General Election if you thought it would interfere with Louis's comfort ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... in the Moslem, not the Jewish fashion (loc. cit.). Heated sand is applied as a styptic and the patient is dieted with ginger-soup and warm drinks of ginger-water, pork being especially forbidden. The Fantis of the Gold Coast circumcise in sacred places, e.g., at Accra on a Fetish rock rising from the sea The peoples of Sennaar, Taka, Masawwah and the adjacent regions follow the Abyssinian custom. The barbarous Bissagos and Fellups of North Western Guinea make cuts on the prepuce without amputating it; while the Baquens ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... West Africa. I rather forget the facts, but Jeekie, my negro servant, knows them all, for as a lad my uncle saved him from sacrifice, or something, in a place where they worship these things, and he has been with us ever since. It is a fetish with magical powers and all the rest of it. I believe they call it the Swimming Head and other names. If you look at it, you will see that it seems to swim ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... time. The bit of copper was at the bottom of it. The effort he made for the second almost cost him his life. He rescued a poor slave girl in order to be faithful to a trust imposed in him, and taught her the truths of Allah. The silver leaf was his reward. He found it in the heathen fetish which she gave him in her gratitude. It had been ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... without us—if," I said. "You must remember we've made him a fetish with our rank and file. And he's something of a fetish with the country, now that he's President. No, we can't destroy him—can't even injure him. He'll have to do that himself, if it's ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... but by a thick cotton leading-rope which is passed over the headstall, and such a rope is carried by every Indian groom. I asked my groom one day to tie up with his leading rope a dog that would not follow. He absolutely refused, and I discovered that the rope was the fetish of his caste and was formerly adored and propitiated in the course of an annual caste festival. To touch a dog with it would have ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... is not necessary to speak. The preceding volumes of this work have been written in vain, if the reader has not obtained from irrefragable testimony—the monarch's own especially—a sufficient knowledge of that human fetish before which so much of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... developing in what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the artist and for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect upon the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost obliging him to create his own impulse upon his ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... susceptible in part of sometime being used to the advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real that they ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... last night when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... gyrations. Talmage never ventured far from shore, and he of all men knew that while the mob would forgive vulgarity—in fact, really enjoyed it—unsoundness of doctrine was to it a hissing. Orthodoxy is very tolerant—it forgives everything but truth. Every fetish of the superstitious and cringing mind, Talmage repeated over and over in varying phrase. He was the antithesis of an independent, exactly as Spurgeon was. It is the fate of every man who lives above the law to be hailed as brother by some of those ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... view, and vast crowds passed before it; a whole people hastened to the convent, an interminable procession of devotees hungering after hope, who rubbed medals, chaplets, pictures, and missals against the dead woman's dress, to obtain from her one more favour, a fetish bringing happiness. Even in death her dream of solitude was denied her: a mob of the wretched ones of this world rushed to the spot, drinking in illusion around her coffin. And it was noticed that her left eye, the eye which at the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... The noise they had made had scared away all the other elephants—however, they appeared pretty well satisfied with the four they had killed. They now assembled round the last elephant which had fallen, while one of their fetish-men, or priests, approached and cut off a portion which was carefully stowed away in a basket; this was intended, we understood, for an offering to their idols. A dance was now commenced, and was as ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... pleasure. "I think so, but I supposed nobody else could see anything in it. No one of my acquaintance has ever alluded to it," continued she, half laughing, half crying, "but I see them trying to scrutinize it slyly when they are not observed. As for poor old Anita, I believe she thinks it is our Fetish. She walks round it on tiptoe with her hands ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... India, Africa, will you not find their features in some circles of the social world right around you? Idolatry! you cannot find any more gross, any more cruel, on the broad earth, than within the area of a mile around this pulpit. Dark minds from which God is obscured; deluded souls, whose fetish is the dice-box or the bottle; apathetic spirits, steeped in sensual abomination, unmoved by a moral ripple, soaking in the slump of animal vitality. False gods, more hideous, more awful, than Moloch ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... of the conjuror of the tribe, that so her forefather the Sun might be propitious to them, and the Incas might show favor to the poor ruined Omaguas, in the day of their coming glory. And as she grew, she had become, it seemed, somewhat of a prophetess among them, as well as an object of fetish-worship; for she was more prudent in council, valiant in war, and cunning in the chase, than all the elders of the tribe; and those strange and sweet songs of hers, which had so surprised the white men, were full of mysterious ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... their parasols and in front they waved a Red Cross flag. On a gooseberry bush in the midst of the farm they also left a white flag, where it still flew to protect a few fat pigs, turkeys, and other fowl. The white flag is becoming a kind of fetish. To-day all our white tents were smeared with reddish mud to make them less visible. Beyond Range Post the enemy set up a new gun commanding the Maritzburg road as it crossed that point of hill. The Irish ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... theory of the people as well as of the dynasty—by the grace of God, not by the consent of the people. The same may be said of the German Emperor, who fills his office as King of Prussia. To the Anglo-Saxon foreigner the dynasty in Germany, and particularly in Prussia, appears a sort of fetish, the worship of which begins in the public schools with lessons on the heroic deeds of the Hohenzollerns, and with the Emperor, as high priest, constantly calling on his people to worship with him. This view of the ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... become slave to a small point of inquiry, and you call it the advance to a new time. "The crusade is on," you say. Coronation rites for the commoners and destruction to superstition. I put my hand out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain that there is no joy also deference to a fetish. Your creed thunders "Thou shalt not." Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... the officer knows practically all that can be learned. I need not say that all are in gold; but a few special sets in radium can be obtained. Even these, however, are not ruinous, for with Mr. Luke Jones reasonable prices are a fetish. ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various
... yellow idol, with nine arms and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind. I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun, than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist. Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it, and become ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... opinion of the natives, is never due to a natural cause. It is always the result either of a crime or of sorcery, and is followed by the poison ordeal, which has to be undergone by an innocent person whom the fetish-man accuses ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... whose primary consideration is the child and who sees in the child the object and focus of all her activities, never makes a fetish of the book. It has its use, to be sure, but it is subordinate in the scheme of education. It is not a necessity, but a mere convenience. She could dispense with it entirely and not do violence to the child's interests. No book is large enough ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... from memory without the error of a point, or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder that China is today more like an herbarium than anything else. Learning is a kind of fetish, and it has no influence whatever upon the great ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in the foregoing citation the exercise of a charity that is unquestionably born of fetish-worship, which, whether it be obeah generally, or restricted to a mere human skin, can be so powerful an agent in the formation and retention of beliefs. Hence we see that our philosopher relies here, in the domain ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... been previously pointed out, nowhere before nor since has pure legality been made such a fetish. It was a game played by lawyers, not an attempt to get justice done. Since, in all criminal cases at least, the prosecution was carried on by one man and his associates, poorly paid and hence of mediocre ability, and the defence conducted by ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... Christianity to have proclaimed this truth, through all their aberrations. But the worship of a God who needs forgiveness and help, and deserves pity every hour of his existence, is no better than that of any other voluntarily selected fetish. The Emperor Julian's project was hopeful in comparison with the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... attention of the German workman to the undeveloped state of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetish of the words 'the people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.' Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for revolutionary evolution."[18] This statement of Marx is one of the most significant documents of the period and certainly one of ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... CHISERA produces the sticks from her medicine bag, and hands them to one of the Old Men. To each of the others who will dance with her (two or three) she gives a fetish from her bag. They have already put on appropriate headdresses and are prepared for dancing. She motions the rattles to begin. Behind her are the Old Men, with the drums and rattles; on each side, the Fighting Men seated on the ground. The dance begins, the CHISERA singing. ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... stress of hungry war demand will be true of scores of articles for trade afterward. The old rule-of-thumb traditions that hampered expansion have gone into the discard, along with voluntary military service and the fetish ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... the venerable Bishop Crowther, who has spent his whole life in that part of Africa where these conquests are supposed to be made, declares that the real vocation of the quiet apostles of the Koran is that of fetish peddlers.[118] If it be objected that this is the biased testimony of a Christian missionary, it may be backed by the explorer Lander, who, in speaking of this same class of men, says: "These Mollahs procure ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... punch on the nose from him. Fine arms, but legs no good below the knee. Couldn't make cavalry men of them." And after glancing down complacently at his own shanks, he always concluded: "Pah! Don't they stink! You, Makola! Take that herd over to the fetish" (the storehouse was in every station called the fetish, perhaps because of the spirit of civilization it contained) "and give them up some of the rubbish you keep there. I'd rather see it full of bone than full ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... particular species of snake called daboa, which is not sufficiently large to be terrible to man, and is otherwise tameable and inoffensive. These daboas arc taken care of in the most pious manner, and well fed on rats, mice, or birds, in their fetish houses or temples, where the people attend to pay their adoration, and where those also who are sick ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... that those who profess it are more numerous than those of other employments. That the greatest number of these are at Kommendo, Mina, and Kormantin. From each of which places, there go out every morning, (Tuesday excepted, which is the Fetish day, or day of rest) five, six, and sometimes eight hundred canoes, from thirteen to fourteen feet long, which spread themselves two leagues at sea, each fisherman carrying in his canoe a sword, with bread, water, ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... black japanned dispatch-box, which he guarded like a child with absurd precautions. He never allowed that box out of his sight one moment; and he gave me no peace as to its safety and integrity. It was a perfect fetish. "We must be cautious," he said, "Sey, cautious! Especially in travelling. Recollect how that little curate spirited the diamonds out of Amelia's jewel-case! I shall not let this box out of my sight. I shall stick to it myself, if we ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... private gain, and that the mere name of Empire wearied and sickened them. On these grounds they stood to save England; on these grounds they were elected, with what seemed like clear orders to destroy the blood-stained fetish of Empire as soon as possible. The present mellow condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa is proof of their honesty and obedience. Over and above this, their mere presence in office produced ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... article followed, in which Clerambault took a final leave of the bloody old fetish falsely called Country; or rather in opposition to the great flesh-eater, the she-wolf of Rome, on whose altar men are now offered up, he set the august Mother of ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... received. With leave of the commodore, he set out from Accra, and proceeded as far as Yansong, the chief town of Acquimbo, distant from the coast about one hundred and forty miles. Here the natives were celebrating the Yam feast, a sort of religious ceremony, to witness which Park got up into a Fetish tree, which is regarded by the natives with fear and dread. Here he remained a great part of the day, exposed to the sun, and was observed to drink a great quantity of palm wine. In dropping down ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... this once indifferent brother had all at once become a sort of sweet-tasted fetish, stroked David's best coat with his adhesive fingers, and then hugged him with an accompaniment of that mingled chuckling and gurgling by which he was accustomed to express the milder passions. But if he had chosen to bite a small morsel out of his beneficent brother's cheek, David would have been ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... changes. This learned and worthy doctor astonished the musical world a few years by his new marks of phrasing in the Beethoven symphonies. They topsy-turvied the old bowing. With Chopin, new dynamic and agogic accents are rather dangerous, at least to the peace of mind of worshippers of the Chopin fetish. Riemann breaks two bars into one. It is a finished period for him, and by detaching several of the sixteenths in the first group, the first and fourth, he makes the accent clearer,—at least to the eye. ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... She was talking to another woman and seemed quite well, only tired, till suddenly she said in a loud voice, 'I am going to die, that I may come back as a spirit and bewitch these devils till they are spirits too.' Then she called upon the fetish of her tribe, put her hands to her breast and fell down dead. At least," added Hans, spitting reflectively, "she did not fall quite down because the slave-stick held her head off the ground. The Arabs were very angry, both because she had cursed ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... and we were very eager to go and see the station it sheltered. Landing was no easy matter, and I waited a long time in a big canoe, manned by twenty paddlers kneeling forward, before the old negro in the stern decided the attempt to be possible. He never stopped invoking every fetish under the sun, and sprinkling the sea out of a brandy bottle, keeping his eye the while on the waves as they came rolling in. Then all at once he gave a great shout, loudly responded to by the twenty paddlers, ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... this uncanny mixture of bird and reptile that has made the kingfisher an object of superstition among all savage peoples. The legends about him are legion; his crested head is prized by savages above all others as a charm or fetish; and even among civilized peoples his dried body may still sometimes be seen hanging to a pole, in the hope that his bill will point out the quarter from which the ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... about and rearrange as she chose; but then that was only a part of their whole incomprehensible way of regarding themselves (in spite of their acute personal and parochial absorptions) as minor members of a powerful and indivisible whole, the huge voracious fetish they called ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... apprehend the imaginations of others or judge them! This is shown by the fact that we can no longer tell whether children who vivify everything in their imagination see their fancies as really alive. It is indubitable that the savage who takes his fetish to be alive, the child that endows its doll with life, would wonder if fetish and doll of themselves showed signs of vitality—but whether they really take them to be alive is unknown to the adult. And if we can not sympathetically apprehend ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... was different. In a strange way she had felt that it was an injustice toward her father, and she began to worship him like a fetish. Even though she but dimly remembered him, she recreated him for herself in most vivid fashion by becoming absorbed in everything she had ever heard about him. She asked Kastager about him and Tage, and every morning and night she kissed a medallion-portrait of his which belonged ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... 'supremacy' must have something more supreme than himself to keep him in order, if it be only a fetish wherewith to tickle his imagination?" suggested the prince with a touch of satire,— "Even kings must bow, or pretend to bow, to the King ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... in these countries is a sacred, or Fetish, animal; and not only a heavy fine is extorted from those who kill one, but the Fetish is supposed to revenge his death ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... the West make a fetish of "progress," which is the ethical camouflage of the desire to be the cause of changes. If we are asked, for instance, whether machinery has really improved the world, the question strikes us as foolish: it has brought great changes and ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... collection, somewhat similar, although a little larger, of my own. In his rare moments of amiability, he could talk on such matters with verve and originality: more usually he preferred to pursue with the bitterest animosity an abstract fetish which he called his "luck." He was by temperament an enraged pessimist; and I could believe, that he seriously attributed to Providence, some quality inconceivably malignant, directed in all things personally against himself. His immense ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... this rude fetish, between it and the altar, whereon lay some flowers, and in such fashion that the moonlight struck full upon her, was a white-robed woman. She was young and very beautiful both in shape and feature, and though her black hair streaming almost to the knees took from ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... have pent in every sigh by which my heart might have ventured to intimate its distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony and joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my small bedroom at Mrs. King's lodgings, and they two should have been my household gods, from which my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the tender and the mighty, should never, either by softness or strength, have severed me. But this was ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... tales of bad men," said the stranger, plucking up spirit, "and these tales drew me away, for the price offered for their capture was great, and my fetish told ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... the poetic spirit of the great war in a superlative degree. His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeks after his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than that of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become a sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentiment what Charles Peguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Peguy nor Brooke had the opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as it seemed for the moment, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... reason that will never be understood until all souls are judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull, everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street after street, ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... prosperity means only the prosperity of a class. Yet such is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press, and of the ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... the Gold Coast every nation has its own, every village, every family, and every individual. A great hill, a rock any way remarkable for its size or shape, or a large tree, is generally the national Fetish. The king's is usually the largest tree in his country. They who choose or change one, take the first thing they happen to see, however worthless—a stick, a stone, the bone of a beast, bird, or fish, unless the worshipper takes a fancy for something of better appearance, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... some quaint fetish about the necessity for maintaining the usual diplomatic forms, there is no necessity for delay in emergencies of this description. If an ordinarily intelligent Englishman, with a fair knowledge of English history and a ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... you to do with these savages and their troubles, lords? If a few of them are killed it is no matter, but as you should know, O Doctor, if you wish to hunt lions there are plenty in that land whither you travel, seeing that the lion is the fetish of the Fung and therefore never killed. But the desert about Zeu is dangerous and harm may come ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Poussin, Milton, Wren, Jane Austen and Mozart are highly civilized artists, and that the creators of the Gothic cathedrals and the author of the Chanson de Roland, Villon, Webster, Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Whitman, Turner, Wagner and the Congolese fetish-makers are not. But, whatever we may mean, assuredly we do not mean that one set is superior to the other. They differ widely; but they differ in the means by which they compass the same end. It is absurd to argue that civilization is either favourable or unfavourable to art; but ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... the packed front room into the passage, and then into a sort of bar parlour. Malim and I also made our way there. "That's the fetish of the club," said Malim, pointing to a barrel standing on end; "and I'll introduce you to the man who is sitting on it. He's little Michael, the musical critic. They once put on an operetta of his at the Court. It ran about two nights, but he reckons all the events of the ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... was a time in this country, even in this country, when a boy or girl went to an institution of higher learning for only one reason: to get an education. And now! Stadia and bowls instead of laboratories and classrooms. Physical perfection has become a fetish and that ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... sense of belonging to a powerful organization had been developed in these harassed, half-wild Indians. They were proud of, and attached to, the mine. It had secured their confidence and belief. They invested it with a protecting and invincible virtue as though it were a fetish made by their own hands, for they were ignorant, and in other respects did not differ appreciably from the rest of mankind which puts infinite trust in its own creations. It never entered the alcalde's head that the mine could fail in its protection and ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... lousy-looking, dressed-up dolls, life size and tinselly, that stood in the glass cases; the blood-streaked Jesus on the crucifix; the mouldering, mumbling, filthy peasant women on their knees; all the sense of trashy, repulsive, degraded fetish-worship was too much for her. She hurried out, shrinking from the contamination of the ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... for revenue reform or its opposite, for radicalism or conservatism,—and a solid array of members in Senate and House equally without pilotage on living issues. Until the South breaks away from its fetish of past fears and prejudices, it cannot rise to its proper opportunities ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... Among soldiers of the best sort the Regiment is apt to be a fetish, and to Desmond the lightest imputation of disregard for its ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... home of Wanderer. In what past age or at how great a distance it was from his own world, he could only imagine. But that the big man who called himself Wanderer loved this country there was not the slightest doubt. It was a fetish with him, a past he was in duty bound to revisit time and again, ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... Greek, there are only two religious possibilities—fetish-dances and spinning dervishes don't count—the Renaissance meant the revival of these two influences, and since the sixteenth century they have both been increasing steadily. Luther was a child of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has always spoken with a Hebrew accent. Christianity ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... free, energetic, wild-falcon spirit had never as yet troubled itself with thoughts of such kind. She had made a hero for herself out of the Dictator—she almost adored him; but it was with the most genuine hero-worship—or fetish-worship, if that be the better and harsher way of putting it—and she had never thought of being in love with him. Her highest ambition up to this hour was to be his friend and to be admitted to his confidence, and—oh, ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... they are cautious in their praises of Mahommedanism, generally confining themselves to imposing its morality only upon the refreshment of the lower classes. They seldom suggest the Mahommedan view of marriage (for which there is a great deal to be said), and towards Thugs and fetish worshippers their attitude may even be called cold. But in the case of the great religion of Gautama they feel sincerely ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... gentility led him into some actions that can only be characterised as childish. Even in Cornwall he was on the lookout for his fetish. On one occasion when dining with the ex-Mayor of Liskeard, he pulled out of his pocket and used instead of a handkerchief, a dirty old grease-stained rag with which he was wont to clean his gun. {408a} This ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... were not for such men we would be savages tonight. Had it not been for a few brave and heroic souls in every age, we would have been naked savages this moment, with pictures of wild beasts tattooed upon our naked breasts, dancing around a dried snake fetish; and I tonight thank every good and noble man who stood up in the face of opposition, and hatred, and death for what he believed to be right. And then they screwed this thumbscrew down as far as they could and threw him into some dungeon, where, in throbbing misery and the darkness ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Beaconsfield in extremis, who literally knew everyone that ought to be known, and who would visit a comparatively humble patient with equal interest. Quain was thoroughly good-natured, ever friendly and even affectionate. Forster's belief in him was as that in a fetish. ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... settle only at its northern coast line and its most southern cape; and, to-day, it has given Cuba all of its benefits, and has left the equally beautiful island of Hayti, only fourteen hours away, sunk in fetish worship and brutal ignorance. ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... them accordingly. They are not guilty of "sins and waste and carelessness"; and some of them are even inclined to question whether they should pay for the results of such sins on the part of other men: and since those who believe in the "fetish of parental responsibility," to quote the favourite Socialist cliche, can show that this is not a fetish but a tutelary deity of Society, whose power has been increasing since backbones were invented, they may be well assured that the last word ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... Mahon—himself the only man of his rank commanding a Division and almost at the top of the Lieutenant-Generals! Oh God, if I could have a Corps Commander like Gouraud! But this block by "Mahon" makes a record for the seniority fetish. I have just been studying the Army List with Pollen. Excluding Indians, Marines and employed men like Douglas Haig and Maxwell, there are only about one dozen British service Lieutenant-Generals senior to ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... things that are to be found in modern literature are simple paraphrases of Holy Writ. And interweave all your sentences with the Sacred Text. All the temporal prosperity of England comes from the use of the Bible, all its spiritual raggedness and nakedness from its misuse. They made it a fetish. And their commentators are proving, or rather trying to prove, that it is only a little wax and pasteboard—only the literature of an obscure and subjugated race. But, even as literature, it has had a tremendous influence in forming the masculinity of the British character. They are now ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... water, and if she breaks the rule, she must give a goat to be killed; its flesh is distributed, and its blood, diluted with water and mixed with herbs, is sprinkled on the watering-place and on the paths leading to it. Were any woman to disregard these salutary precautions, the chief fetish-man in the village would fall sick and die, which would be an ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... how papa glared. Lord Cantilever is the head of his party. Its august, and, I presume, reverenced leader. He is papa's particular fetish. I am not sure that he does regard him as being any lower than the angels, but if he does it is certainly something in decimals. My suggestion seemed as outrageous to him as his suggestion seemed to me. But it is papa's misfortune ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart, and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance of the "before treatment" view of a chiropodist's sign. This darling ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... classes—that it would be inexpedient to urge it, when the object in view was the solution of a pressing difficulty with regard to Ireland taken apart from the rest of the United Kingdom. But that difficulty will be removed under Tariff Reform—one-sided Free Trade is no longer a sacrosanct fetish—and the case of Ireland must be taken not as apart from, but as part of, the United Kingdom. Irish interests, Agricultural and Industrial, can be far better promoted, furthered, and secured under a scientific tariff system than ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... cement that showed a strong tendency to "set" about his form before she could rescue him,—and she had fought with him on the edge of a cliff and had thrown him over; and his director, anxious for the "punch" that was his fetish, had insisted on a panorama of the fall, so that there was no chance for Gil to save himself the bruises he got. Gil Huntley's part it was always to die a violent death, or to be captured spectacularly, because he was the villain whose horrible example ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... "that is the God who has guarded me from the day of my birth. Every one in our country worships the fetish tree, from the wood of which this ...
— What Men Live By and Other Tales • Leo Tolstoy
... The story which had ended so disastrously for the young conductor threw a rather lurid sidelight upon Jackson's accuser. Fairness was the superintendent's fetish, and the revenge which would sleep on its wrongs and go about deliberately and painstakingly to strike a deadly blow in the dark was revolting to him. Yet he was just enough to distinguish between gross vindictiveness and an evil which bore ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... lawyer thinks he owes a moral obligation to his client and to himself to cross-examine. He is compelled to go on. There is a musty tradition of the law that a trial without cross-examination is not a proper trial. It is a legal fetish and one of the things that is done. The judge expects it, the jury expect it, the client expects ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... like the notorious ape and tiger. But he thought that Gideon and Katherine Varick had less of it than any one else he knew; the mediocre was repellent to them; cant and sentiment made them sick; they made a fetish of hard truth, and so much despised most of their neighbours that they would not experience the temptation to grab at popularity. In fact, they would ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... decapitated and the head of the emperor was placed upon them. On the statue of Olympic Jove appeared the bust of the contemptible Caligula; and this incongruous adaptation represented the change of the popular faith from its former heavenly idealisations to the most grovelling fetish worship of the time. This deification of the emperors avenged its terrible blasphemy by the sublime wickedness of those who were so raised above humanity. Here, in this last pagan temple of Rome, converted into one of the earliest ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... pavement, or choose what tie he'll wear on certain days, or give way to some such human weakness when he's alone. We so-called 'men of science' are, I truly believe, the worst of the lot. You can't get rid of one fetish but you have instantly the impulse to kneel to ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... God be thanked for the fetishes with which the less fortunate of us are still allowed to adorn the barren walls of our life! The cathedral, the imaginary "sheltering-place for others," was Lois' fetish, and the thought of it and of the strong-faced man with whom she worked in spiritual partnership was a deep, inspiring consolation. It stood at her right hand and helped partly to overthrow the weight of dread and evil presentiment ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... old as civilization and so wide-spreading should come to an end and be superseded by something else, and that this change should be taking place under our very eyes. But, happily for me, the world-conflict which is now devastating Europe has begun to undermine in the soul of many the fetish-worship of civilization. And to assist further in breaking the spell which civilization may have cast over the imagination of most of my audience, I would remind you that civilization is, after all, a mere mushroom growth, ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... warrant in Scripture; but, if he sometimes speculates falsely, he lives truly, which is by far the most important matter. The mere dead letter of a creed, however carefully preserved and reverently cherished, may be of no more spiritual or moral efficacy than an African fetish or an Indian medicine-bag. What we want is, orthodoxy in practice,—the dry bones clothed with warm, generous, holy life. It is one thing to hold fast the robust faith of our fathers,—the creed of the freedom-loving Puritan and Huguenot,—and quite another to set up the five points of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... then, was his revolutionary substitution of the primitive Elizabethan and early seventeenth century method for the fetish of the single line. For some time it is true the established battle order had been blown upon from various quarters, but no one as yet had been able to devise any system convincing enough to dethrone it. It will be remembered that ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... seems to have been developed by several English authors, each of whom, like pioneers in a new country, left his stamp on subsequent works in the same field. Richardson's governing motive may be summed up in the word "sensibility," which means "delicacy of feeling," and which was a fashion, almost a fetish, in eighteenth-century society. Because it was deemed essential to display proper or decorous feeling on all occasions, Richardson's heroines were always analyzing their emotions; they talked like a book of etiquette; ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... learner, teacher, Thus foreshadow things to come, When the girl shall grow the creature Of false terrors vain and dumb, And entrust their baleful fetish with her ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... olives they saw the hill of Eze rising like a horn; while on its almost pointed apex, the old town hung like some carved fetish, to keep ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... "Fetish," he observed quietly, "the warrior appealing to his oracle of Delphi like a savage to his moon. Passing gods of ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... enter, sharp and welcome, into their lungs. Artifice they drove forth and they set Martin Tupper upon a throne of mahogany to rule over them. A very reign of terror set in. All things were sacrificed to the fetish Nature. Old ladies may still be heard to tell how, when they were girls, affectation was not; and, if we verify their assertion in the light of such literary authorities as Dickens, we find that it is absolutely true. Women appear ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... with a sudden burst of realization. "Then that holy relic, that fetish, the sacred tooth ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... is; yet our usefulness depends upon our being able to clear it away, and to convince [xv] those who mechanically serve some stock notion or operation, and thereby go astray, that it is not culture's work or aim to give the victory to some rival fetish, but simply to turn a free and fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question. In a thing of more immediate interest, just now, than either of the two we have mentioned, the like misunderstanding prevails; and until it is dissipated, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... course it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the world. And I remember what another pessimist of sentiency has uttered: "Transient are all. They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are glad ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Colonel is not here. Never speak of the big drum in that irreverent tone to him, I pray. It would well-nigh give him a fit. The big drum is his fetish, though he nearly smashed it ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... Britons of Britain. In the Imperial Light Horse the proportion was very much higher. But what may fairly be argued is that their exploits have proved, what the American war proved long ago, that the German conception of discipline is an obsolete fetish, and that the spirit of free men, whose individualism has been encouraged rather than crushed, is equal to any feat of arms. The clerks and miners and engineers who went up Elandslaagte Hill without bayonets, shoulder to shoulder with the Gordons, and who, according to Sir George White, saved ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... public opinion in this matter. We look upon Public Opinion with no superstitious reverence,—for Tom's way of thinking is none the wiser because the million other Toms and Dicks and Harries agree with him,—nevertheless, even a fetish may justly become an object of respectful interest to one who is to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... subject to some rule of which he did not even know the elements, and much less the axioms. Herein his instruments, or indeed, any that man could make, were as futile and as useless as would be the prayers of an archbishop addressed to a Mumbo-jumbo in a fetish house. The link was wanting; there was, and could be, no communication between the two. The invisible ether which he had subdued to his purposes was still a constituent part of the world of matter; he must discover the spiritual ether, and discover ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... attic was Maggie's favorite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks; but was now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering. ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... order to help in the solution of this problem I shall state one or two facts about the natives of these regions. The Sherbros and Mendis, both of whom inhabit the vast territory known as Sherbroland, are, of all primitive Africans, the least given to fetish worship. This fact has always proved a stumbling-block to the spread of Mohammedanism in that part of the world. Arab as well as Negro Moslem missionaries have always found the Sherbro and Mendi man rather hard nuts to crack. Many an emissary of the prophet has invaded Sherbroland, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various |
