"Initiatory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evacuation, there came to me a polite request that I should visit M. le Maire at the Hotel de Ville. His worship was elaborately civil but obviously troubled in mind. He coughed nervously several times after the initiatory compliments had passed, and then he began to speak. "Monsieur, you are aware that the Germans are going ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... said to Raphael, with all the gravity of an academician pronouncing his initiatory discourse, "is one of the great Pascal's ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... the presence of Lucian Davlin, she took the initiatory step in the part she was henceforth to play. And she took it unhesitatingly, as if dissimulation was to her no new thing. Truly, necessity, emergency, is the mother of much besides "invention." Entering, she gave him her hand with free ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... the attentive reader will notice in these stories a recurrent pattern of theme and incident: the grotesques, gathering up a little courage, venture out into the streets of Winesburg, often in the dark, there to establish some initiatory relationship with George Willard, the young reporter who hasn't yet lived long enough to become a grotesque. Hesitantly, fearfully, or with a sputtering incoherent rage, they approach him, pleading that he listen to their stories in the hope that perhaps they can ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... parallels between Hindu and Christian ceremonies, but on examination they are generally not found to prove that there has been direct borrowing from Christianity. For instance, the superior castes are commonly styled twice born in virtue of certain initiatory ceremonies performed on them in youth, and it is natural to compare this second birth with baptismal regeneration. But, though there is here a real similarity of ideas, it would be hard to deny that these ideas as well as ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... was, the scrambling and kicking at first was frightful; but Paterfamilias dragged the younger children out into the road, and other help was nigh at hand, and the providential calm that comes over fallen horses after their initiatory struggle was at hand too, and in due time matters were righted: that those two fiery stallions did not kick everything to pieces, and that all four steeds did not gallop us to destruction, was due, under Providence, to the ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... field, and thank God that He has given me the opportunity to do something towards alleviating some of this misery. But what about the work as regards the saving of souls and establishing of a Church? I can only speak of the work in Ta Ss[)u] Kou. It is in its initiatory stage. All the Christians and adherents can sit round the four sides of my table. But I ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... full Moon, the Princess Nu-nah will be brought to the Temple and the Rites performed initiatory to the soul's great change. You, also, my child, must bear her company. The same journey lies before you both and you can go hand in hand through the dark valley of ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner
... circumcision. The Temple was consigned by consecration to the ceremonies of Jupiter Olympius; while the statue of that deity was erected on the altar of burnt-offerings, and sacrifice duly performed in his name. Two women, who had the initiatory ordinance enjoined by the Mosaical law performed on their children, were hanged to a conspicuous part of the city with their infants suspended round their necks; and many other cruelties were perpetrated, the very atrocity of which precludes them at once from popular ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... necessary and wholesome than otherwise. They help to render men insensible to danger, suffering, and death; and as we are so often called upon to fight each other, and die in defence of our liberties, or of our tyrants and oppressors, whichever it may be, it seems to me we are in need of some such initiatory process in the art of seeing blood shed unmoved, and of some lessons which shall diminish our love and regard for life. As for the gladiators, they are wretches who are better dead than alive; and to die ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... soldiers, and turn truth and pathos itself into a jest. They were most likely imitated from the popular ballads. The following is the order of words in which a young lady thinks fit to complain of a desert, into which she has been carried away by a giant. After seven initiatory O's addressed to her friends and to life in general, she ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... of pain which modifies muscular action in a curious way. We have already stated that local pain serves an adaptive purpose. In this light let us now consider headache. Headache is one of the commonest initiatory symptoms of the various infections, especially of those infections which are accompanied by no local pain and by no local muscular action. In peritonitis, cholecystitis, pleurisy, arthritis, appendicitis, salpingitis, child-birth, in obstructions ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... ice." There is hope for him in the one, but only a dreary despair in the other. In the latter part of 1867, the lawyer began to realize the force of this philosophy. The amorous widow was then boarding at the Metropolitan Hotel, and he began to take the initiatory steps to be rid of her. After two years of madness, during which she had sacrificed the respect of every relative she had, including her own daughter, a pretty girl in her teens, it was hardly likely that he would evince the moral courage to declare openly and straightforward ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... holiness—had it been quenched at so unhallowed a stream? But Arbaces knew well the means by which to confirm his conquest. From the arts of pleasure he led the young priest at once to those of his mysterious wisdom. He bared to his amazed eyes the initiatory secrets of the sombre philosophy of the Nile—those secrets plucked from the stars, and the wild chemistry, which, in those days, when Reason herself was but the creature of Imagination, might well pass for the lore of a diviner ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... huddled closer together, and told their beads anew and muttered prayer on prayer. Verily, was it a gloomy day for the Cistercians of Kirkstall Abbey; and one sadly unpropitious to those lay brothers whose initiatory rites had been so ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:—style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason—insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action—true, most of all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence. ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... make you his wife'—Mrs. Coles had said. She would like to know what his 'proposing' had to do with it?— except, perhaps, as an initiatory step. ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... Philosophy. Science considers, primarily and predominantly, the more exact and rigorous relations of Phenomena; and the existence of an exact and definite point of departure in Thought and Being, more fundamental, from the Scientific or rigorously precise point of view, than that of Hegel, is the initiatory ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... forestalled me," he said in an agitated voice, "but it is so flattering for our friend to be the object of eagerness on the part of all good citizens, and to obtain the public vote of high and low, that I cannot complain of being obliged to come second only; therefore, all honor to the initiatory authority!" (Here he bowed respectfully to Minard.) "Yes, Monsieur Thuillier, many electors think of giving you their votes in that portion of the arrondissement where I keep my humble penates; and you have the special advantage ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... through this test of steady-handed manliness, it was the turn of old Kester, at his right hand—and so on, till every man had drunk his initiatory pint under the stimulus of the chorus. Tom Saft—the rogue—took care to spill a little by accident; but Mrs. Poyser (too officiously, Tom thought) interfered to prevent ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... lord of the elements, and Vrihaspati of the Brahmanas. Soma is the lord of (deciduous) herbs, and Vishnu is the foremost of all that are endued with might. Tashtri is the king of Rudras, and Siva of all creatures. Sacrifice is the foremost of all initiatory rites, and Maghavat of the deities. The North is the lord of all the points of the compass; Soma of great energy is the lord of all learned Brahmanas. Kuvera is the lord of all precious gems, and Purandara of all the deities. Such is the highest creation among all entities. Prajapati is the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... language, the first of the Christian emperors was unworthy of that name, till the moment of his death; since it was only during his last illness that he received, as a catechumen, the imposition of hands, and was afterwards admitted, by the initiatory rites of baptism, into the number of the faithful. The Christianity of Constantine must be allowed in a much more vague and qualified sense; and the nicest accuracy is required in tracing the slow and almost imperceptible gradations by which the monarch declared ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... three weeks Rounders continued to go through a performance like the initiatory one, but at the end of that time his ambition moved him to do something more. Pompey was tractable, and he determined to attempt the "meat-jerk." He had not forgotten the advice of Brinton, but he thought it was given through jealousy. He communicated his determination to the manager, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... separated from wisdom and changed one for another, consider whether such virtue is not a mere outline and in reality servile, possessing neither soundness nor truth. But the really true virtue is a purification from all such things, and temperance, justice, fortitude and wisdom itself, are a kind of initiatory purification 38. And those who instituted the mysteries for us appear to have been by no means contemptible, but in reality to have intimated long since that whoever shall arrive in Hades unexpiated and uninitiated shall lie in mud, ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... science that takes off men from sensible objects, and makes them apply themselves to the intelligible and eternal Nature, the contemplation of which is the end of philosophy, as the view of the initiatory mysteries into holy rites. For the nail of pain and pleasure, that fastens the soul to the body, seems to do us the greatest mischief, by making sensible things more powerful over us than intelligible, and by forcing the understanding ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... Basutoland. On the western frontiers of the Transvaal and the Free State strong commandos were assembling for the destruction of Baden-Powell's retaining force at Mafeking and for the capture of Kimberley. Both Kruger and Steyn aimed at results other than those achieved by the initiatory victories of 1880-1. They cherished the hope that the time had come for the establishment of a Boer Republic reaching from the Zambesi to Table Mountain; but, for the accomplishment of so great an enterprise, external assistance was necessary, the aid of their kinsmen in the south, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... fellow just as the shopman had stuffed more work into the green bag—their eyes met. Rhapsody felt an all-overish sensation peculiar to that experienced by an amateur in a shower bath, during his first douse, or the incipient criminal detected in his initiatory crime! Poor Rhapsody felt like fainting, while Miss Alice Somebody, without the nerve to gather up her work, or withstand a further test of the force of circumstances, precipitately left the store, her face red as scarlet, and her demeanor wild ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... passed between the chief conspirators, and of the written evidence recorded by them in various forms, then and afterwards, we have a substantial unmasking of the combined occult influences which presided over the initiatory steps of the great American Rebellion—its central council—the master wheel of its machinery—and the connecting relation which caused all its subordinate parts ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... earliest work where the progress is described, enumerates ten without distinguishing them very clearly. Later writers commonly look at the Bodhisattva's task from the humbler point of view of the beginner who wishes to learn the initiatory stages. For them the Bodhisattva is primarily not a supernatural being or even a saint but simply a religious person who wishes to perform the duties and enjoy the privileges of the Church to the full, much like a communicant in the language ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... choral service. The wind-shaken roses, blooming around her, with their sweet ordos, were the censers and incense, and the sunlighted garden, the earliest sacred place of Bible history, where the first fair woman worshipped, was the hallowed ground of the initiatory rite. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... that he saw supernatural revelations. Again and again the form of an antelope appeared before him. The antelope is the graceful peace spirit of the Ogallalla; but seldom is it that such a gentle visitor presents itself during the initiatory fasts of their young men. The terrible grizzly bear, the divinity of war, usually appears to fire them with martial ardor and thirst for renown. At length the antelope spoke. He told the young dreamer that he was not to follow the path of war; that a life of peace and tranquillity was marked out ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the first of the six initiatory steps in the long way which led to the conclusion that the universe is self-existing, self-sustaining and self-governing, by showing that all the movements of the solar systems were necessarily what they have been by reason ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... beginning, begin ab ovo[Lat]. begin again, begin de novo; start afresh, make a fresh start, take it from the top, shuffle the cards, reshuffle the cards, resume, recommence. Adj. beginning &c. v.; initial, initiatory, initiative; inceptive, introductory, incipient; proemial[obs3], inaugural; inchoate, inchoative[obs3]; embryonic, rudimental; primogenial[obs3]; primeval, primitive, primordial &c. (old) 124; aboriginal; natal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and stopping every man whom he knew to belong to that order, to ask if they took a fee, and if "there was any bedivelment of gridirons and goats, such as the Masons and Odd Fellers had!" Being repeatedly assured that the fee was only a dollar, and that the initiatory process was not very painful, he concluded "to go it, provided they'd promise to run him for constable. Office is the hull any of the scallywags jine 'em for, and I may as well go in for a sheer," said ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... exactly, for we go even further; for if you mark the progression of a sensible man's fluids, you'll find what an emblem of life it presents to you. What is his initiatory glass of 'Chablis' that he throws down with his oysters but the budding expectancy of boyhood,—the appetizing sense of pleasure to come; then follows the sherry with his soup, that warming glow which strength and vigor ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... will see, that she had still greater reason for her jealousy and vigilance. And Lovelace will tell the sex, as he does in Letter XI. of Vol. V., that the woman who resents not initiatory freedoms, must be lost. Love is an encroacher, says he: loves never goes backward. Nothing but the highest act of love ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... will attempt to explain to you the changes through which Madame Sand's mind has passed,—the initiatory trials, labors, and sufferings which she has had to go through,—before she reached her present happy state of mental illumination. She teaches her wisdom in parables, that are, mostly, a couple ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... months before the Constitution was adopted by the Convention. The members of the Convention must therefore have been well acquainted with the provisions of the Ordinance. It provided for a temporary Government, as initiatory to the formation of State Governments. Slavery was prohibited ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... be obtained, by macerating the pressed canes or megass, as it issues from the mill, and repassing it through the rollers; and, be it remembered, that from 40 to 45 per cent. of saccharine juice is nearly, if not altogether, equivalent to a similar per centage of sugar; so that by these initiatory improvements alone, and with little additional trouble, the produce of sugar might be nearly doubled from any given quantity ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... for congratulation that the great Empire of Brazil has taken the initiatory step toward the abolition of slavery. Our relations with that Empire, always cordial, will naturally be made more so by this act. It is not too much to hope that the Government of Brazil may hereafter ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Ulysses S. Grant • James D. Richardson
... ours has taught us definitions, divisions, and partitions of virtue, as so many surnames and branches of a genealogy, without any further care of establishing any familiarity or intimacy betwixt her and us. It has culled out for our initiatory instruction not such books as contain the soundest and truest opinions, but those that speak the best Greek and Latin, and by their fine words has instilled into our fancy the vainest humours ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... revolution was carried on by towns. These organizations were proof against all the attacks of the British Government. For ten years previous to 1775, they had passed resolutions and taken the initiatory steps of resistance. The colonies were more cumbrous, and opinion when expressed was necessarily representative. Representatives may go beyond, or fall short of, the opinions of their principals, but the people themselves ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... was in conjunction with an advance of the column that had forced Johnson to retire, Woodruff was compelled unfortunately to give way, and two regiments on the right of my line went with him, till they rallied on the two reserve regiments which, in anticipation of the enemy's initiatory attack I had sent to Sill's rear ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... in the account of the YUNBEAI of the Euahlayi, their mode of removing the tabu on the totem in food, their magic, their 'multiplex totems,' their methods of hunting, their initiatory ceremonies, their highly moral lullabies, and the whole of their kindly life, Mrs. Parker's book appears to deserve a welcome from the few who care to study the ways of early men, 'the pit whence we were dug.' The Euahlayi are a sympathetic ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... certain specific conditions. Thus, if one, having entered the Church by baptism, withdraws from it, or is excommunicated therefrom, and afterward repents and desires to regain his standing in the Church, he can do so only through baptism. However, such is a repetition of the initiatory ordinance as previously administered. There is no ordinance of "rebaptism" in the Church distinct in nature, form, or purpose, from other baptism; and, therefore, in administering baptism to a subject who has been formerly baptized, the form ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... initiatory stage of thought, of grasping any other theory which would apparently meet the case so well or be more satisfactory. They, of course, had not yet arrived at the idea that God is a personal Spirit whose nature is revealed in the constitutive characteristics ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... exalts, inebriates him, till the scientific apprehension seems to take the place of prayer, oblation, communion. It would be a mistake, he holds, to attribute to the human soul capacities merely passive or receptive. She, too, possesses initiatory power as truly as the divine soul of the world, to which she responds with the free gift of a light and ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... tracks, so similar to hieroglyphics as to justify an initiatory reverence in a Cadmian mind, drawn indefinitely across the smooth-spread yellow sand, led me, curious, to the arena of his achievements. A dozen similar tracks led from different directions, converging to a pile of dung, and here half a dozen Scarabaei, of as many ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... Crispina thraldom after having tasted the delights of liberty would have been a tragedy, and there were even wider considerations to be taken into account. Since his bereavement he had unconsciously taken up a far bolder and more initiatory line in public affairs, and his popularity and influence had increased correspondingly. From being merely a strong man in the political world he began to be spoken of as the strong man. All this he knew would be jeopardised ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... committed to the keeping of the Bards, who were admitted to their office after a severe probation and trying initiatory rites, among which the chief was, that they should paddle alone, in a little coracle, to a shoal at some distance from the coast of Caernarvonshire—a most perilous voyage, supposed to be emblematic both of the trials of Noah and of the troubles ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... increase their ranks by recruits. From Washington the Union army began to advance with considerable strength and determination, compelling General Lee to relinquish his design of penetrating into Pennsylvania. Initiatory steps were now being taken for a great battle, the first encounter of which took place, under General Pleasonton, who commanded our cavalry during this campaign, at the Catoctin Creek, in Middletown, Maryland. ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... Kabalist; and the writer of the Gospel of Saint John a Gnostic or a Neoplatonist. The Gospel of Nicodemus is scarcely more than a copy of the Descent of Hercules into the Infernal Regions; the Epistle to the Corinthians is a distinct reminiscence of the initiatory Mysteries of Eleusis; and the Roman Ritual, according to H. P. Blavatsky, is the reproduction ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... was in no sense undone by the subsequent secret teaching, which was in fact but the filling up of a bare but correct outline," p. 58, and I contrast this with the conduct of the Manichaeans "who represented the initiatory discipline as founded on a fiction or hypothesis, which was to be forgotten by the learner as he made progress in the real doctrine of the Gospel." (2) As to allegorising, I say that the Alexandrians ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... The initiatory for a state organization was taken by the Woman's Temperance Union of Syracuse, which, at a meeting held September 10, 1874, decided to call a state convention of all women's temperance organizations, to be held at Syracuse in October, preparatory to the great national convention which was to ...
— Two Decades - A History of the First Twenty Years' Work of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of the State of New York • Frances W. Graham and Georgeanna M. Gardenier
... led to serious collisions between the gunners of Philadelphia and Baltimore. So far was the dispute carried, that schooners armed, and filled with armed men, cruised for some time on the waters of the Chesapeake, and all the initiatory steps of a little war were taken by both parties. The interference of the general government prevented what would have proved, had it been left to itself, a very ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... before the decisions of a critic can be of absolute value? For a mind at once poetical and philosophical; for a critic whose affections are as free and kindly as the spirit of society, and whose understanding is severe as that of dispassionate government? Where are we to look for that initiatory composure of mind which no selfishness can disturb? For a natural sensibility that has been tutored into correctness without losing anything of its quickness; and for active faculties, capable of ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... rites, mingled with those of freemasonry. The suggestion of this society is said to have come from a curious book he picked up on a second-hand stall in London. The society attracted people by the strangeness of its initiatory rites, and the promises of happiness and wellbeing made by its founder to those who joined it. Lodges were established in many countries, many disciples were obtained, great riches were amassed, ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir |
