"Instinctive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there is to be any other rule, that of hereditary succession is perhaps as good as any. By no other rule is it possible to preserve the liberties of the State. By no other to intrust the power of making the laws to those only who have that keen instinctive sense of injustice and wrong which enables them to detect baseness and corruption in their most secret hiding-places, and that moral courage and generous manliness and gallant independence that make them fearless in dragging out the perpetrators ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... late to free himself. With an instinctive movement of the hands he caught up the manhole cover, shield-like. As he did so he saw the glimmer of the polished steel and heard the repeated challenge. But he neither paused nor hesitated. He let his knees break under him, and as he fell he saw to it that the rim of the manhole dropped into its ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... came at last, no one seemed happier or more eager than Len Haley. An instinctive fear seemed to possess the lad that his uncle would be prowling about the mountains and apprehend him when he least expected it; hence, to go flying away to Baltimore in a big automobile was to ...
— Dorothy's Triumph • Evelyn Raymond
... as all knowledge in it being of a fragmentary and piecemeal description, nothing complete. It may well happen that an intelligent boy shall be unable to understand a seemingly simple thing, because some bit of knowledge which his instructor takes it for granted he possesses, and probably thinks instinctive, is wanting to fill ...
— Children and Their Books • James Hosmer Penniman
... act of intellectual suicide. The wise, as the world goes on, may differ more and more from some of Milton's opinions. They can never escape the greatness either of the poet or of the man. Men's appreciation of Milton is almost in proportion to their instinctive understanding of what greatness is. Other poets, perhaps, have things of greater beauty: none in English, none, perhaps, in any language, fills us with a more exalting conviction of the greatness of human life. No man rises from an hour with Milton without feeling ashamed of the triviality of his ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... dogs for cats is hereditary; it is an instinct common to all dogs, and, seeing that instinctive sensations do not owe their origin to any deliberate act of reasoning, it is generally difficult to account for them. It is therefore worth drawing attention to the fact that Rolf did, nevertheless, make an attempt at ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... that she saw his face contract as they scrambled over some shelf of jutting stone; but they pushed on cautiously until they came to a precipitous descent. Ida sat down gasping, when her companion stopped, and gazed with an instinctive shrinking into the gulf below. She could now see the climbing pines, black beneath the moon, and the river shining far away in the midst of them, but they seemed to go straight down. She was very weary, and scarcely felt able ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... away, but instead of returning directly home Roger went back to the hotel. Even amid the hallucinations of opium the father had too much instinctive delicacy to mention Mildred's name or to make any reference to Arnold's intentions; but the quick-witted fellow gained the impression that the elegant young stranger had been a welcome and favored suitor in the past better days, and he had a consuming wish to see ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... every hour are reminded how hard life is, even at its most prosperous moments, who have nothing to gain by war, and all, even life, to lose; who by virtue of their own struggles have a deep knowledge of, a certain dumb sympathy with, the struggles of their fellow-creatures; an instinctive repugnance to making those struggles harder; who have heard little and dreamed less of those so-called "national interests," that are so often mere chimeras; who love, no doubt, in their inarticulate way the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... dickens are you fellers drivin' at?" demanded Anderson. The remainder of his posse deserted the red-hot stove and drew near with the instinctive feeling that ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... only when I speak of him that I can overcome in you the insensibility which is killing me. My suspicions were true after all: you deceived me for his sake. Oh! the instinctive feeling of jealousy was right which forced me to quarrel with that man, to reject the perfidious friendship which he tried to force upon me. He has returned to town, and we shall meet! But why do I say 'returned'? ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... heroism they did not realise they possessed. They had grown so accustomed to a brave way of living that they sincerely believed they were quite ordinary persons. That's courage at its finest—when it becomes unconscious and instinctive. ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... at once with a little gasp of relief. The hand which the man had been holding hung limp and nerveless at her side. She held it away from her with an instinctive repulsion, born of her unconquerable antipathy to the touch of strangers. She began rubbing it with her pocket-handkerchief. The man himself was not a pleasant object. Part of his head was swathed in linen bandages. Such of his features ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sunny, and this gave her a reason for opening her large parasol. She cowered under it, hiding herself from the women who rolled by in shiny carriages with high-stepping horses; not so much because she feared she might meet acquaintances, as from an instinctive desire to hide herself, a thing so shamed and everlastingly wretched, from every human eye. And so it happened that, when she was close to the station, she missed seeing and being seen by Tims, who was driving to Mr. Goring's house in a hired trap ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... of the helicopter came across the broken ground. Now louder, now momentarily muted, its moments of loudness grew steadily more strong. It was coming nearer. Thorn gripped his spear in an instinctive, utterly futile gesture of defense. ...
— Invasion • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Boxer and another of our dogs—without whom indeed, we never left the camp, as they were sure to give us timely warning should any Indians be lurking around. We knew, however, that they would not attack the red-men, of whom they seemed to have an instinctive dread, but would silently slink close to us, should any enemies be near. We were looking out, as may be supposed, for Indian trails, as well as for those of the other emigrant train of which we had heard, when we saw signs on the ground which at first puzzled us. We dismounted ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... soil wherever they stopped, always home lovers and home builders, loyal to their own people, instinctive clan leaders and clan followers. A sturdy, honest, covenant-keeping, God-fearing, fighting people, above all things they hated sham and pretence. They never boasted of their families, though some of them might have quartered the royal arms of ...
— The Clansman - An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan • Thomas Dixon
... made to play with puppets like you, mademoiselle," said the comtesse, addressing herself to the unconscious little being as she took it in her arms, but belying her words by the grace and instinctive maternal expertness with which she handled and soothed the infant. "Yes, you can go, Sarah—au revoir, Mademoiselle Madeleine. Fie the little wretch, what faces she pulls! And you, Margery, you need not wait either; I shall keep this creature for a while. Poor little one!" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... his position, he felt for his automatic pistol. The butt caught a fold of his sash and he was forced to bend his elbow in order to get it out. It looked as if he would be too late, and he slipped as the movement dislodged the rubbish on which he sat. Then, as he shrank with an instinctive quiver from the prick of the knife, the figure swerved ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... afternoon the expected arrival of the subject of Eustacia's ruminations created a bustle of preparation at Blooms-End. Thomasin had been persuaded by her aunt, and by an instinctive impulse of loyalty towards her cousin Clym, to bestir herself on his account with an alacrity unusual in her during these most sorrowful days of her life. At the time that Eustacia was listening to the rickmakers' conversation ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... ambition;—there was, indeed, little that common constructors of history would consider to be history. Yet it was now written, and made common thought by an unfettered press,—"Nobler days nor deeds were never seen than at this time."[2] This was an instinctive appreciation of a great truth; for the real American Revolution was going on in the tidal flow of thought and feeling, and in the formation of public opinion. A people inspired by visions of better days for humanity, luxuriating in the emotions of hope ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... only assume perdition. You are afraid to assume heaven. I may take pride in that which I may abstract from my anatomy. I must not allude to my body as frankly as to my soul. I must withdraw my body from the public eye. From discussion. From its instinctive avowals. Our bodies must be coffined. Treated as dead before they are born. Regarded as conveniences. Not as essential entities. The body is only for a little while. The soul is forever. But why is that little while ...
— Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living • H.W. Long
... fought with him in many a doubtful battle With all the odds against us, but his daring, Joined to a rare instinctive foresight By which he could anticipate all dangers, Would win the day and ne'er was he defeated! In this our latest war he took great risks, Might have been taken by his foes, and would Have lost his liberty, his throne, his life; But venturing much he won, and by exposing His own ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus
... 'Keeping His commandments' does not explain the whole process by which we do the things that are pleasing in His sight. We must also take this other metaphor of the bearing of fruit. Neither an effortless, instinctive bringing forth from the renewed nature and the Christlike disposition, nor a painful and strenuous effort at obedience to His law, describe the whole realities of Christian service. There must be the effort, for men do not grow Christlike in character as the vine grows its grapes; but ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... dangers. Yet, so long as our struggle was but a domestic contest, a resistance against oppression by a perjurious king, you had no reason to think that the sympathy you felt for us, being a generous manifestation of the affections of free men, was at the same time an instinctive presentiment of a policy, which you in your national capacity will be called upon by circumstances, not only to consider, but, as I ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... upon the will. But its supremacy seems to be this quality which it shares with or derives from the taste—its immediate and spontaneous operation. It is, he seems to mean, a direct perception of beauty in character applied to the regulation of conduct. Virtue corresponds to an instinctive and so far ultimate appreciation of beauty of character. Mackintosh insists upon this intrinsic charm of virtue in the language which struck Mill as simply foppish affectation. The pleasure of 'benevolence' itself, says Mackintosh, is infinitely superior to the pleasures to which ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... he went out at nights. When one had hunted fierce game in Canada, shooting driven pheasants was tame sport, and the beaters found the birds; but on the sands one must match one's intelligence against the instinctive cunning of the ducks and geese. Besides, there was some risk that gave the thing a spice. Belts of sand were dangerously soft and the tides were treacherous. Sometimes they ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... sight of the man he had really come to see, Carroll was conscious of an instinctive dislike. Lawrence was of medium height, slightly stooped and not unpleasing to the eye. But his brows were inclined to lower and the eyes themselves were set too closely together. He was dressed plainly—almost harshly, and he stared at Carroll in a ...
— Midnight • Octavus Roy Cohen
... any special work, perhaps eleven years of this kind of life have unfitted me for steady sustained thought. And you know well I bring but slender natural qualifications to the task. A tolerably true ear and good memory for words, and now something of the instinctive insight into new tongues, but that is ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... organization, not troubled about the rightness of their methods, provided they escape the toils of the law, able to command men and successfully to carry through large policies. They are not without their personal attractions, for it is instinctive to admire that which is big and able to achieve. Many of them also make permanent contributions to the upbuilding of the nation. Oriental history is also full of analogies: Nebuchadrezzar, Cyrus, Alexander, and ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... eighteenth century lay generally in assigning to the free and self-conscious will what could be explained by means of the natural effects of human powers and capacities. That century understood too little the theory of instinctive activity. Nobody will claim that in the transposition of willing into the expression of human capacity, the question of determinism is solved. The solution of this question is not our task. We do get an opening however through ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... pity.... They have heard of love—and they do not know. If they ever dream of it it is not what they have imagined when a man suddenly comes crashing through the barriers of friendship and stuns them with an incoherent recital of his own desires. And yet, in spite of the shock, it is with them instinctive to be kind. No woman can endure an appeal unmoved; except for them there would be no beggars; their charity is not a creed: it is the essence of them, the beginning of all ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... rolls to be destroyed. They proceeded to break into Maidstone jail and release the prisoners there, and subsequently entered Rochester. These Kentish insurgents then set out toward London, wishing no doubt to obtain access to the young king, who was known to be there, but also directed by an instinctive desire to strike at the capital of the kingdom. By Wednesday, the 12th of June, they had formed a rendezvous at Blackheath some five miles below the city. Some of the Essex men had crossed the river and joined them, ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney
... existence must be sacrificed. The great sign of true patriotism, the development of selfishness into sacrifice, is the product of political life. That sense of duty which is supplied by race is not entirely separated from its selfish and instinctive basis; and the love of country, like married love, stands at the same time on a material and a moral foundation. The patriot must distinguish between the two causes or objects of his devotion. The attachment which is given only to the country is like obedience given only to the State—a ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... not love you?" the pretty child asked, pouting a little through her tears, and moved by the instinctive coquetries of her sex. ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... on during the gray, lowering, chilly day, and toward evening the clouds broke in the west, and a setting sun shone through the rift, burnishing the desert to red and gold. Shefford's instinctive but deadened love of the beautiful in nature stirred into life, and the moment of its rebirth was a melancholy and sweet one. Too late for the artist's work, but not too late for ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... reports of the neighbouring shepherds, by whom, it appeared, the black-faced ewe had been tracked for a considerable way in a direction leading from Wormiston to Newby. It was indeed ascertained that instinctive affection for her lamb had led this animal across the Tweed, and over the lofty heights between Cailzie and Newby; a route of very considerable difficulty, and probably quite different from that by which she had been led away, but the most direct that could have been taken. Mr. Gibson ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... all right." Walters laughed. "But they have something else, an instinctive ability to do the right thing at the right time and that indefinable something that makes them true men of space, rather than ordinary ground hogs ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... safely at defiance. Time had accustomed the women to her presence in the house, without shaking the vague conviction which possessed them all alike, that the newcomer was not one of themselves. All that Magdalen could do in her own defense was to keep the instinctive female suspicion of her confined within those purely negative limits which it had occupied from the first, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... impression than the sight of this fire. The air was cool; still l'Encuerado was not allowed to kindle a light, which would perhaps have betrayed us to foes. It was now twenty days since we had met with a human being, and our first feeling, after the instinctive joy at the idea of seeing our fellow-creatures, was, alas! ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... said Fenwick, testily; but as Watson merely replied by an interrogative and attentive silence, he threw himself into his tale—headlong. He told it at far greater length than Eugenie had ever heard it; and throughout, the subtle, instinctive appeal of man to man governed the story, differentiating it altogether from the same story, ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... less contented; and his tearless moan went to his sister's heart, for the poor little fellow had been wont to lie day and night in his mother's bosom, and she had been as uneasy without him as he now was without her. All her other babes had grown past her helpless instinctive tenderness, and Theodore's continued passiveness had been hitherto an advantage, which had always been called his 'goodness ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and while Nini and Ivana gasped, she clapped her hands in an instinctive, feminine reaction of joy. "But there are things here which I believe none but the Ducas of our race have ever seen! Oh! Why, the sacred girdle is as ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... their conversation had presumably become interesting enough to justify him in securing a seat nearer to her. The talk returning to ruins, Miss Elsie informed him that they were going to see some on Kelpie Island. The consul, from some instinctive impulse,—perhaps a recollection of Custer's peculiar methods, gave her a sign of warning. But the Englishman only lifted his eyebrows in a kind of ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... for this suite, but as success has imitators who hope for success, many factories both in and out of France copied this series. How shall we know the true from the false? By that sixth sense that has its origin in a taste at once instinctive and cultivated. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... manifest that reflex and instinctive sequences are not determined by the experiences of the INDIVIDUAL organism manifesting them, yet there still remains the hypothesis that they are determined by the experiences of the RACE of organisms forming its ancestry, which by infinite repetition in countless ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... of the poet is liable to take him unprepared, and the mere apparition of a poet who can add up a pounds shillings and pence column offhand might well induce apoplexy. Yet it is to be feared that that providence which arms every evil thing with its fang has so protected the publisher with an instinctive dread of verse in any form, and especially in manuscript, that he has, after all, little to fear from ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... the impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go 'meandering' about the world. It was in vain to represent to her that some conveniences, tea perhaps included, resulted from this objectionable practice. She always returned, with greater emphasis and with an instinctive knowledge of the strength of her objection, 'Let us ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... on through such a length of years, 140 The Shepherd, if he loved himself, must needs Have loved his Helpmate; but to Michael's heart This son of his old age was yet more dear— Less from instinctive tenderness, the same Fond spirit that blindly works in the blood of all— 145 Than that a child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts, ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... whistled, whenever he found himself at a sufficient distance from the scattered houses which lined the roads. He was everywhere respectfully greeted, with an instinctive solemnity of a godly sort—a solemnity without fear. Men looked at him as he swung along, with right Scottish respect for his character and work. They knew him to be at once a man among men ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... advanced that there is no such thing as positive fact, but only relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive perception of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only basis of inference, and in now taking my tenth or twentieth look at London I have been careful to keep about me a pocket vision of New York, so as to see what London is like by making constantly sure what it is not like. A pocket ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... gaze and made her vision keen. He saw that she knew him, knew him even in that peasant's dress and under the new stubble of beard. The flash became for a moment a fire, and her figure quivered, but he was not afraid. He had an instinctive confidence that she would understand, and that she would not betray him by any ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... case is that the Socialist, whether he wanted to or no, would no more be able to abolish personal property altogether than he would be able to abolish the human liver. The extension of one's personality to things outside oneself is indeed as natural and instinctive a thing as eating. But because the liver is necessary and inevitable, there is no reason why it should be enlarged to uncomfortable proportions, and because eating is an unconquerable instinct there is no excuse ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... honour,—in recognition not so much of your brilliant and unsparing service to state and nation, as of your sympathetic insight into the institutions of popular government as the people intended them. An instinctive faith in the righteous intentions of the average man has endowed you with a singular power to discern the best intent of the public will. Men follow gladly in your lead, and are ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... made an instinctive movement to detain him, but he flung him aside and entered the drawing-room, the servant recovering his equilibrium and following on a run. Light from great crystal chandeliers dazzled him for a moment; the butler again confronted ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... elderly sergeant he might have had a chance, man to man, one arm to two; but with Superintendent Cairns his only weapons were his wits. He lay quite still and reviewed the situation, as it was, and as it had been. In the very moment of his downfall, by instinctive presence of mind he had preserved the use of his right hand, and that was a still unsuspected asset of incalculable worth. It had been the nucleus of all his plans; without a hand he must have resigned himself to the inevitable from the first. Then he had split up the party. He heard ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... Rollo had been asked whether he supposed that Carlos understood what he said, he would have answered no; and yet he continually forgot to act upon this belief, but talked on, under the influence of a sort of instinctive feeling that good plain English, such as he took care to speak, could not fail to convey ideas to any boy that heard it. Under the influence of a similar feeling, Carlos talked Spanish to Rollo, each imagining that the other understood him, at least in some degree, while, in fact, neither ...
— Rollo in Paris • Jacob Abbott
... had previously stood motionless beneath his lifted dagger, feeling herself unable to break from his grasp of iron, and supposing that any effort to do so would bring down the dagger into her delicate breast. A woman's instinctive horror of such a blow deterred her from the slightest movement that might invite it. She had trusted to me for what action might serve to save us from our enemies. But now her terror of leaving my presence, and her horror of being alone with Montignac, overcame her ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... could make such a prolonged and desperate resistance with only the faintest pretext of right as a basis for its action. Yet a great and fundamental cause of the feeling manifested lay hidden away beneath the surface in the instinctive antipathy of the slaveholders to Mr. Adams and all his thoughts, his ways, and his doings. For into this question of (p. 191) countenancing the Panama Congress, slavery and "the South" entered and imported into a portion of the opposition a certain element of reasonableness and propriety in a ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... of coveting another term as President—which every other historian and biographer from Hildreth to Sydney Howard Gay has pronounced, and which has become a stock historical convention; holds Jackson's campaign ending at New Orleans an imbecile undertaking redeemed only by an act of instinctive pugnacity at the end; gives Scott and Jacob Brown the honor they have never before received in fair measure; and in many other points redistributes praise and blame with entire independence, and with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... A sort of instinctive dread directed Norman's steps down the open portion of Randall's Alley, and, voices growing louder as he came nearer, confirmed his suspicions. The fence at this end was down, and, on entering the field, a gleam of light met his eye on the ground—a ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... chilled the growth of the various young loves that had budded so auspiciously. She always agreed with everybody and everything in sight, even to the point of changing her mind on the instant, if circumstances seemed to make it advisable. Her instinctive point of view, when she went so far as to hold one, was somewhat cut and dried; in a word, priggish. She kept a young man strictly on his good behavior, that much could be said in her favor; the only criticism that ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... since too, I believe," said Mr. Prendergast, with a lawyer's instinctive desire to divert ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... structure is caused by a greater number of germs of corals becoming attached to the declivity, than to the central plateau of a submarine bank: it likewise applies to the notion formerly entertained (Forster's "Observ." page 151), that lagoon-islands owe their peculiar form to the instinctive tendencies of the polypifers. According to this latter view, the corals on the outer margin of the reef instinctively expose themselves to the surf in order to afford protection to corals living in the lagoon, which belong to ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... at the instinctive prompting of his heart. He felt obliged to speak and he turned to Rakitin. If Rakitin had not been there, he would have spoken to the air. But Rakitin looked at him ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... the most cruel deeds which war has ever perpetrated. For these woes, which no imagination can gauge, Louis XIV. is responsible. He has escaped any adequate earthly penalty for the crime, but the instinctive sense of justice implanted in every breast, demands that he should not escape the retributions of a righteous God. "After ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... has been and still is a good deal of mutual ill-feeling both in Germany and in England cannot be denied. Rivalry between nations is always accompanied by feeling which is all the stronger when it is instinctive and therefore, though not unintelligible, apt to be irrational. But what in this case is really at the bottom of it? There have no doubt been a number of matters that have been discussed between the two Governments, ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... came into my mind. I recalled her references to men who get in a 'funk' and want to stop proceedings on the eve of the wedding, and then I saw the whole thing. William was that sort of man. I had an instinctive idea just then that no matter who he was going to marry he would have come to me at the eleventh hour with the ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... not understand his refusal, but her instinctive tact warned her not to insist. She returned the bill to her purse, thanked him again, and turned quickly to hide the slight flush of annoyance. George ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... touched me deeply came from some girl students of the Western Province, enclosing their little contribution "for the service of our common motherland." It is only the instinctive mother-heart that can truly realise the bond that draws together the nurselings of the common homeland. There can be no real misgiving for the future when at the country's call man offers the strength of his life and woman ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... next moment his eye fell upon the shoulder and arm that lay nearest to him, and the little bundle, swathed in flannel, that it clasped to her breast. His brow grew dark as he gazed. The sleeping woman moved. Perhaps it was an instinctive consciousness of his presence; perhaps it was only the current of cold air from the opened door: but she shuddered slightly, and, still unconscious, drew the child as if away from HIM, and nearer to her breast. The shamed blood rushed to Rand's face; and saying half aloud, "I'm not ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... be inferred that the kind of education called for was one mainly of character. In these men, whether for the work of business or of government, what was wanted was the will to do well and justly, and the instinctive hatred of all evil and unjust dealing. Such an education of the will and character is supplied (whatever be its shortcomings in other ways) by our English public school education, for men whose work in life is in many ways singularly ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... been said that the love of the chase is an inherent delight in man—a relic of an instinctive passion. If so, I am sure the pleasure of living in the open air, with the sky for a roof and the ground for a table, is part of the same feeling; it is the savage returning to his wild and native habits. I always look back to our boat cruises, and my land ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... fragment, of this romance, Doctor Dolliver, followed by Pansie, goes out into the garden one frosty October morning, and while the apothecary is digging at his herbs, the imitative child, with an instinctive repulsion for everything strange and morbid, pulls up the fatal plant from which the elixir of life was distilled, and frightened at her grandfather's chiding, runs with it into the cemetery where it is lost among the graves and never seen ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... the urchins that come From many a haunt that is never a home, Instinctive as ducklings to swim and to wade, Scarce knowing aforetime why water ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... high-strung individual at best, reacted violently to the change in the creature. In an instinctive blaze of anger and frustration, Cantrell reached out and slapped him ...
— Ten From Infinity • Paul W. Fairman
... by the fact that he was no talker at any time, and when in liquor clamped his jaws like a sprung trap. Whatever effect the alcohol may have had upon his mind was not apparent because no thoughts passed his lips. The rum did go to his head, however. The instinctive effort of will that kept his legs steady and his mouth shut had no root in thought. Behind the veil of those light eyes, the brain of Pharaoh Daggs, drunk, was like a seething pit, one black fuddle of ugliness. To compensate for the apparent lack of effect of liquor upon him, the inward disturbance ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... estimates of what will be, by considering what has been. They had a wonderful art of navigation, considering that they had no compass, sextant, or other instrument, and that their vessels were always comparatively small. The handling of canoes, like swimming, is instinctive with them, and no white ever compares with them ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... last vouchsafed some little light as to his motives. There was an old story, he told her, that his estate would go to a Feltram. He had an instinctive distrust of that family. It was a feeling not given him for nothing; it might be the means of defeating their plotting and strategy. Old Trebeck, he fancied, had a finger in it. Philip Feltram had told him that Mardykes was to pass away to a Feltram. Well, they might conspire; but he would take ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... me such general displeasure. He is totally unfixed in his principles, and wants to puzzle other people. I said his principles had been poisoned by a noted infidel writer, but that he was, nevertheless, a benevolent good man. JOHNSON. 'We can have no dependance upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded upon principle. I grant you that such a man may be a very amiable member of society. I can conceive him placed in such a situation that he is not much tempted ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... but what irritates and antagonizes me in any environment is the presumption on the part of the creator of that environment that theirs is the only world-view. I suppose the really strongest thing in me is an instinctive spirit of contradiction, for I always rise spontaneously against anything and everything that is proclaimed to me as being so. This is perhaps rather sweeping but it is more or less so. People influence me never by what they tell me but by the general ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... another shed where the owner was installing a new machine. She hesitated in the doorway, oppressed by an instinctive dread. The great hall was vibrating from the machines and black shadows filled the air. He reassured her with a smile, swearing that there was nothing to fear, only she should be careful not to let her skirts get caught in any of the gears. He went first and she followed into the deafening ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... went forth to others, it attracted others to him. Especially those whom he called the "plain people" felt themselves drawn to him by the instinctive feeling that he understood, esteemed, and appreciated them. He had grown up among the poor, the lowly, the ignorant. He never ceased to remember the good souls he had met among them, and the many kindnesses they had done him. Although ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... scruples swept aside in the first rush of their reunion. He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go. Yet as he sat there he thought of Strefford, he thought of Coral Hicks. He had been a coward in regard to Coral, and Susy had been sincere and courageous in regard to Strefford. Yet his mind dwelt on Coral ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... person whose laugh dismayed him, and when at last he escaped from the cafe where Mr. Bladen had hauled him to join them in a bock he felt as if the whole boulevard was looking at him, and judging him by his company. Later, an instinctive conviction regarding the young person with Mr. Bladen sent the hot blood into his cheek, and he returned to the pension in such a miserable state of mind that Miss Byng was alarmed and advised him to conquer his ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... it in our hearts to make any distinctions in so happy a partnership; but while we see something more than promise in both writers, we have a feeling that Mr. Piatt shows greater originality in the choice of subjects, and Mr. Howells more instinctive felicity of phrase in the treatment of them. Both of them seem to us to have escaped remarkably from the prevailing conventionalisms of verse, and to write in metre because they have a genuine call ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... Cynthia, who received him, led him to this apartment and left him alone with Myrtle. She welcomed him very cordially, but colored as she did so,—his visit was a surprise. She was at work on a piece of embroidery. Her first instinctive movement was to thrust it out of sight with the thought of concealment; but she checked this, and before the blush of detection had reached her cheek, the blush of ingenuous shame for her weakness had caught and passed it, and was in full ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... errors committed in previous existences. A stone, a plant, an insect, a demon, or a god are only illusory forms, each encompassing an identical soul on its way to deliverance, as it is caught at different stages of its long calvary and imprisoned through original sin and the instinctive desire for life. Whence we see emerging a new feeling of charity which embraces all beings. Their moral character is felt to be the same as that of man, their goal is the same, and in the vast world of illusion each seeks to ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci
... which are the natural consequence of the warm temperaments of more southern nations; for love was numbered with the base inferior passions, in the frigid and hardy composition of the warrior of the north. It was the offspring of reasoning and observation, not of instinctive sentiment and momentary impulse. In the wild, poetical code of the old Gothic superstition was one axiom, closely and strangely approximating to an important theory in the Christian scheme—the watchfulness of an omnipotent Creator over a finite creature. Every action ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... audacity and unscrupulousness of her father, the voluptuous pleasure-loving nature of her mother, and mingled with both, qualities which came from neither. She was a tyrant, held in check by a singular caution, with an instinctive perception of the presence of danger, to which her purposes always ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... with its place pre-appointed in the process—a fact which gives the highest sanction to the constitution in question and establishes its absolute necessity. The origin of a State involves imperious lordship on the one hand, instinctive submission on the other. But even obedience—lordly power, and the fear inspired by a ruler—in itself implies some degree of voluntary connection. Even in barbarous states this is the case; it is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... animals, has certain instinctive propensities, which; prior to the perception of pleasure or pain, and prior to the experience of what is pernicious or useful, lead him to perform many functions which terminate in himself, or have a relation to his fellow creatures. He has one set of dispositions which tend ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... incredulity of the lower classes—and be it observed that their incredulity is obviously based on an instinctive feeling that the claims and arguments of their own party are alike preposterous—underneath this vein of unbelief is a vein of extraordinary credulity. Poverty is to be at once and for ever abolished. "The millions ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... than their power to bring money—if there are higher faculties to be exercised than acquisitive and sensual ones—if the pleasures which poetry and art and science and philosophy can bring are of any moment; then is it desirable that the instinctive inclination which every child shows to observe natural beauties and investigate natural phenomena, should be encouraged. But this gross utilitarianism which is content to come into the world and ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... his wife he was almost a stranger, he had paid her the compliment of letting her know the date and hour of his return; not from any impulse towards friendliness, but from an instinctive pride of race, which made it impossible for him to slight a white woman in the eyes of the natives. However far apart their lives were sundered, his servants, at least, would have to respect her as the Memsahib and the mistress of his house; ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... wrought, is not our model; for, according to that faith demanded at setting out, fine art delights us from its being the semblance of what in nature delights. Now, as the artist does not work by the instrumentality of rule and science, but mainly by an instinctive impulse; if he copy the antique, unable as he is to segregate the merely delectable matter, he must needs copy the whole, and thereby multiply models, which the casting-man can do equally well; whereas if he copy ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... everyone believed in it. The state of Europe in that pious epoch need not be described. Society is not maintained by the conjectures of theology, but by those moral sentiments, those gregarious virtues which elevated men above the animals, which are now instinctive in our natures and to which intellectual culture is propitious. For, as we become more and more clearly enlightened, we perceive more and more clearly that it was with the whole human population as it was with the primeval clan; the welfare of every individual is dependent on the welfare ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... indeed, others with less hostile intentions. All that they cared for was the spectacle, always so attractive to the mob, whose instinctive pride is flattered by it,—the sight of greatness ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... is, that degraded and sensual men have an instinctive aversion to religious truth, and a still greater distaste for religious restraint. The carnal man is at war with God. When will this great truth, so loudly proclaimed in every page of the gospel, be practically acknowledged and acted upon? To those ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... and there was a Turkish officer in riding pants and red morocco slippers, back from the Yemen with two or three incurable complaints. He talked out-of-date Turkish politics in bad French and eked out his ignorance of table manners with instinctive racial habit. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... feet, covering it as with a fresh fall of snow. Complete tenderness overcame him as he beheld Amy in this new sacred relation; a look of religious reverence for her filled his eyes. He asked himself what he had ever done to deserve all this.Perhaps it is the instinctive trait of most of us to seek an explanation for any great happiness as we are always prone to discuss the causes of our adversity. Accordingly, and in accord with our differing points of view of the ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... His Life that He should lay it down! Like Samson himself, that strange prototype of the Strong Man armed, he slew more of the enemies of our souls by His Death than by all His gracious Life. For this cause He came into the world. For Sacrifice, which is the very heart of man's instinctive worship of God, was set there, imperishably, in order to witness to and be ratified by His One Offering which alone could truly take away sins; and to deny it or to obscure it is to deny or to obscure the whole history of the human race, from the Death of Abel to the Death of ...
— Paradoxes of Catholicism • Robert Hugh Benson
... your forgiveness humbly enough if that were of any use. It isn't, I know. Sins that are instinctive, not of malice, lie ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... in the man's face. His son and daughter arose as if moved by an instinctive realisation of a duty, and perhaps for the first time in their lives were submissive to an influence they had never quite recognised before: a father's unalterable right to command. For once in their lives they were meek in his ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... understand us no better than we understand the lower animals of our own world. Why, I have come across here very learned discussions of the question as to whether gilaks, that is men, have any means of communication. One writer claims that we do not even reason—that our every act is mechanical, or instinctive. The dominant race of Pellucidar, David, have not yet learned that men converse among themselves, or reason. Because we do not converse as they do it is beyond them to imagine that we converse at all. It is thus that we reason in relation to the brutes of our own world. They know that the Sagoths ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... patriotism, honesty and integrity, entitled him to the respect and lasting gratitude of his fellow citizens. The taste for letters which characterised his Harvard College days, followed him into public affairs, and if his style lacked the simplicity of Madison's and the prophetic grasp and instinctive knowledge of Hamilton, he shared their clearness of statement and breadth of view. He displayed similar capacity in administration and in keeping abreast of the times. Although a lifelong member of the Federal party, whose ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... with the instinctive gallantry of his nation to the female figure which now appeared at the door of her compartment. She stood for a moment listening, seemingly greatly agitated, and then, without a word, disappeared, retreating hastily ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... With instinctive delicacy Mr. Bernard softly closed the door, and retired, feeling that the scene had become too sacred ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... advancement of her counsellor, Mary de Medici continued to press the king to admit Richelieu to his cabinet. Louis long resisted her solicitations, such was his instinctive dread of the man destined to rule him. Nor was it until 1624, after the lapse of sixteen months, and when embarrassed with difficult state questions, which no one then in office was capable of managing, that the royal will was declared admitting ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... the last speaker, imploringly caught the Methodist by the skirt of his coat. But a change had come over that before impassioned intercessor. With an irresolute and troubled air, he mutely eyed the suppliant; against whom, somehow, by what seemed instinctive influences, the distrusts first set on foot were now generally reviving, and, if anything, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... his lot, he began to feel the pride of public life. He continued to be a regular guest at Joe's, and was careful not to seem to avoid the society of his fellow-clerks in the evenings, for he had an instinctive feeling that it was as well they should not become acquainted with his circle in Warwick Street. And yet to him the attractions of that circle became daily more difficult to resist. And often when he was enduring the purgatory of the Divan, ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... how some uncatalogued sense informs you in the dark of the movement of the man beside you? I looked suddenly sideways toward Jeremy, knowing, although I couldn't see him, that his eyes were seeking mine. It is only the animals who omit in the darkness those instinctive daylight movements; men don't have sufficient control of themselves. We had both heard Grim's voice at the same instant, speaking ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... mass, were seen emerging from the forest. The affrighted steeds tore on. It was with difficulty the miller could keep them together. His wife clasped her infant closer to her bosom. The children looked from under their fur covering, and then shrunk down again shivering with fear, for they had an instinctive dread of the danger which threatened them. The stout miller, who scarcely before had ever known what fear was, turned pale, as the sharp, eager yelps of the infernal pack sounded nearer and nearer behind him. He had no weapons ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... much, this Lionel Trevalyon, he is only mortal. "After I have made her love me, I shall tell her of this man's proposal of marriage," he said to his aggrieved conscience. After all is there not an instinctive leaning in the hearts of most of us towards the Roman Catholic doctrine of penance? Immediately on our conscience becoming seared as with a red-hot iron through some act its sensitiveness shrinks from, we, feeling this inward shrinking away as if from our lower ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... they must not be regarded, by any means, as mere animals. I had felt something of this before, when that first Thing peered in through my window. Then I had applied the term superhuman to it, with an almost instinctive knowledge that the creature was something different from the brute-beast. Something beyond human; yet in no good sense; but rather as something foul and hostile to the great and good in humanity. In a word, as something intelligent, ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... friends—they seemed already too friendly to be called acquaintances!—replying to their enquiries, and trying to think far enough ahead to guess what they would expect her to say, and what tone it would be well to take. She was used to such feats of mental agility, and it was instinctive with her to become, for the moment, the person she thought her interlocutors expected her to be; but she had never had quite so new a part to play at such short notice. She took her cue, however, from the fact that the Princess Estradina, in her mother's ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... instructed class, could say with impunity, speaking of what were called the god-inflicted diseases, that to his mind they were neither more nor less god-inflicted than all others. The doctrine of abstract entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation between the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, and their dependence on arbitrary volition; since it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... the spontaneous, instinctive, semi-conscious invention of the earliest ages, that was sufficient for primitive societies, and keep to creations that were the result of reflection and of great pretension, we can roughly ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... glad to meet again this handsome man who had seen so much and who talked so well. He was something different from the rest, and so far superior to them all. But, not being one of those instinctive girls who yield without pressure and fall in love at first sight, there were no flushings nor palpitations as Edgar came up; only a grave little smile stole half timidly over her face, and she forgot that he had insulted her mother's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... out its prehensile lizard claws in an instinctive effort to catch itself. Evelyn was thrown clear. And Tommy, standing alone in the blackness of a carboniferous jungle upon an alien planet, sent bullet after bullet into the shaking, obscenely flabby body of the thing. The bullets penetrated, and exploded. Great masses of flesh upheaved and fell ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... It is a mistake to talk of inductive reasoning, as though it were a distinct species from deductive. The fact is that inductive inferences are either wholly instinctive, and so unsusceptible of logical vindication, or else they may be exhibited under the form of deductive inferences. We cannot be justified in inferring that platinum will be melted by heat, except where we have equal reason for asserting the same thing of ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... favorite retreats. She had been a very hard creature to manage. Her father could influence, but not govern her. Old Sophy, born of a slave mother in the house, could do more with her than anybody, knowing her by long instinctive study. The other servants were afraid of her. Her father had sent for governesses, but none of them ever stayed long. She made them nervous; one of them had a strange fit of sickness; not one of them ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... almost feminine refinement, among his family and friends. A soft, low voice was considered an excellent thing in man, as well as in woman! Indeed, the enforced intimacy of tent life would soon become intolerable, were it not for these instinctive reserves and delicacies, this unfailing respect for the established place and possessions of every other member of the family circle, this ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... contend with early impressions, and poor Caesar was even without the support of either of these frail allies. He was, however, well mounted on a coach horse of Mr. Wharton's and, clinging to the back of the animal with instinctive skill, he abandoned the rein to the beast. Hillocks, woods, rocks, fences, and houses flew by him with the rapidity of lightning, and the black had just begun to think whither and on what business he was riding in this headlong manner, when ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... in his mind. He possessed a soldier's proud confidence in his regiment—the supposition that the old fighting Seventh could be defeated was impossible; the Indians did not ride those uplands who could do the deed! Then there came to him a nameless dread, that instinctive shrinking which a proud, sensitive man must ever feel at having to face his old companions with the shadow of a crime between. In his memory he saw once more a low-ceiled room, having a table extending ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... arrived successively to Humai. The queen steadfastly marked the majestic form and features of Darab, and said in her heart: "The youth who bears this dignified and royal aspect, appears to be a Kaianian by birth;" and as she spoke, the instinctive feeling of a mother seemed to ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... eagerness to follow up her first great success and accomplish her mission, Jeanne's object was to march on at once with the young Prince, with or without his immense retinue, to Rheims where he should be crowned and anointed King as she had promised. Her instinctive sense of the necessities of the position, if we use that language—more justly, her boundless faith in the orders which she believed had been give her from Heaven, to accomplish this great act without delay, urged her on. She was straitened, if we may ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... as it goes, is, however, too inclusive; for plainly, although every work of art is an expression, not every expression is a work of art. Automatic expressions, instinctive overflowings of emotion into motor channels, like the cry of pain or the shout of joy, are not aesthetic. Practical expressions also, all such as are only means or instruments for the realization of ulterior purposes—the command of the officer, the conversation of the market ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... in the palest pink, which set off and enhanced her fairness. But it was to Lucile that all eyes instinctively clung. The soft curls framing the lovely, eager face; the color that came and went with each varying emotion; the instinctive grace with which she carried her proud little head, won her admiration ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... tugged at the boat and attempted to draw her up farther without much success. She was too heavy, and desisting from his efforts, he approached Miss Dalrymple. The young girl shrank back slightly, but seeming not to notice that first instinctive movement, he reached over and lifted her out. It was done in a businesslike manner and with no more outward concern than a Kikuji porter might have displayed in meeting the exigencies of a like situation. The bubbles seethed around Mr. Heatherbloom's legs; unmindful of them or the shifting sands ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... much also of the gift he showed for restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, conveying the impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was most so." Yet it was no mask, it was instinctive. ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... poem. It may be broadly divided into three currents of thought, or (as one might say) into three acts of passion. I. The sense of grievous loss in the death of John Keats the youthful and aspiring poet, cut short as he was approaching his prime; and the instinctive impulse to mourning and desolation. 2. The mythical or symbolic embodiment of the events in the laments of Urania and the Mountain Shepherds, and in the denunciation of the ruthless destroyer of the peace and life ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... yielded to no hardships, and surpassed even the seasoned savages in strength and endurance. On the shore of the Georgian Bay, however, his guide at length abandoned him. But Brebeuf had been here in a former year, and his instinctive woodcraft guided him twenty miles through the forest to ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... possess a greater number of documents; this is why we can write a history of Augustus and rectify so many mistakes made about him by preceding generations. It has often happened to me to find, a propos of the volumes written on Augustus, that my contradiction of tradition creates a kind of instinctive diffidence. Many say: "Yes, this book is interesting; but is it possible that for twenty centuries everybody has been mistaken?—that it was necessary to wait till 1908 to understand what occurred in the year ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... ere the moon rose added to his difficulties. With no landmark to serve as a guide he had to rely absolutely upon his instinctive sense of locality, and kept steadily in the one direction, although that meant riding over the rugged ground, barred by tumbled boulders and thickly growing trees, which formed the almost precipitous sides of the gullies. At any time a fall was possible; he carried his life in his hands and knew ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... suave social dexterity had vanished. Her eyes were dark with purely human instinctive jealousy. They looked at each other a moment, then Lord Selsey came ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... Oh beautiful instinctive faith in maternal love and maternal wisdom! Wot ye the moulding power ye wield, ye mothers ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of the mother, subject to the vicissitudes of the environment. The young of the bird, being warm blooded, cannot develop without more uniform temperature than weather conditions ordinarily supply. This heat is supplied by the instinctive brooding ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... the circumstance of the word "nen-nook" (bear) being often used to encourage them when running in a sledge. Indeed, the only animal which they are not eager to chase is the wolf, of which the greater part of them seem to have an instinctive dread, giving notice at night of their approach to the huts by a loud and continued howl. There is not one dog in twenty among them that will voluntarily, or, indeed, without a great deal of beating, take the water, if they think it ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... pleased as any one with the report of Sir Marcus Wardhill's intended return. Poor Lawrence had that instinctive dread of his guardian which a cat or a dog has of the person who takes every occasion of giving them a kick or a buffet when they meet. He felt that he was unjustly and tyrannically treated, yet he had no means of breaking away from ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... them, they may be glad of food," said Lord Reginald, and putting up such provisions as they had cooked, they hurried off, each armed with a long stick, followed by Neptune, who, although he seemed to have an instinctive dread of approaching the burning mountain, was yet willing to follow his master. Instead, however, of bounding on before, as was his usual custom, he kept close at Lord Reginald's heels. They took the most direct route along the broad valley, intending then to turn to the left down the narrow valley ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... to be naturally good writers of letters. In the first place, those whose fingers grow tired of playing notes or writing them, seem to find recreation in the reeling off of letters. They have acquired an instinctive sense of form, and an instinct for smoothing over its rough edges, and modulating from one mood into another. Besides, music is so thoroughly an expression of mood, and a good letter has so necessarily a unity of ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... see that you are a kind-hearted family," said La Lorraine, who, from a rare instinctive delicacy, did not interrogate Jeanne as to the cause of ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... quietly by a person's side for long intervals of silence. The average woman, when she is in the company of even a single person, seems to consider herself derelict in duty, if conversation is not what she calls "kept up;" an instinctive phrase, which, by its universal use, is the bitterest comment on its own significance. Men have no such feeling. Two men will sit by each other's side, it may be for hours, in silence, and feel no derogation from good comradeship. Why ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... fierce hunger, the wearing, unceasing fight against Arctic cold, and, when weakened and exhausted by both, the dumb, instinctive struggle for life against the combination, Bruce said nothing; but in a dozen commonplace sentences described physical sufferings sufficient for a ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... somewhat noisy fashion—for there seemed to them to be no very especial reason for silence—until there suddenly broke upon their ears a deep, hollow, drumming sound, speedily followed by a series of loud, fierce roars. The sounds emanated from somewhere close at hand, and after a moment's instinctive pause to listen, they all with one accord hastened forward to investigate, with the result that they suddenly found themselves emerging from the cramped and gloomy environment of the forest depths into ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... protest that he countenanced it of necessity and against his own conviction; his contemptuous "better to marry than to burn" is only out of date in respect of his belief that the end of the world was at hand and that there was therefore no longer any population question. His instinctive recoil from its worst aspect as a slavery to pleasure which induces two people to accept slavery to one another has remained an active force in the world to this day, and is now stirring more uneasily than ever. We have more and more ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... dissent; as opposed to nodding the head which signifies assent. These are two items, apparently instinctive and universal, of man's gesture-language which has been so highly cultivated by sundry North American tribes and by the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... but for one or two remarks that fell from him. They showed an insight into the real nature of scientific knowledge, and an instinctive sense of the truths underlying words, which I have never met with except in men of considerable culture and experience. I suspect that his manner is deliberately assumed in protest against the selfish vanity which ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... birth-rate to fall with the growth of social stability is thus a tendency which is of the very essence of civilization. It represents an impulse which, however deliberate it may be in the individual, may, in the community, be looked upon as an instinctive effort to gain more complete control of the conditions of life, and to grapple more efficiently with the problems of misery and disease and death. It is not only, as is sometimes supposed, during the past century that the phenomena may be studied. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... the missionaries have made themselves hated that there is any molestation of Europeans engaged in the affairs of this world. Chinese antipathy to Caucasians in China is neither a racial animosity nor a religious; it is an instinctive dislike of persons who will not mind their own business. China has been infested with missionaries from the earliest centuries of our era, and they have rarely been molested when they have taken ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... his name from the lips of his beloved, Ralph drew very close to her, with that instinctive drawing which he was now experiencing. It was that irresistible first love of a man who has never wasted himself even on the harmless flirtations which are said to be the ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett |
