"Prenatal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... intellectual and brilliant than Prof. Harris, were as badly afflicted as he with this Greek superstition, which has been implanted in school boys so young that it dominates their whole lives with the energy of a prenatal condition. The only very silly things ever written by the brilliant Emerson were those passages in which he speaks of Plato; and the silliest thing in the life of Hamilton is the way in which he exulted ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us. What are we, in fact, what is our character, if not the condensation of the history that we have lived from our birth—nay, even before our birth, since we bring with us prenatal dispositions? Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... the child. In Somatology,—the science of the physical characteristics and constitution of the body and its members,—he seeks not alone to observe the state and condition of the skeleton and its integuments during life, but also to ascertain their nature and character in the period of prenatal existence, as well as when causes natural, or unnatural, disease, the exhaustion of old age, violence, or the like, have induced the ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... brother, whom she might almost be said to have loved in the prenatal state, her other self, whom she had watched over and saved! sole object of her affection since at Bazeilles she had seen her poor Weiss set against a wall and shot to death! And now cruel war had done its worst by her, had crushed her bleeding heart; henceforth her way through life was to be a ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... certainly have improved. It may be that all these higher qualities were latent in the original mother, that careful education is bringing them out, and that our personal differences depend on slight variations in prenatal condition." ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... surroundings? He should not. Man has had two modes of life already—one, slightly conscious, closely confined, peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new surroundings, his immensely wider life, and ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... long-consolidated ideal concretion which we call space, are welcomed by the mind as in a sense familiar and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul, so that Plato could plausibly take them for recollections of prenatal wisdom. But a rocket that bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even if expected, is expected with anxiety and observed with surprise; it assaults the senses at an incalculable moment with a sensation individual and new. The exciting tension and lively stimulus ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... forgot his four years of veneer. The century of prenatal barbarism broke out fiercely. He was seeing things far away— and forgetting things near by. His eyes blazed and ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... was one of those local assumptions that might be described as prenatal rather than posthumous. It was what he was going to be, that made his name an awe-inspiring word in the community, more than what he was already. It was the conviction of his friends and colleagues that a tardy world would too late ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... warmth of tenderness and patience, and a strength of gentle wise insistence, more than human, she broods. It takes the very strength of her life, far far more than in prenatal days. So there comes, slowly, but as she keeps true to the brooding spirit, surely, the strong gentle self-controlled life out of the warm womb of her brooding life. So comes the child's higher birth, so preparing the way for ...
— Quiet Talks on John's Gospel • S. D. Gordon
... letters what their mother thought of them, and how things appeared to her in the days of their babyhood. Perhaps; who knows? At present, being but five years old, they are centred in whatever thing the particular day brings forth, and but that they are leashed fast by an almost prenatal and unconscious affection, they are as unlike in disposition, temperament, and colouring as they are alike in feature. Richard is dark, like father and me, very quiet, except in the matter of affection, in which he is clingingly demonstrative, ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... and soul-, as well as line-destroying self-consciousness, may be prenatal, and it may result from the Puritan attitude toward beauty; that old New England point of view that the beautiful and the vicious are akin. Every young child needs to have cultivated a certain degree of self-reliance. To know that one's appearance is pleasing, to put it mildly, ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... foxes. The situation was aggravated by the fact that these sexual pleasures were often the only ones the very poor could obtain, and were, therefore, disproportionately pursued, and by the fact that their conditions were often such that prenatal nourishment and such things were utterly abnormal. The consequences began to appear. To a much less extent than the Eugenists assert, but still to a notable extent, in a much looser sense than the Eugenists assume, but still in some sort of sense, the ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... The undoubted transmission of siphilis [tr. note: sic] to off-spring might be regarded as a case of transmission of an acquired characteristic. But the case is not in point since congenital siphilis [tr. note: sic] is, properly, due to a prenatal infection, the bacillus entering the very germ-plasm of the human ovum (egg). Medical science, generally, has become very cautious in the use of the word "hereditary." There is almost unanimity among ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... little girl, who played about the lodgers' rooms in the dingy Church Street house, was of course unaware of the weight of expectation hanging to her. She was almost abnormally silent, perhaps because of her depressing prenatal experiences as well as the forlorn environment of the rooming-house,—perhaps because of physical and spiritual anaemia. "She's a puny mite of a child," Mrs. John Clark said complainingly, unpromising like everything Clark; nevertheless, the last of the sturdy ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... slept the prenatal sleep of dawn. A pale greenish veil hung over the roofs, through which day must peer before awakening those who slept beneath. I had often noticed this greenish color in the sky, made doubtless by the flare of gas and electricity against ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... statements of life insurance companies, "expectant mothers are the most neglected members of our population." Dr. Van Ingen, of New York City, estimates that 90 per cent, of women in this country are wholly without prenatal care. ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... of prenatal anomalies, the first to be discussed will be those of extrauterine pregnancy. This abnormalism has been known almost as long as there has been any real knowledge of obstetrics. In the writings of Albucasis, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould |
