"Environment" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... handkerchief, and a small brush should be kept for brushing the tops of books with rough edges, before they are opened. But it were well that all books had the top edge gilt. There is no better preservative against dust. Dust not only dirties books, it seems to supply what Mr. Spencer would call a fitting environment for book-worms. The works of book-worms speak for themselves, and are manifest to all. How many a rare and valuable volume is spoiled by neat round holes drilled through cover and leaves! But as to the nature of your worm, authorities differ ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... the Pelagian controversy, and variously tortured in the disputes of our national antiquaries. The revolutions of the last age appeared to justify the image of the sublime Bossuet, "sette ile, plus orageuse que les mers qui l'environment."] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... is essentially Teutonic in origin and character. Turning to the representative art of Germany and Belgium, we find the Virgin almost invariably wearing a crown, whether she sits on a throne, or in a pastoral environment. No better example could be named than the celebrated Holbein Madonna, of Darmstadt, known chiefly through the copy in the Dresden Gallery. Here the imposing height of the Virgin is rendered still more impressive by a high, golden crown, richly embossed and edged with pearls. ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... prove that there can be little of dramatic import in environment. Any room can present a tragic front; any room can be comic. This little den was now hideous as a torture-chamber. The new faces of the men themselves had changed it upon the instant. The Swede held ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... mischance, become deprived of the use of iron, or of the useful alloys, bronze and brass, our civilization would be in great danger of reverting to Savagism. Man, destitute of metals, can do but little to improve his surroundings; but grant him these, and victory over his environment ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... everything. He is the "elementum," "habitaculum," "habitator," "locus" of the universe. The material world was created for man's probation. All spirits pre-existed, and their partial immersion in an impure material environment is a degradation from which they must aspire to be delivered. But the whole mundane history of a soul is only the realisation of the idea which had existed from all eternity in the mind of God. These doctrines show that Victorinus is involved in a dualistic view of matter, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... posted. Occasionally the flotilla flashed their search-lights upon Jebel Surgham, and swept the scrub and desert in front of the troops. The enemy's scouts, however, were never disclosed in the radii of the electric beams. In fact, the first notice we had that the dervishes were about to inspect our environment was the impetuous incoming of our friendlies from Jebel Surgham and the cracking of snipers' guns in the bush mingled with the buzzing of bullets overhead. A battalion rose quietly from the ground, for the troops slept ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... a young choir soprano leaves the little village where she was born and the limited audience of St. Jude's to train for the opera in New York. She leaves love behind her and meets love more ardent but not more sincere in her new environment. How she works, how she studies, how she ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... been attained by capitalism. Socialism must accomplish this movement forward in its own way, by its own methods—to make it more definite, by Soviet methods. But the specialists are inevitably bourgeois on account of the whole environment of social life which made them specialists.... In view of the considerable delay in accounting and control in general, although we have succeeded in defeating sabotage, we have not yet created an environment which would put at our disposal the ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... to Ireland by the English government, in the hope of establishing there a Protestant population which would, in time, come to outnumber and control the native Irish. The Scotch were Presbyterians, of course, and finding the Irish environment distasteful, began, about 1720, to come to America in such numbers that, fifty years later, they formed a sixth part of our entire population. Nearly all of them settled in Western Pennsylvania, from which a steady stream flowed ever southward and westward, furnishing the hardy pioneers of Kentucky ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... a comprehensible attitude, for he backed away in hasty alarm whenever the infant, in arms or carriage, bore down upon him. On several occasions when the Farraday household invaded the Byrdsnest Stefan and Jamie together sneaked away in search of an environment more ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... stopped me after a few sentences, and I did not again refer to my new friends; though I had been thinking a good deal of Constance Grey and her plain-faced, plain-spoken aunt. I felt strangely out of key with my environment in that glaring place, and the strains of an overloud orchestra, when they came crashing through the buzz of talk and laughter, and the clatter of glass and silver, were rather a relief to me as a substitute for conversation. I drank ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... calcareous formation; and the remarkable effect of limestone soil upon the bodily development of a people is not less marked in this latitude than elsewhere. In most of the Antilles the white race degenerates and dwarfs under the influence of climate and environment; but the Barbadian creole—tall, muscular, large of bone—preserves and perpetuates in the tropics the strength and sturdiness ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... too, for to sever a nerve is to paralyze all beyond. If all knowledge comes through experience, and all experience comes through the nervous system, the possibilities depend upon the mechanism each one is provided with for absorbing from his environment, what energies there are that can act upon the nerves. Touch, taste, and smell imply contact, sound has greater range, and sight has the immensity of the universe for its field. The most distant but visible star acts through the optic nerve to present itself to consciousness. ...
— The Machinery of the Universe - Mechanical Conceptions of Physical Phenomena • Amos Emerson Dolbear
... this process the part of the salt substance concerned loses its connexion with the liquid and contracts into individually outlined and spatially defined pieces of solid matter. It thereby becomes optically distinguishable from its environment. ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... seek a lordlier burial. It was the death he had always craved. From murder, fire, and sudden death, why should we call on the Lord to deliver us? A broken neck in a hunting-field, a slip on rocky mountains, a wounded animal at bay—such was the environment of death for which he had ever prayed. But this—this was ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... follows. Keen in his critical observation of the Duke and other members of the household, he, nevertheless, has a tender appreciation of the difficulties of the young Duchess in this unloving artificial environment. ...
— Dramatic Romances • Robert Browning
... If a man planted trees which belonged in his neighborhood, nuts that were already in the dominant ruling group, then his chances for success would be very good, but if he introduced in fence corners trees that had to adjust themselves to a new environment, he would find very few growing and the squirrels, other trees and various obstacles to development in the midst of established species, would wipe out most of them. Nevertheless, as it isn't much trouble, I would advise anybody to take a pocketful of hickory nuts out with him ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... that in life that lies too deep for any mere change of environment to touch. Sammy remembered a lesson the shepherd had given her: gentle spirit may express itself in the rude words of illiteracy; it is not therefore rude. Ruffianism may speak the language of learning or religion; it is ruffianism still. Strength may wear the garb of weakness, and still ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... one's environment upon which no government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... therefore poison-loaded atmosphere, is a proof of the wonderful efficiency of the protective economy of Nature within us; so wonderful, indeed, that few can believe the fact of living to be consistent with the real existence of such a deadly environment as science pretends to reveal. It is a common impression, therefore, that actual results fail to justify the alarm sounded by sanitarians. Hence the necessity for calling attention at the outset to an ample and manifest equivalent for the deadly dose of confined exhalations ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... are familiar through current European memoirs. Silvio Pellico has made the life of an Austrian prisoner-of-state, in its outward environment and inward struggles, as well known as that of the Arctic explorer or the English factory-operative. A confirmatory supplement to this dark chapter in the history of modern civilization has recently appeared from the pen of another ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... which drove him on through life and to this catholicity; no feeling for the fact that such a man is too prone to consume himself rapidly, like a flame; nor any indignation at the thought that the vulgar narrowness and pusillanimity of his whole environment, especially of his learned contemporaries, so saddened, tormented, and stifled the tender and ardent creature that he was, that the very universality for which he is praised should give rise to feelings of the deepest compassion. "Have pity on the exceptional ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Into this environment the first Act of Uniformity was projected. In the preamble of the Act we find the state of things not unfairly described, with a discreet avoidance, however, of all reference to the causes of confusion. Mention is made of the old diversity of use, and then of the new and far greater diversity ...
— The Acts of Uniformity - Their Scope and Effect • T.A. Lacey
... as the introductory thirty-five pages of Dr. Holmes's book make, we doubt the wisdom of so very sketchy an account of Emerson's lineage and intellectual environment. Attracted towards Emerson everybody must be; but there are many who have never been able to get quit of an uneasy fear as to his 'staying power.' He has seemed to some of us a little thin and vague. A really ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... with Mary Bowerman's taunts and Abner Stout's guile, Debby decided that the time had come for Hester to have a change of environment. Miss Richards's advice was again sought. But that old friend no longer held the full power in her hands. Debby had grown alive and alert. She knew the standing of the schools throughout the State, and in what particular line of study ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... must be self-existent the difficulty about self-existence was common to both cases. The well-known argument from design did not convince him, as he believed in a continual process of natural adjustment of creatures to their environment,—a theory resembling that of Darwin, but not yet so complete. I listened to Mr. Uttley's account of his views with much interest; but they had no influence on my own, as it seemed to me much easier to refer everything to an intelligent Creator than to ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the morning has found us all, and unlovely it seems as regarded from this shanty environment. At 4:50 Excelsior has shrieked every settler awake. At half-past five we have breakfasted and I pass out of the house, one of the half-dozen who seek the mill from ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... of to the outer vehicles which it externalizes as instruments through which to function on the various planes of being, we shall find that we have reached a principle in ourselves which stands in loco dei towards all our vehicles and also towards our environment. It is above them all, and creates them, however unaware we may be of the fact, and relatively to them it occupies the place of first cause. The recognition of this is the discovery of our own relation to the whole world of the relative. On ...
— The Dore Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... porcelain manufactory, Troyon delighted in warmth and richness of tone and color; but in the rendering of the texture and color of cattle the quality availed him greatly, and as objects in his foreground the landscape environment gained in depth by its judicious use. Troyon will be chiefly remembered by the pictures painted from 1846 to 1858. The later years of his life, until his death in 1865, were passed with a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... explained. "And don't laugh! It isn't prettifying. It's psychology. The Platform was designed by engineers and physicists and people with slide rules. They made a beautiful environment for machinery. But there will be men living in ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... insect world that this principle of the adaptation of animals to their environment is most fully and strikingly developed. In order to understand how general this is, it is necessary to enter somewhat into details, as we shall thereby be better able to appreciate the significance of the still ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... his seventh year the boy had faced life alone. He had never gone with the stream but had always found lodgment in the backwaters. There is no employment quieter, peacefuller than that of a clerk in a haberdashery. From Mondays till Saturdays, calm; a perfect environment for a poet. You would be surprised to learn of the vast army of poets and novelists and dramatists who dispense four-in-hands, collars, buttons and hosiery six days in the week and who go a-picnicking on the seventh, provided it does ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... that perhaps after all it had not been a good thing, this making him into a new creature, with new desires and aims and hopes that could never be fulfilled. Perhaps he would have been happier, better off, if he had never been taken out of that environment and brought to appreciate so keenly another one where he did not belong, and could never stay, since this old environment was the one where he must stay whether he would or no. He put the thought from him ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... fell into a common way of writing. The faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of environment—a tour in Scotland, or abroad—shook him into his old thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the Lyrical Ballads, the poems of 1804, and the Prelude, ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... case of our two writers is different. The wheel of time will never bring Euphues and Sacharissa "to their own again." They are as dead as the Jacobite cause. And for that very reason they are all the more interesting for the literary historian. All writers are conditioned by their environment, but some concern themselves with the essentials, others with the accidents, of that internally constant, but externally unstable, phenomenon, known as humanity. Waller and Lyly were of the latter class. Like jewels suitable to one costume only, they remained in favour just ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... delusion that the body is somehow the man seems to have less of a material basis. Visits to a tomb or grave are unfortunate, not alone because they renew grief through thinking upon it and thus cause great distress to those for whom we mourn, but also because the environment of a cemetery is one of the worst possible for the sorrowing. It is a dismal park of concentrated griefs where each mourner accentuates the emotional distress of all others. There is but one sensible attitude to take toward those ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... gambling that I am concerned. In that sense I have "backed" him, in no other sense to any satisfactory result. With all his four legs he stumbles more than one does with only a pair, an extraordinary proof of his want of harmony with his environment. ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... thought of them with something of the awe which belongs to things having in themselves some element of the mystic, if not of the supernatural. The blue of her eyes was not more wonderful than the flawless grace of her person and her environment. I could compare her only with visions one has read and dreamed about in the unreal worlds of poetry and romance. Her actual existence as a woman of the moment, a possible adventuress, certainly a very material and actual person, ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to study the grand old trees of the finest forest in France. But among the elder generation of our fellow-citizens who have "done the Continent" there must be many who, in the palmy days of Fontainebleau, have seen the imperial hunt winding through the greenwood aisles in much magnificence of environment, and heard the blare of horn and bay of hound dying away in the distance as the splendid assembly pursued the gorgeous if somewhat theatrical and spiritless pleasures of the chase. It may have happened on such an occasion that an early return of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... into the garden,' he said. His instincts remained primitive, and just then this room was too narrow for all he felt, and it seemed to him that the large things of the night and the distant glory of the stars were the only environment that ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... to impose human law upon environment until it becomes machine-like in its regularity. The objectionable is eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen. One is not even made wet by the rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about grewsome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a well-oiled groove ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... educational platform for the city of Columbus. In the first place, he aims to provide school accommodations which are fitted to the peculiar needs of each part of the community. In the second place, he aims to shape the school system of Columbus in terms of the local environment of the children. In the third place, he has inaugurated a high school policy, which makes high school training ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... much greater if the entire populations of Erie and Minneapolis and Kansas City were to execute a three-cornered "general post" or if Portland, Oregon, and Portland, Maine, swapped inhabitants? How long would it take the inhabitants of any one town to settle down in their new environment and go to work on precisely the same lines as their predecessors whom they dislodged? The novelty would, I think, be even less than if Manchester and Birmingham were miraculously made to execute a ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... foundation for success-building, has greater courage, more moral stamina. He has not become weakened and softened by the superficial ornamental, decorative influences of city life. And there is a reason for all this. We are largely copies of our environment. We are under the perpetual influence of the suggestion of our surroundings. The city-bred youth sees and hears almost nothing that is natural, aside from the faces and forms of human beings. Nearly everything ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... agree with you," Wanhope consented. "We cannot tell what influences reach us from our environment, or what our environment really is, or how much or little we mean by the word. The sense of danger seems to be inborn, and possibly it is a survival of our race life when it was wholly animal and took care of itself through what ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... painter, "I hope you will not be too impatient, Mrs. Taine, I fear I cannot be ready for some time yet. I suppose I must confess to being over-sensitive to my environment; for it is a fact that my working mood does not come upon me readily amid strange surroundings. When I have become acclimated, as it were, I ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... will be what you will to be; Let failure find its false content In that poor word "environment," But spirit scorns it, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... time finding out where he did live," he began again, after another glance of parenthetical enjoyment. "But finally I got on the trail through some old book on Brook Farm. I was bound I'd get the environment right before I did ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... attraction of life in a Southern city, excellent as they are; the principal charm of the South is the character of the people themselves. There is an undefined flavour of old-world politeness and courtesy perfuming their environment The bow of a Southern gentleman does not appear to be the jerk of a string-pull; it suggests having been learned remotely from the bow that brought the sword projecting through the long coat-tails as the hat was ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... change you will say. Just now we were concerned with what touches ourselves, with our immediate environment, and all at once we are exploring the round world and leaping to the bounds of the universe. This change is the result of our growing strength and of the natural bent of the mind. While we were weak and feeble, self-preservation concentrated ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... cold, fathomless awe of the midnight sky. That we cannot thus directly account for the difference in local coloring serves but to make that difference of more human interest. The dissimilarity between the Western and the Far Eastern attitude of mind has in it something beyond the effect of environment. For it points to the importance of the part which the principle of individuality plays in the great drama daily enacting before our eyes, and which we know as evolution. It shows, as I shall hope to prove, that individuality bears the same relation ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... strife burst upon the country. In estimating his military character and rightly apportioning the credit due to his great achievements, much stress must be laid upon the constant effort for professional improvement made by him from his early life. "Without the opportunity and the environment which enabled him to develop himself," writes one who knew him for over forty years, "Farragut might have gone to his rest comparatively unknown; yet among his comrades and contemporaries in the navy he would have been ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... against the Sower that flings with mocking hand the seed of genius and recks not where it falls. The germ of such a life as Brann's we can but accept in worshipful, unquestioning gratitude, for the process of its spawning is too entangled to unravel. But of the environment of his life we cannot refrain from rebellious questioning, appreciative though we be of that which was, and of our heritage of the unquenchable spirit that is and shall be as long ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... throne, nor rule more royally. Voice so low and tender and heart so warm, all herself she gave, and gladly, thoughtlessly, recklessly. Is it true that all humanity means to do right though often wrong: that the heart at times must obey the mandates of circumstances and environment: that even the purest and best succumb to temptation? Another day, and ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... Mr. Holcombe, who found himself at the end of it in a very bad way, with nerves unstrung and brain so fagged that he assented without question when his doctor exiled him from New York by ordering a sea voyage, with change of environment and rest at the other end of it. Some one else suggested the northern coast of Africa and Tangier, and Holcombe wrote minute directions to the secretaries of all of his reform clubs urging continued ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... best detective—the most reliable and efficient agent against evil-doers. When a crime is committed the daily newspaper, with its Argus eyes, gives such minute and circumstantial details, together with such exhaustive particulars concerning its environment, and the details of its perpetration and supposed authors, that the public at large, so instructed and informed, become detectives. Hence "crooked" and wicked people are really more afraid of the thunderbolt exposure of the newspapers than of ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... sufferings, she had loved so dearly. She looked down at the pearls which hung from her neck. She saw herself in her spotless muslin gown. She felt the touch of laces and silk, all the nameless effect of this environment of luxury thrilled in her blood. It was better, she decided, that she did not think of the future at all. It was better that she should nurse the gratitude which she ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... having lost his wife and gone to live in Massachusetts. Ivory would have sold it long ago had circumstances been different, for it was at too great a distance from the schoolhouse and from Lawyer Wilson's office to be at all convenient, but he dreaded to remove his mother from the environment to which she was accustomed, and doubted very much whether she would be able to care for a house to which she had not been wonted before her mind became affected. Here in this safe, secluded corner, amid familiar ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the Christian ideal to-day is that it shall save the individual, but also remove that which produces crime and makes sin almost inevitable—in short, that it shall seek to redeem the environment as well as the sinner, and give more wholesomeness, more fullness, more joy to life through redeeming its conditions, as well ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... he seemed to be as scientific as in the development of a history of customs, in which the essential is absolute exactness and local color. He therefore naturally wished to make the most scrupulous and detailed observation of the environment. ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... will do what must be done. For our national household is cluttered with unfinished and neglected tasks. Our cities are being engulfed in squalor. Twelve long years after Congress declared our goal to be "a decent home and a suitable environment for every American family," we still have 25 million Americans living in substandard homes. A new housing program under a new Housing and Urban Affairs Department ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... in time with the disease itself and which has been operative throughout civilization. We must seek some widespread change in social conditions, for man's essential nature has changed but little, and the change must, therefore, be of environment. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... than 2% of the children sent out proved failures confirmed Barnardo's conviction that "if the children of the slums can be removed from their surroundings early enough, and can be kept sufficiently long under training, heredity counts for little, environment for almost everything." In 1899 the various institutions and organizations were legally incorporated under the title of "The National Association for the reclamation of Destitute Waif Children," but the institution has always been familiarly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... J. G. Frazer has abundantly shown in his Golden Bough. This uniformity is not, however, due to necessary uniformity of origin, but to a great extent to the fact that it represents the state of equilibrium arrived at between minds at a certain level and their environment, along lines of thought directed by the momentum given by the traditions of millennia, and the survival in history of the men who carefully regarded them. The apparently unreasoned prohibitions often known as 'taboos,' ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... slaves was checked by the reaction against that class and it became more of a problem to establish them in a hostile environment, certain Quakers of North Carolina and Virginia adopted the scheme of settling them in Northern States.[6] At first, they sent such freedmen to Pennsylvania. But for various reasons this did not prove to be the best asylum. In the first ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... no less puzzled by this peculiarity. The immense size of their eyes did not seem astonishing after we began to reflect upon the consequences of the relative lack of light in their world. It was but a natural adjustment to their environment; with such eyes they could see in the dark better than cats. Their feet were bare and covered on the soles with thick soft skin, while the insides of their long hands were almost as white and delicate as those of a ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... our civilization, because we have industrial and commercial prosperity, wealth and liberty, churches, schools, and newspapers, we ought to ask ourselves whether civilization does not imply something more and higher than this,—what kind of soul lives and loves and thinks in this environment? Instead of trying to persuade ourselves that we are the greatest and most enlightened people, would it not be worth while to ask ourselves, in a dispassionate temper, whether our best men and women are the most intellectual, the most interesting, ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... commander as merely one of those unappreciated scientists who repay humanity's indifference with contempt. For Conseil, the captain was still a misunderstood genius who, tired of the world's deceptions, had been driven to take refuge in this inaccessible environment where he was free to follow his instincts. But to my mind, this hypothesis explained only one ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... of the well-known tendency of the human mind to blend numbers of different incidents into one story. An episode of one experience, having been transferred to an earlier one, becomes rationalized in adaptation to its different environment. This process of psychological transference is the explanation of the reference to Elephantine as the source of the d'd', and has no relation to actuality. The naive efforts of Brugsch and Gauthier to study the natural products of Elephantine for the purpose of identifying ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... accustomed to avoiding controversy with civilian authorities—they cannot effectively sue for the constitutional rights of their sons and daughters. Yet they see their children, fresh from the integrated environment which is the rule on military installations, condemned to schools which are frequently two, even three grades behind the integrated schools these same children had attended on-base or at their fathers' ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... beings tend to vary and to rise in the scale, independently of the conditions to which they and their progenitors have been exposed; whilst others maintain that all variation is due to such exposure, though the manner in which the environment acts is as yet quite unknown. At the present time there is hardly any question in biology of more importance than this of the nature and causes of variability; and the reader will find in the present work an able discussion on the whole subject, which ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... frequently a rhythm variously expressive of all the wide range of feeling which a writer must have to make his or her books living things. She does no less well in the depiction of men than in the portraiture of women. All stand out of their vivid environment distinctly and they are all personalities of power—even, occasionally, of "that strong power called weakness." And they all wear something of a glory imparted to them by the sympathy of their creator and interpreter. High ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... sustain and guide her through the last throes of her trousseau. Already every post brought solemn letters from Miss Robinson filled with detailed questionings as to the ordering of lingerie. So it was really in this fortnight of London that she must gain her clearest impression of what her new environment was to be; there would be ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... hand. What a fight that must be! Rojas was traveling light and fast. He was gaining. He had bought his men with gold, with extravagant promises, perhaps with offers of the body and blood of an aristocrat hateful to their kind. Lastly, there was the wild, desolate environment, a tortured wilderness of jagged lava and poisoned choya, a lonely, fierce, and repellant world, a red stage most somberly and fittingly colored for a supreme struggle ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... in all its calm grave, beauty still held the heart the fair landscape, the monastery, which might have sheltered his renunciation, had been put to secular uses or fallen into ruin long years ago. If he proposed to retire from the world, he must himself provide suitable environment. Marychurch Abbey, at the end of the eighteenth century, had very certainly nothing to ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... else, and he recurred passionately to his old idea of becoming a novelist. He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work on a battered type-writer, did his own cooking, and occasionally pawned something to keep him in food. The environment was calculated to further impress him with ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... at six o'clock is roll off and turn to!" Well, that is just what he would get at sea. In most steamers the engineer walks out of the mess-room, bathroom, or berth, into an alley-way on either side of the engine platform. The beat of the engines becomes part of his environment. He sleeps with it pulsing in his ears, so that if she slows or stops he opens his eyes. When I go up at four o'clock and call the Second Engineer, he will stretch, yawn, half open one eye, and mutter, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... and Metternich occupy in Europe till 1848 the place which France and Bonaparte had occupied in the earlier crusade. "I was born," says Metternich in the fragment of his autobiography, "to be the enemy of the Revolution." Nature, indeed, and the environment of his youth had formed him to act the part of the genius of Reaction. Beneath the fine, empty, meaningless mask of the Austrian noble lay a heart which had never quivered with any profound emotion, or beat high with any generous impulse. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... everybody else. No question of joy in life here. If a man lived in Meriden, he lived there to work. If a man worked in Meriden, he worked for the sake of the dollars that had the power finally to free him from that environment and introduce him to a period of enjoyment. Most of the people, especially the German and Polish workmen and tradesmen, saw in the life they were compelled to lead a temporary, provisional existence, a condition the bitterness of ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... when a long cold winter and a miserable spring, with frosty nights lasting well into June, was followed by a cold wet summer and a wet autumn, that we can see properly what a mind and body is his—how infinitely more perfect the correspondence between organism and environment in his case than in ours, who have made our own conditions, who have not only houses to live in, but a vast army of sanitary inspectors, physicians and bacteriologists to safeguard us from that wicked stepmother ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... power that moulds and makes, And Man is Mind, and evermore he takes The tool of Thought, and, shaping what he wills, Brings forth a thousand joys, a thousand ills:— He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: Environment ...
— As a Man Thinketh • James Allen
... The parents of the human race were separated from God. Environment is a condition of life. They have learned to do evil, they have to share the lot of those who had not kept their first estate. Heaven was an impossible climate to the apostate angels, and Eden was only possible to those who obey. It is easy to see that the garden was not now Paradise. Adam ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... unconscious aspiration in prayer and an absolute and organic trust in the protection of the divine Providence persist in my character, though reason has long assured me that this is but a crude and personal conception of the divine law. Truly from the environment of our early religious education we can never escape. This the Jesuits know ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... social event can prove the influence of environment, is it not this? In fact, the Sunday-best mood of some reacts so effectually on the rest that the men who are most accustomed to wearing full dress look just like those to whom the party is a high festival, unique in their life. And think too of the serious old men to whom ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... The goal of Rapid Dominance will be to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and military objectives. To achieve this outcome, Rapid Dominance must control the operational environment and through that dominance, control what the adversary perceives, understands, and knows, as well as control or regulate what is not perceived, ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... keeps unflaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. Let him not care particularly if he miss the tone of conversation, the pungent material detail of the day's manners, the reproduction of the atmosphere and the environment. These elements are not essential: a novel may be excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion or a character is so much the better depicted as it rises clearer from material circumstance. In this age of the particular, let him remember the ages ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its sides at home. Here was a small settlement of pioneers surrounded by hostile aborigines. The royal arm, strong as it was at home, could not well afford protection a thousand leagues away. The colony must organize and learn to protect itself. In other words, the colonial environment was very much like that in which the yeomen of the Dark Ages had found themselves. And might not its dangers be faced in the old feudal way? They were faced in this way. In the history of French Canada we find the seigneurial system forced back towards its old feudal plane. ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... attempted in his great work to classify man, as Buffon has classified animals, and to show that his varieties of character, like the differences of form in the lower creation, come from environment. The three great divisions of the Comedie Humaine are "Etudes de Moeurs," "Etudes Philosophiques," and "Etudes Analytiques"; and the "Etudes de Moeurs" comprise many subdivisions, each of which, in Balzac's ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... currents which we cannot measure or describe. The psychic world is the final world, though its towers and pinnacles no eye hath seen. If we try to shut out for an hour the outer world, and descend into the soul-world of the life of man, we find ourselves in a new environment, and with an outlook over new forms and powers. We find ourselves in a world of images and attractions, of impulses and desires, of instincts and attainments. It is not only a world of separate and individual ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... lesser stars, the author of Indiana and Valentine, although a woman, was acknowledged as worthy to rank. The artist in her, a disturbing element in her inner life which had driven her out of the spiritual bondage and destitution of a petty provincial environment to secure for herself freedom and expansion, had justified the audacity of the move by a triumphant artistic success. From this time onward her artistic faculty dominated her life, often, probably, unknown to herself an ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... of an honest man instead of that of a cruel idol. There has also been a propaganda of a soulless stupidity called Determinism, representing man as a dead object driven hither and thither by his environment, antecedents, circumstances, and so forth, which nevertheless does remind us that there are limits to the number of cubits an individual can add to his stature morally or physically, and that it is silly as well as cruel to torment a man five feet high for not ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... Belfort and over the hills by Nancy, down to the Marne and the Aube; Celts and Flemings from the north, and Norsemen from the west, all met and mingled with the native Gauls and eventually became Parisians. Environment acted its part, and so did the forces of Nature. The soil of the basin of Paris is fruitful, the climate equable, but neither encourage idlers; both demand a toll of strenuous labour, yet not so trying to man's strength as to leave him exhausted at ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... a change of environment that people need as a change of heart and of character. Diamonds are often found embedded in volcanic mud; mud surrounds them on every side, and yet they have lain there for centuries and are still diamonds. What is ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... to duller, months ditto staring one in the face, and for this present—the rural villa of one's estimable cousins, with the sun and the stars for company. Really does it seem such a trifle to you to be plucked up by the ears from one's environment, transplanted bodily league on league, and set down on an empty ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... humor—and Tewfick Pasha liked always to be kept in good humor—he had touches of that boyish charm that had made him the enfant gate of Paris and Vienna as well as Cairo and Constantinople. An enfant no more, in the robustly rotund forties, his cheerful self-indulgence demanded still of his environment that smiling acquiescence that kept life ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of a life lived physically rather than mentally. And yet this was only half true. Martin Warlock should at this time have been a quite normal young man with normal desires, normal passions, normal instincts. Such he would undoubtedly have been had he not had his early environment of egotism, mystery and clap-trap—had he, also, not developed through his childhood and youth his passionate devotion to his father. The religious ceremonies of his young days had made him self-conscious and introspective and, although ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... Columbus, my hero, royalest Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment this of thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee, mutinous, discouraged souls; behind thee, disgrace and ruin; before thee, the unpenetrated veil of Night. Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from their deep basin—ten miles deep, ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... developed in this respect should husband his or her resources—always keeping a reserve fund by avoiding undue fatigue, spending plenty of time in sleep, taking care of the body, and arranging for intervals of rest that shall include change of scene and environment. ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... without an anticipation of judgment. What are you going to do with these two feelings? Do you think that you can deal with them? It is no use saying, 'I am not responsible for what I did; I inherited such-and-such tendencies; circumstances are so-and-so. I could not help it; environment, and evolution, and all the rest of it diminish, if they do not destroy, responsibility.' Be it so! And yet, after all, this is left—the certainty in my own convictions that I had the power to do or not to do. That is a fundamental part of a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... say that the wretch is the product of circumstances, and cannot be expected to act otherwise than he does? Shall we liken evildoers generally, as at present is customary in certain quarters, to the sick? Shall we say that such men are the outcome of their heredity, their education, their environment? I have known of a husband who in a state of intoxication brutally struck and injured his wife, while she was holding in her arms a babe not eight days old. Shall we say that that man was morally sick, that he could not help becoming intoxicated, and therefore ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... structure. Unity, balance, and harmony become manifest as spatial properties - you had been taught to regard them as principles of art. You wonder if art itself may not be merely a matter of right placing - the adjustment of a thing to its environment. You are certain that this is so as each coign and niche offers you its particular insight. Strange vagaries float through your mind - one's duty to the inanimate things of one's possession; the house too ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... my comprehension. Surely it would not be difficult to introduce the prison fare gradually. There is real danger in a shock to the basic organ of life when all the other organs are painfully accommodating themselves to a radical change of environment. Weak men are sometimes shattered by it. Those who talk about the healthiness of prisons (a subject on which I shall have something to say by-and-bye) would be astonished at the quantity of physic dispensed by the doctor. My constitution is a strong one, and a dyspeptic ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... sung," move her not at all. Meanwhile, the majority of men are more kindly compact, and have more natural affections, and on them the memory of their earliest friendships, and of that beautiful environment which Oxford gave to their years of youth, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... Devonshire, established a business in Eastcheap, and left it to his two sons, Robert and James. Robert Smith[2] made over his share to his brother and went forth to see the world. This object he pursued, amid great vicissitudes of fortune and environment, till in old age he settled down at Bishop's Lydeard, in Somerset. He married Maria Olier, a pretty girl of French descent, and by her had five children: Robert Percy—better known as "Bobus"—born in 1770; Sydney in 1771; ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... travelers who had seen the wonders of the New World and the Old; men so stimulated by new discoveries, by new achievements of every sort, that hardly anything, even the supernatural, seemed for them impossible. Outside of ancient Athens, no dramatist has had a more favorable environment. ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... architecture is produced at certain eras in a people's life, is the earlier volume on "The Poetry of Architecture" (1837), which discusses the relation between architecture and its setting of landscape or other environment, illustrated by examples drawn from regions he had visited,—the English Lakeland, France, Switzerland, Spain, and ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... appeared a thing apart, and she was able to feel, with sincerity and dignity, that if she received much, she also gave much—the hours of relief and pleasure which ease the labour, the inevitable torment of the artist, all that protecting environment which a woman's sweet and agile wit can build around a man's taxed brain or ruffled nerves. To chat with her, in success or failure; to be sure of her welcome, her smile at all times; to ask her sympathy in matters where he ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... arbitrary codes and an opportunity to embrace a compass as wide as the range of literary excellence. Realizing that every reader, even the professed critic, is hemmed in by certain prejudices arising from his temperament, his education, his environment, he was unwilling to pledge his trust to any school or fashion of criticism. The favorite oppositions of his generation—Shakespeare and Pope, Fielding and Richardson, English poetry and French—had no meaning for him. He was glad to enjoy ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... common sense—not always a quality distinguishing the inventor—clear perception, breadth of view, and scientific method and spirit in the treatment of every question. His natural talent was re-enforced by an experience and an environment which led him to develop these ways and this mental habit. His trade was that of an instrument maker, his position was that of custodian and repairer of the apparatus of Glasgow University. He had for his daily companions and stimulus the great men and ozonized ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... of others. Perhaps the heretic might have liked him more if the Jesuit had liked him less. The adventurous explorer of Lake Huron, the bold invader of the Iroquois, befits but indifferently the monastic sobrieties of the fort of Quebec, and his sombre environment of priests. Yet Champlain was no formalist, nor was his an empty zeal. A soldier from his youth, in an age of unbridled license, his life had answered to his maxims; and when a generation had passed after his visit to the Hurons, their elders remembered with astonishment the continence ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... natural begettings of her situation upon her nature. To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a moment in ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... subjects. The particular economic problems in America at this time are determined by the whole complex economic and social situation. Two main factors in this may be distinguished: the objective and the subjective, or the material environment and the population composing the nation. The one is what we have, the other is what we are, as a people. These factors are closely related; for what we are as a people (our tastes, interests, capacities, ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... an iron will is the plaything of chance, the puppet of his environment, the slave of circumstances. Are not doubts the greatest of enemies? If you would succeed up to the limit of your possibilities, must you not constantly hold to the belief that you are success-organized, and that you will be successful, ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... Mark Antony's shining armor now supported a faded velvet breakfast jacket that showed its original color only in patches. But even in the intimacy of the breakfast hour Papa Claude preserved his air of distinction, the gracious condescension of a temporary sojourner in an environment from which he expected at any ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... soaked out of her long ago by those hot, steaming suds that enveloped her the greater part of her waking hours, and left her physically, mentally, and morally limp. Her one strong instinct was motherhood; but five little Flathers, opening feeble eyes on their future environment, had become so discouraged that they promptly closed them again. It was as if they really could not stand the prospect of life in that home with Mr. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... three thousand acres, a part of the confiscated estate of an Irish earl. Sir Walter Raleigh was also given forty-two thousand acres near Spenser. Ireland was then in a state of continuous turmoil. In such a country Spenser lived and wrote his Faerie Queene. Of course, this environment powerfully affected the character of that poem. It has been said that to read a contemporary's account of "Raleigh's adventures with the Irish chieftains, his challenges and single combats, his escapes at fords and woods, is like reading bits of the Faerie ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... These are the most extensive movements made. The vestigial legs remain inert and absolutely useless. Then why are they there? It were better to lose them altogether, if it be true that crawling inside the oak has deprived the animal of the good legs with which it started. The influence of environment, so well-inspired in endowing the grub with ambulatory pads, becomes a mockery when it leaves it these ridiculous stumps. Can the structure, perchance, be obeying other ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... become of late the fashion for any one who writes of his own life to see himself against a dark background, to see his development frustrated by some shadow of heredity or some horror of environment. But Gilbert saw his life rather as the ancients saw it when pietas was a duty because we had received so much from those who brought us into being. This Englishman was grateful to his country, to his parents, to his home for all that ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... an evolution as well as plants and animals! Having denied the existence of God, or his active control and interference, they must account for environment by evolution. Listen:—"Henderson points out that environment, no less than organisms, has had an evolution. Water, for example, has a dozen unique properties that condition life. Carbon dioxide is absolutely necessary to life. The properties of the ocean are so ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... clothing machines—a million machines have to be kept going to keep back the jungle and fight off starvation and just hold on doggedly to the bare fact of civilization. And they're short-handed. The law of diminishing returns seems to operate. They're trying to maintain a civilization higher than their environment will support. They work until they're ready to drop, just to stay in the same place. And the monotony and the strain makes some of them take to cuyal ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... was still fighting a battle in which a susceptible heart and a reasonable mind had locked horns in a well-nigh hopeless conflict. Reason, common-sense, the instinctive ready-made judgments of his training and environment,—the deep-seated prejudices of race and caste,—commanded him to dismiss Rena from his thoughts. His stubborn heart simply would ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... light, still the victim of her cavalier training, still held back by the poor black and the poor white, the products of her accursed institution. Now that is all abolished, she needs help from the North. I doubt if we in the North would be any better had we been placed in the same environment, and our superiority may be due as much to soil, climate, and the consequent unprofitableness of slave labor, ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... what can education do to alleviate a condition of this sort? How may the weak influence of the school make itself felt in an environment that has crystallized on every hand this unfortunate standard? Individualism is in the air. It is the dominant spirit of the times. It is reenforced upon every side by the unmistakable evidences of national prosperity. It is easy to preach the simple life, but who ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... that—a courteous and unconventional sort of ease. In all these surface characteristics he was a geographical anomaly. In the cast of his mind he was more Southern than the South, as a Northern convert is apt to be. Even his speech, like the dyer's arm, had taken tints from his environment. One might say that his pronunciation had literally been colored by his long association with the colored race. He invariably said flo' for floor, and djew for dew; but I do not anywhere attempt a phonetic reproduction of his dialect; in its finer qualities it was too elusive to be snared ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... refuse to allow themselves to be surprised by any upheaval of circumstances. "I should worry," they seem to be saying, and press straight on with the job in hand. There was one small touch which made the environment seem even more friendly and unexceptional. One of the girls, on being introduced, promptly read to me a letter which she had just received from my sister in America. It made this oasis in an encircling wilderness ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... cities that as a rule the terrible struggle with the wolf at the door is apt to sour the nature of women and turn them into crones at the age when in the more fortunate classes the true beauty of woman often begins; and even where the environment is not that of poverty, but of straitened means, it is as a rule impossible for a ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... exterminated. There are several forms and colors of these pests. If you have attempted plant-growing you are undoubtedly familiar with them. In the house, shaded places, crowded plants, poor ventilation, dry plants, all furnish environment favorable to the development of aphids. Change these conditions at once. The old method of fighting used to be by burning moistened tobacco stems, or steeping them in water and making a very weak tea for spraying. But either was a difficult, disagreeable ...
— Gardening Indoors and Under Glass • F. F. Rockwell
... which she had been reared? thought Laodice. Had it existed only in the shut house of Costobarus? Was all the world wicked except that which was confined within the four walls of her father's house? Could she survive long in this unanimously bad environment? But she remembered Joseph of Pella, the shepherd; even then his wholesomeness was not without its ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller |
