"Fixedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hearts of those whose lives seemed to hang in his hands with alarm if not dismay. His spirit seemed to be stirred within him. There was indeed no anger, either in his looks or tones; but there was a stern fixedness of purpose in his manner and aspect which aroused, yet repelled, the curiosity of those around him. Even Ole Thorwald and Montague agreed that it was best to let him alone; for although they might overcome his great ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... this fixedness and placidity, conveying the impression of fate, death, repose, or immortality, which render sculpture so congenial as commemorative of the departed. Even quaint wooden effigies, like those in St. Mary's Church ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... around him. In the car, the doctor, completely overwhelmed, sat with his arms folded on his breast, gazing with idiotic fixedness upon some imaginary point in space. Kennedy was frightful to behold. He was rolling his head from right to left like a wild beast in ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... man, and who have made his nature a serious study, apart from racial bias, I am perplexed with conundrums which cannot be solved. Some of the conundrums are perhaps superficial, and disappear with a deeper insight into his life; others are wrought into his being. Yet he has a fixedness of character, reaching in some directions to absolute crystallization; he possesses the virility of young manhood and many of the mutually inconsistent traits of late manhood and early youth. I wonder at his ignorance of merest ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... disputations; when those who endeavored to lead an earnest Christian life met with nearly as much to oppose them as in periods of active persecution; such were her environments. They were little favorable to the strength of mind, the fixedness of purpose, the self-denial and Christian devotion that marked this noble deaconess. Born in 368 A.D. of a heathen family of rank, owing to her parents' early death she was educated a Christian. In her seventeenth year she married Nebridius, the prefect of the city, but after a ...
— Deaconesses in Europe - and their Lessons for America • Jane M. Bancroft
... only removes the hindrances of reason, but positively helps reason. It makes even the speculative notions the more lively. It engages the attention of the mind, with the more fixedness and intenseness to that kind of objects; which causes it to have a clearer view of them, and enables it more clearly to see their mutual relations, and occasions it to take more notice of them. The ideas themselves that otherwise are dim ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... open up the subject with a full acknowledgment, and would offer any gradual settlement within my power. He paid his bill (doing what was right by attendance) with his eye rolling about him to the last for any tokens of his Luggage. One only time our gaze then met, with the lustrous fixedness (I believe I am correct in imputing that character to it?) of the well-known Basilisk. The decisive moment ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... husbands, fathers, brothers, or some one dearer, do not directly or indirectly aid them. So far from alienating the married pair, so far from creating domestic disturbance, the discussion of this question has called into activity faculties men never dreamed woman possessed. She has shown more fixedness of purpose, sagacity, and sound judgment, than have ever been attributed to her. Excepting the religion of Christ, which first broke the chains binding woman to a mere animal existence, and sent gleams of love and hope through ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... till then, had hidden nature from her. The Little Virgin still existing in the beautiful young girl thought on the morrow that her flowers had never been so beautiful; she heard their symbolic language, she looked into the depths of the azure sky with a fixedness that was almost ecstasy, and tears without a cause rolled down ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... potations of the Chinese leaf the night before. She told me quite frankly that she 'declined being lectured on the food or beverage she saw fit to take;' which was but reasonable in one who had arrived at her maturity of intellect and fixedness of habits. So the subject was thenceforth tacitly avoided between us; but, though words were suppressed, looks and involuntary gestures could not so well be; and an utter divergency of views on this and kindred themes created a perceptible distance ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... ever so little, and she kept her eyes on the questioner with involuntary fixedness. The last shadow of doubt regarding Sibyl having disappeared (no woman with an uneasy conscience, she said to herself, could talk in this way), she had now to guard herself against the betrayal of suspicious sensibilities. Sibyl, of course, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... render home the all-powerful magnet of attraction, and the focal point of domestic enjoyment—to make my welfare and happiness at all times a matter of tender solicitude—and to demonstrate the depth and fixedness of that love which you so long ago plighted to me.... Whatever of human infirmity we may have seen in each other, I believe few have enjoyed more unalloyed bliss in wedded life than ourselves." For ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... one Common Form; upon which Dissolution the Component Particles of the Mixt, being Freed and set at Liberty, do Naturally, and oftentimes without any Operation of the Fire, Associate themselves each with its Like, or rather do take those places which their Several Degrees of Gravity and Levity, Fixedness or Volatility (either Natural, or Adventitious from the Impression of the Fire) Assigne them. Thus in the Distillation (for Instance) of Man's Blood, the Fire do's First begin to Dissolve the Nexus or Cement of the Body; and then the Water, being the ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... which a full, graceful drapery is requisite; but when, as is often the case, the sculptor is required to reproduce the actual costume of the day, what can we look for? The truth is, it has no grace in itself; what, then, must it be when put into the fixedness of bronze or marble? Yet where is the remedy for this? We do not wish to see the men whom we have known and who have moved among us in the dress of other men put into an antique disguise by the sculptor; the incongruity of this is too apparent. Much has been written and said ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... whether, in the utterance of such extraordinary Night-thoughts, no feeling might be traced there; but with the light we had, which indeed was only a single tallow-light, and far enough from the window, nothing save that old calmness and fixedness ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... associate arrangements, modes of life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, perhaps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their want of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The face of physical nature in the United States shares this incessant fluctuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits of the population. It is time for some abatement in the restless love of change which characterizes us, and makes us almost ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... consciousness of the difference in himself between the possible and the actual, the hoped-for and the existent. He feels that duty is the highest law of his own being; and knowing how it bids the waves be stilled into an icy fixedness and grandeur, he trusts (but with a boundless inward misgiving) that there is a principle of order which will reduce all confusion to shape and clearness. But wanting peace himself, his fierce dissatisfaction fixes on all that is weak, corrupt and imperfect around him; and instead of ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre. Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with something bitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible in it, strikes clearly ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... could be plainly seen in the distance, while close upon our left were the Sweetwater Mountains. The difference in scenery after leaving the river and plains was such as to awaken new emotions and fire one with a new kind of admiration. The immensity and fixedness of the mountains awakened a keener sense of stability, of firmness of purpose, and a sort of expect great things and do great things spirit; while the sense of beauty appreciation was in no wise narrowed as it followed ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... I found that she breathed more regularly and distinctly—presently her eyes lost that fixedness which had made them so painful to look upon. Then she recognised me, and took hold of my hand, regarding me with the sweet smile with which I ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Frederick Marryat
... But they have quietly taken things as they are. They have wanted Luther's substitute for superstition—a fervently religious spirit. They have had only worldly and political motives, for wishing to see the old imposition done away; and these have been powerless against natural apathy, and the fixedness of old establishment. Infidelity and indifferentism ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... him tired to see the fixedness, the apathy, and lifelessness of this rich and populous world, which should be up and stirring by rights—trading, organising, inventing, building new towns, making the old ones keep up with the procession, laying new railroads, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... all his outburst, a certain independence and a fearlessness and a certain fixedness of purpose that sent an exultant thrill through her even when her heart was burdened with the thought of this new danger that threatened him. She had sent him away for the fault of instability, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was conscious of a degree of pain and sorrow for which she could not readily account. If Clara loved Dr. Hartwell, why should it grieve her? Her step grew nervously rapid, and the eyes settled upon the carpet with a fixedness of which she was unconscious. Suppose he was double her age, if Clara loved him notwithstanding, what business was it of hers? Besides, no one would dream of the actual disparity in years, for he was a very handsome man, and certainly did not look more than ten years older. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the scriptures, and, like another young Samson, the Spirit of God began very early to move him, there being such a delightful gravity in his young conversation, that what Gregory Nazianzen once said of the great Bazil, might be applied to him,—"That he held forth learning beyond his age, and fixedness of ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... a farewell address to his country, and retired to private life at the Hermitage, where he lived until his death in 1845. There is much in the life of Andrew Jackson that can be profitably copied by the American youth of to-day; notably his fixedness of purpose, indomitable will, and great love of truth. There are other things that would be well to pass by and give little promise, such as his sporting propensities. Lossing says: 'The memory of that great and good man is revered by his countrymen ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... for the salvation thus obtained. They were exerting all their powerful influence to increase the chance, already alarmingly great, of making a Democrat the next President of the United States. Nevertheless Mr. Lincoln, with his wonted imperturbable fixedness when he had reached a conviction, did not modify his ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... propagate them by "root-joints," whereas, the variegated Tussilago farfara can thus be safely propagated;[879] but this latter plant may have originated as a variegated seedling, which would account for its greater fixedness of character. The Barberry (Berberis vulgaris) offers an analogous case; there is a well-known variety with seedless fruit, which can be propagated by cuttings or layers; but suckers always revert to the common form, which ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin |
