"Instinct" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which they are enabled to track through the snow, and are very skilful in killing. Their skins afford them a little scanty covering. Herding together among bushes, and crouching almost naked over a little sage fire, using their instinct only to procure food, these may be considered, among human beings, the nearest approach to the animal creation. We have reason to believe that these had never before seen the ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... have yet to see the end. I will pray for you with all my heart, for you deserve to be happy, and none can be more fascinating than you, when you exert yourself. What is it in women that I do not feel which makes them so mad after the other sex? Instinct, certainly, for reason is against it. Well, I have no objection to help others to commit the folly, provided that I am not led into it myself." Such were my reflections, as I closed the ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... emigrants went forth from their native land against the wishes of the authorities, and they naturally carried with them a prejudice against the cause of missions. On their arrival they were received by the missionaries with mixed feelings. Natural instinct led them to welcome the sight of men of their own race, but their minds misgave them when they thought of the effect which would be produced upon their converts. The Maoris were not yet grounded ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... toward the cottage, threading his way more by instinct than sight among the rocks, but only to stop short again, horrified by the thought that now assailed him. That man—Barron or Dale—it was not safe that he should be trusted with Myra. It was madness after what ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... increases the other, until the maximum desire is reached, to which the will must surrender. Nature needs this automatic function; otherwise the vital needs of individual and race might be suppressed by other interests, and neglected. In the case of the sexual instinct, the mutual relations between the various parts of this circulatory process are especially complicated. Here it must be sufficient to say that the idea of sexual processes produces dilation of blood vessels in the sexual sphere, and that this physiological ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... misery—it was quite unpremeditated—but even this mitigation of the affront hardly brought him any comfort as yet Braelands was certainly deeply grieved at the miserable outcome of the meeting. He knew the pride of the fisher race, and he had himself a manly instinct, strong enough to understand the undeserved humiliation of Andrew's position. Honestly, as a gentleman, he was sorry the quarrel had taken place; as a lover, he was anxious to turn it to his own advantage. ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... satisfied. There was something underlying the charming expression and the fascinating manner which my instinct felt to be something wrong. As I walked away toward the opposite end of the bridge, the doubt began to grow on me whether she had spoken the truth. In leaving the neighborhood of the river, was she simply trying to ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... any more than that they should habitually walk at the rate of five miles an hour or carry a hundredweight continually on their backs. Their normal condition should be in nowise difficult or remarkable; and it is a perfectly sound instinct that leads us to mistrust the good man as much as the bad man, and to object to the clergyman who is pious extra-professionally as much as to the professional pugilist who is quarrelsome and violent in private life. We do not want good men and bad men any ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... regions, are in every religion the supposed abode of the divine. What is higher is always the stronger and the nobler; a superior is one who is better than we are, and therefore a chieftain in Algonkin is called oghee-ma, the higher one. There is, moreover, a naif and spontaneous instinct which leads man in his ecstasies of joy, and in his paroxysms of fear or pain, to lift his hands and eyes to the overhanging firmament. There the sun and bright stars sojourn, emblems of glory and stability. Its azure vault has a mysterious attraction which invites the eye to ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Cellini gravely, "if you will think again of the last of your three dreams, you will not doubt that he HAS intentions towards you. As I told you, he is a PHYSICAL ELECTRICIAN. By that is meant a great deal. He knows by instinct whether he is or will be needed sooner or later. Let me finish what I have to say. You are ill, mademoiselle—ill from over-work. You are an improvisatrice—that is, you have the emotional genius of music, a spiritual ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... not so easy to do good as those who have never attempted it may imagine; and they who without consideration follow the mere instinct of pity, often by their imprudent generosity create evils more pernicious to society than any which they partially remedy. "Warm Charity, the general friend," may become the general enemy, unless she consults her head as well as her heart. Whilst she pleases herself ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... no answer. He watched her retreating figure until it turned in at the gate, and then he wheeled abruptly and went back. An instinct of flight was on him. Here in the open street he longed for walls, only perhaps because he knew how well everybody wished him and their kindness ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... chance for either of us; all I could think of was that I was riding Spitfire's son and that he was going to kill me, and that, maybe, it was a sort of reparation I had to make. Besides, I should be free of Baker and his threats, and he could never harm you through me. But all the time the instinct to live was strong, and I'd got my feet clear of the stirrups, for I didn't want to go with him into the bog. Then he threw me and I heard his hoofs tearing at the stones of the road as he went over, and he squealed. It's horrible to hear ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? — men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and remaining unpaid without fault, is a crime, and a crime fit to be punished by denying to the offender the enjoyment of the light of heaven, and shutting him up within four walls. Your own good sense, and that instinct of right feeling which often outruns sagacity, carried you at once to a result to which others were more slowly brought, but to which nearly all have at length been brought, by reason, reflection, and argument. Your movement led the ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... sharply from the trail and made a detour through a grove of trees, riding with reckless speed, his head down to escape low branches; and in a minute or two he came with unerring instinct back to the trail some distance ahead of Forsythe and Rosa. Then he wheeled his horse and stopped stock-still, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... feet of men. On each side of it lay a wild moor, covered with heather and low berry-bearing shrubs. Under a big bush Maggie saw something glimmer, and, flying to it, found a child. It might be a year old, but was so small and poorly nourished that its age was hard to guess. "With the instinct of a mother, she caught it up, and clasping it close to her panting bosom, was delighted to find it cease wailing the moment it felt her arm. Andrew, who had dropped the things he carried, and started ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... timidity, almost of apology, which Montague noticed and wondered at. It was only later, when he had time to think about it, that he realized that Hegan had begun as a farmer's boy in Texas, a "poor white"; and could it be that after all these years an instinct remained in him, so that whenever he met a gentleman of the old South he stood by with a little deference, seeming to beg pardon for his hundred millions ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... fighting against the Bourbon, in 1860: "offerse per l'unita della patria sua vita quadrilustre." The very insignificance of this young life makes the fact more touching; one thinks of the unnumbered lives sacrificed upon this soil, age after age, to the wild-beast instinct of mankind, and how pathetic the attempt to preserve the memory of one boy, so soon to become a meaningless name! His own voice seems to plead with us for a regretful thought, to speak from the stone in sad arraignment of ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... to the northwest from instinct that I should find my journey's end soonest that way. Over the divide which hid the wide valley of the Arkansas, and into the deep draws and low bluffs of a creek with billowy hills beyond, I found myself still instinctively smelling my way. I grew more cautious with each ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... Futurity is the proper Object of the Passion so constantly exercis'd about it; and this Restlessness in the present, this assigning our selves over to further Stages of Duration, this successive grasping at somewhat still to come, appears to me (whatever it may to others) as a kind of Instinct or natural Symptom which the Mind of Man has of its ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... his genius have hurried him into fresh developments, and characteristic details, appropriate to the imaginary correspondent whom he addresses? These considerations may seem a mere leaning on 'internal evidence,' and 'literary instinct,' broken reeds. But the case is buttressed by the long and, on any theory, purposeless retention of Letter IV, the secrecy concerning it, and the confession, so obviously true, that Letter IV is the source and model ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... look, a word at that moment would sway him; he felt it, and leaned forward, waiting in secret suspense for the glance, the speech which should decide him for good or ill. Who shall say what subtle instinct caused Octavia to turn and smile at him with a wistful, friendly look that warmed his heart? He met it with an answering glance, which thrilled her strangely, for love, gratitude, and some mysterious intelligence met and mingled in the brilliant yet soft expression ...
— The Abbot's Ghost, Or Maurice Treherne's Temptation • A. M. Barnard
... Whether from some instinct of protection of his helpless master in that foul and hostile place, or because barking had proved to be of no use Bobby sat back on his haunches and considered this strange, disquieting thing. It was not like Auld Jock to sleep in the daytime, or so soundly, at any time, that barking would ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... let his sports hovercar sink to a parking level and vaulted over its side he was still questioning his decision to sign up with the Vacuum Tube outfit rather than with their opponents. Joe was an old pro and old pros do not get to be old pros in the Category Military without developing an instinct to stay away from ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... liked to see her closets full of silk gowns, made and unmade, and jewels and laces which did her no good and only excited the sin of envy and a desire for her death in the minds of all the young women who served Rigou. She was one of those beings, half-woman, half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful Arsene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance which prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the vast ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... all born with a strong sex instinct, and this instinct must find expression in some way. We know that the sex energy can be sublimated, that is, raised to a higher power. For instance, the creative sex urge may be directed to the making of a bookcase, or the making of a century at cricket. But I know of no evidence to prove ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... It was this strong instinct of Nationality which rendered the masses so long tolerant, if not complaisant, toward Slavery and the Slave Power. Merchants and bankers were bound to their footstool by other and ignobler ties; but the yeomanry of the land regarded slavery with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... "'The instinct of women to seek a life of repose, their eagerness to attain the life of elegance, does not mean contempt for labor, but it is the confession of unfitness for labor. Women were not intended to work,—not because work is ignoble, but because ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... have caused him a pang which would have excluded the rushing train of thought that followed those decisive words. As it was, though the sentence of unchangeable hatred grated on him and jarred him terribly, his mind glanced round with a self-preserving instinct to see how far those words could have the force of a substantial threat. When he had come down to speak to Baldassarre, he had said to himself that if his effort at reconciliation failed, things would only be as they had been ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... was a telling one, and the princess was overwhelmed by it, and from that moment her defeat was assured. But as her heart and mind were instinct with noble and generous feelings, she understood De Guiche's extreme delicacy. She saw that in his heart he really suspected that the king was in love with La Valliere, and that he did not wish to resort to the common ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... homely instinct James had half consciously foreseen what would be the controlling element of the case; and while he had not formulated it to himself he had brought with him one of his neighbors, who had watched with his daughter through ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... one from the other. Plato, with his great knowledge of human nature, was well aware how easily one is transformed into the other, or how soon the noble but fleeting aspiration may return into the nature of the animal, while the lower instinct which is latent always remains. The intermediate sentimentalism, which has exercised so great an influence on the literature of modern Europe, had no place in the classical times of Hellas; the higher love, of which ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... influential of the motives that brought the early settlers to these shores, apart from that natural instinct to scatter and multiply which urges even sober salmon to climb the Rocky Mountains, was their desire to find a country at once fertile and winterless, where their flocks and herds could find pasture all the year, thus doing away with the long ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... terror, and Philosophy, shuddering, averts her face; the nations turn from these gloomy teachers to storm its portals in exultant hosts, battering them wide enough for thousands to charge through abreast. The heroic instinct of humanity with its high contempt of death is wiser and truer, never let us doubt, than superstitious terrors or philosophic doubts. It testifies to a conviction, deeper than reason, that man is greater than his seeming self; ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... and that are on the branches above the water and a little under the water are not those that produce pearls, but another species; because those that bear pearls are more careful from their natural instinct to hide themselves as much further under water as they can than those he ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... instinct told me that it would be better to give Isabella no notice of my coming into her neighbourhood. As I rode up the avenue I saw Lucille, herself the incarnation of spring, moving among the flowers. She turned at the sound of the horse's tread, and changed colour when she recognised me. A flush—I ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... brings the latter the closer together. All that part of its organisation which it had committed to its government, devolves again upon itself, and acts through its medium. When men, as well from natural instinct as from reciprocal benefits, have habituated themselves to social and civilised life, there is always enough of its principles in practice to carry them through any changes they may find necessary or convenient to make in their ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... groped blindly for an explanation. Her woman's instinct told her that the man panting on the porch within six feet of the officer was the criminal wanted. There ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... him, if he's above ground," said the fathers, full of faith in the detective instinct of their coursing sons. It seemed incredible that sons should ride so fast and far, and come to nothing. "Never was known to go out o' the county, an' they've rid over it from one eend to t' other. Must ha' made way with himself. He wa'n't quite ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... rose cold and white against the moon, at the end of a nettle-grown lane. A garth of ilex-oaks surrounded it; and beside it, more than half-hidden by the untrimmed trees, stood a ridiculously squat church. By instinct, or, rather, from association of ideas learnt in England, I glanced around this churchyard for its gravestones. There were none. Yet for the second time within these few hours I was strangely reminded of home, where in an upper garret were stacked half a dozen ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... assume an attitude of extreme reserve, or even of icy indifference. Possibly his manner will be curt and sharp. Size up such a reception as just his way of protecting himself against impositions. His treatment of you is merely a superficial manifestation of the instinct for self-preservation. It indicates nothing more than that he is wary of any one who calls on him with an ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... of philosophy for your years," he ventured, after a little hesitation. "There is one instinct, however, ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is the mortal enemy of the orang-outan. While they fear to encounter the grown animals, they will attack the young, and the orangs seem to have the instinct of danger from that source ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... a reinstatement of the Prussian king on the absolute throne of his ancestors—a reaction from all that was progressive to the grossest abuses of despotism? All this time he was fighting a desperate battle against backstairs influences, which with true instinct were deprecating and counteracting his schemes of aggrandizement and national reorganization. It is clear, on looking back to that period which has left such indelible marks on the judgment of many well-meaning liberals, that his exaggerated ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... other terms the prevailing passion for pretty clothes in the masses as well as the classes is the inspiration of the court, while the free personal preferences expressed are probably the effect of that strong, that headstrong, instinct of being like one's self, whether one is like others or not, which has always moulded precedence and tradition to individual convenience with the English. One would not have said that a frock-coat of ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... by your mind, and whether I am right or not you will yourself know best. However, what you yourself can scarcely be aware of (as genius ever remains the greatest mystery to itself) is the beautiful harmony between your philosophical instinct and the purest results of your speculative reason. Upon a first view it does indeed seem as if there could not be any greater opposites than the speculative mind which proceeds from unity, and the intuitive ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... least the majority. But the cruelty of the Chinese is probably not regarded as cruelty, certainly not in the sense of cruelty in the West. Being Chinese, with customs and laws of life such as they are, their instinct of cruelty is excusable to some degree. Not only is it with animals, however, but among themselves the Chinese have no mercy, no sympathy. In Christian England within the last century men where hanged for petty theft; but in Yuen-nan—I ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the request. By a common instinct all of the Grammar School boys gathered closely around the stove, extending ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... By some instinct he knew what she meant. "It was going down the Wenderling Hill," he said, "just as we got into the town. You know that steepish hill? Halfway down was a brewer's waggon. We were going at a good stroke, not saying anything, for the moment. We got up to the waggon. 'There's that infernal white ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... to posses Mrs. Palfrey's receipt for brawn, hers being pronounced on all hands to be superior to his own—as he informed her in a very flattering letter carried by his errand-boy. Now Mrs. Palfrey, like other geniuses, wrought by instinct rather than by rule, and possessed no receipts—indeed, despised all people who used them, observing that people who pickled by book, must pickle by weights and measures, and such nonsense; as for herself, her ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... head waters of the Lockinge brook, close to the springs, I saw the trout spawning on New Year's Day. The big fish had wriggled up into the very shallowest water, and were lying with their back fins and tails out, I suppose from some instinct either that this water is the most highly aerated, or because floods do less harm on a shallow, or for both reasons combined. At Long Wittenham, though I never saw a trout in the river (they are, however, taken there), Admiral Clutterbuck recently had a fine old stew pond in the picturesque ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... the fruitage of our long history, but in industry we must simply wait through patient generations to reach the stage represented by the Englishman, Irishman, or German, who takes to machinery as if by instinct." ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... I held in my hand had been in search of me from Paris to Jerusalem, and from consulate to consulate, had returned from Jerusalem to Paris, to the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. There they had let loose some blood-hounds of the police, who with their usual instinct followed my tracks and discovered my abode in less ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... one to help—and the Anglo-Saxon blood of us, the blood of the race that has fought its way out of a swamp in Friesland, conquering and conquering and conquering, on to the westward, the race whose blood instinct is the acquiring of land, went galloping through our veins to the beat of ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... deafness possessed him. Stupefied, instinct still aided him automatically in his customary habit of fighting; he strove to beat back the mounting waves of lethargy; half-conscious, he still fought ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... and adheres to it. The hard-hitting, erratic, net-rushing player is a creature of impulse. There is no real system to his attack, no understanding of your game. He will make brilliant coups on the spur of the moment, largely by instinct; but there is no, mental power of consistent thinking. It is an interesting, fascinating type. Such men as Harold Throckmorton, B. I. C. Norton, and at times R. N. Williams, are examples, although Williams is really a better ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... Instinct, intuition, or some similar faculty caused Prale to turn off the Avenue eastward toward the river. He was not angry now. His mind was in action. He had convinced himself that there was something behind all this, and he was eager ...
— The Brand of Silence - A Detective Story • Harrington Strong
... souls be found who are actuated by the instinct of the Holy Spirit, the genius of grace, to form an associative effort in the special work of the present time? If there be such a work, and an associative effort be necessary, will not the Holy Spirit ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... was not aware, and against which, had he but suspected it, he would have rebelled with the obstinacy of a child, he was a machine obedient to the will of another mind and to the passions of another heart, a machine which was all the more terrible in that no movement of instinct or of reason could, in his case, arrest ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... first instinct, and that was, instead of firing, to give the alarm, to run down as fast as he could to the water's edge and plunge in amongst the scattered, overhanging trees, making as well as he could judge for the direction from which the cries ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... soul. Within it, extremes touch, but only to blend into a harmonious unit which manifests the Spanish temperament and character more truly there than in any other part of the world. In its Andalusian atmosphere the religious instinct of the Spaniard reaches its fullest embodiment. True, its bull-fights are gory spectacles; but they are also gorgeous and solemn ceremonies. Its ferias are tremendously worldly; but they are none the less stupendous religious fetes. Its ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... looked a little more into his Bible, and tried a little more to understand it, after his father's death, it is not to be wondered at. It is but another instance of the fact that, whether from education or from the leading of some higher instinct, we are ready, in every more profound trouble, to feel as if a solution or a refuge lay somewhere—lay in sounds of wisdom, perhaps, to be sought and found in the best of books, the deepest of all the mysterious treasuries of words. But ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... loved the law and respected it and they honored its expounders and administrators. They do not believe that the world can be made over or made better by any man or by any preaching. They are by instinct conservative, holding on with tenacity to the ideas and institutions that have grown up in past times and that are expressions of the needs of society and of its adjustment to the forces that play upon it. This is why the law, which is the embodiment of these conservative ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... which is connate with, and natural to man. At any rate, there must be something in the nature of man, or in the exterior conditions of humanity, which invariably leads man to worship, and which determines him, as by the force of an original instinct, or an outward, conditioning necessity, to recognize and bow down before a Superior Power. The full recognition and adequate explanation of the facts of religious history will constitute a philosophy ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Every word he said expressed just those things and tributes which her girlish vanity had desired. There was not a word in all of it to give offence. But for the second time she experienced a sense of trouble which her woman's instinct prompted, and a feeling akin to panic stirred. But she resisted it, as she knew she must, and her mind was quite ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... ones. The fears that only self-interest could induce them to take on the neglected and uncontrollable children were not borne out by experience, and in the ease of these babies not really illegitimate—it is the parents who deserve that title, no infant can—the mother's instinct came out very strong. At a conference of workers among dependent children, held in Adelaide in May, 1909, when all six States were represented, a Western Australian representative said that the average family home was not so good for its ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... Islands, and several ports on the north of Madagascar. She has also the sympathy of all the creoles of Mauritius, in whose minds the English occupation of fifty years has been unable to stifle the instinct of nationality. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... Hall of the Commune. And as there was no "people," so in the mediaeval sense of the word there was no "baronage." The nobles of Venice were not Lombard barons but Roman patricians, untouched by feudal traditions or by the strong instinct of personal independence which created feudalism. The shadow of the Empire is always over them, they look for greatness not to independent power or strife, but to joint co-operation in the government of the State. Their ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... cover the nest, are very thick and tufted. Therefore, your mirror, even if it reached their summit, would only reflect the leaves, and consequently neither the nest nor the knife; and the other thing which you do not observe, is this, that the magpies, by an admirable instinct, which God has given them, build their nests, not like a basin, as you supposed, but in the form of a ball; so that the nest is covered with a vaulted roof, formed of sticks closely interwoven, which shelters the bird and its ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... would dream of curing his friend of his degrading vice, for a true friend's instinct in all that belongs to the inner life is unerring as a dog's sense of smell; a friend knows by intuition the trouble in his friend's soul, and guesses at the cause and ponders ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... had made sure that, once absolutely her own, once irrevocably separated from the girl whom instinct had taught her to regard as her rival, Maurice would return to the old allegiance, and learn to love her once more, as in days now long ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... been perceptible to her—may have softened her ideas concerning him—ideas which had accumulated bitterness during the year of his misbehaviour and selfish neglect. Her instinct divined in his apparently sullen attitude the slow intelligence and mental perturbation of a wilful, selfish boy made stupid through idleness and self-indulgence. Even what had been clean-cut, attractive, in his face and figure ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... the way inside, stepping among the littered furniture with the instinct of a cat. He shouted an order, unintelligible to his visitors, and an entire side of the hut was raised, ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... train at Bright River station, and slipped off unnoticed into the darkness of the wet night. She had two miles to walk, and a cold rain was falling. Soon the Old Lady was wet to the skin and chilled to the marrow. She felt as if she were walking in a bad dream. Blind instinct alone guided her over the last mile and up the lane to her own house. As she fumbled at her door, she realized that a burning heat had suddenly taken the place of her chilliness. She stumbled in over her threshold and ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... have seemed to him madness. Even if he could have seen the surprising events of May-June 1808, he would probably have distrusted the spirit which prompted them. In truth, he lacked the sympathetic instinct which led Canning at that crisis to side with the Spanish patriots and thus open a new chapter in the ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... their having any regard for him—now from the injuries that the avarice of their governors causes them, now from the tendency of these to acquire preponderance and to command, which is the first instinct of man. Consequently, the friars, by resisting and restraining in all parts, and at so great a distance from Madrid, the tyranny or greed of the Spaniards, have been very useful to the villages, and have been acquiring their love. And since the islands are not kept subject ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... rising Barnacles who were born of woman, to be followed under a variety of watchwords which they utterly repudiated and disbelieved, Ferdinand rose. Nothing could be more agreeable than his frank and courteous bearing, or adapted with a more gentlemanly instinct to the circumstances ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... "were all my conjectures that she was unhappy, and that, in the trustful and earnest expression of those deep blue eyes, I could read the evidence of a secret grief, and a tacit appeal for sympathy to those whom her instinct taught her were worthy of her trust and confidence! Ah! well, I was young and foolish then (it was not quite a year and a half ago), and imagination found an easy dupe in me; one learns to see things in their true light as one grows older, but it is sad how ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... actual. And it appeared that, after all, he wasn't needed. Concentration on the nuances of minor fifteenth-century poets had unfitted him for being swept on, as these had been, by the world-currents. They had married each other, pushed by the mating instinct in the air—the world's insistence on marriage to balance the death that had swept it. Now they were struggling to find their balance against each other, to be decent, to be fair, to make themselves and each other what ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... to meet him. I have no doubt that he credits me with the disfavour in which he is held by the prince; but I have never even mentioned his name before him, and the prince's misliking is but the feeling which a noble and generous heart has, as though by instinct, against one who is false and treacherous. At the same time we must grant that this traitor knight is a bold and fearless man-at-arms; he fought well at La Blanche Tache and Cressy, and he is much liked and trusted by my lord of Northampton, in whose following he ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... that his greatness lies; the sense of a whole is its controlling factor; details are important, indeed, he took the utmost pains to see that they were necessary and convincing—yet they were details, subordinate, closely related, not irrelevant nor disproportionate. This instinct for a definite plan first is the essence of the classical spirit; exuberance is rigorously repressed, symmetry and balance are the first, last and only aim. To some judges Sophocles is like a Greek temple, splendid but a little chilly; they miss the soaring ambition of Aeschylus or the ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... this slip of a girl that interested me so? Ever and anon I found myself thinking of her. Was it the conversation I had overheard? Was it the mystery that seemed to surround her? Was it the irrepressible instinct of my heart for the romance of life? With the old man, despite our stateroom propinquity, I had made no advances. With the girl I had passed no ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... himself and in his profession, and his accurate instinct that war cannot be made without running risks, combined with his lack of experience in the difficulties of land operations to mislead his judgment in the particular instance. In a converse sense, there may be applied to him the remark of the French naval critic, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... Jack hitched himself along more rapidly. The branch began to creak. Our hero doubted if it would sustain their double weight. However, he trusted to the wary instinct of the ocelot, which kept coming right forward. Jack was about eight feet from the end of the branch when it gave a very ominous crack. In fact, he saw the white splinters show ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... secrets of Mr. Washington's success was his unerring instinct for putting first things first. In nothing that he did was this trait better illustrated than in the unceasing emphasis which he placed upon the fundamental importance of agriculture. He never forgot that over 80 per cent. of his ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... her!" that rang through the narrow room and betrayed the source of his present frenzy. Then he again stood still, grating his teeth and working his hands in a way terribly suggestive of the murderer's instinct. But not for long. He saw something that attracted his attention on the table, a something upon which my eyes had long before been fixed, and starting forward with a fresh and quite different display of emotion, he caught up what looked ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... the day, and retired with her spoils, which were not inconsiderable; but, intoxicated with the glory she had won, enticed by the glittering caparisons that lay scattered on the plain, and without doubt prompted by the secret instinct of her fate, she resolved to seize opportunity by the forelock, and once for all indemnify herself for the many fatigues, hazards, and sorrows ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... is made to show its teeth, and rat-like mien and propensities, through all the splendour of its disguises, merely by the application of his simple philosophical tests. For the question, as he puts it, is the question between animal instinct, between mere appetite, and reason; and the question incidentally arises in the course of the exhibition, whether the common-weal, when it comes to anything like common-sense, is going to stand being gnawed in this way, for ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... development of the olfactory nerve, and thus secures the highest possible scenting powers. EYES—Not too full, but not small, receding or overhung; colour dark hazel or dark brown, or nearly black; grave in expression, and bespeaking unusual docility and instinct. EARS—Set low down as possible, which greatly adds to the refinement and beauty of the head, moderately long and wide, and sufficiently clad with nice Setter-like feather. NECK—Very strong and ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... mystery that rustled in every wood, following the call of the winds and the birds, or wandering alone where the spirit moved him, who never studied nature consciously, but only loved it, and who found out many of these Ways long ago, guided solely by a boy's instinct. ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... neither sympathy nor admiration from the outside world. Concha glanced at Estella and wondered if he had been mistaken. There was in the old man's heart, as indeed there is in nearly all human hearts, a thwarted instinct. How many are there with maternal instincts who have no children; how many a poet has been lost by the crying need of hungry mouths! It was a thwarted instinct that made the old priest busy himself with the affairs of other people, ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... felt that in this shipwreck of my happiness I made no cowardly exposure of my feelings, but he did not understand me. Our minds, as I now found, moved in different orbits. We could not comprehend each other. Instead of feeling, as the instinct of generosity would have taught him to feel, that I was sacrificing my happiness to his, he told me that he now believed I had never loved him. My eyes were opened—I saw him at once as he really was. The ungenerous look ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... sprang off the pavement: It passed in shouts, it passed by instinct down the hill. They were shouting in the street before Marvel was halfway there. They were bolting into houses and slamming the doors behind them, with the news. He heard it and made one last desperate spurt. ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... opinion on "the separate system," adopted in the Philadelphia Penitentiary. One of my objections to this system is this, that to deprive man so entirely of human society, is to do violence to the strongest instinct of his nature, and thereby to inflict suffering far more severe than corporeal pain or privation. If the severity of this system does not obviously tend to carry out the legitimate objects of prison ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... what so frequently happens in the development of the attitude of men toward large general questions: the intuitive recognition of a truth which those who recognize it are quite unable to put into words. It is a self-protective instinct, a movement that is made without its being necessary to think it out. (In the way that the untaught person is able instantly to detect the false note in a tune without knowing that such things as notes or crotchets ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in common hedges. What reason can there be assigned For this perverseness in the mind? Brutes find out where their talents lie: A bear will not attempt to fly; A foundered horse will oft debate Before he tries a five-barred gate; A dog by instinct turns aside, Who sees the ditch too deep and wide;— But man we find the only creature, Who, led by folly, combats nature; Who, when she loudly cries, Forbear, With obstinacy fixes there; And, where his genius least inclines, ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... Dramatic instinct is a delicate perception of, quick and keen sympathies for, and ability to express the various phases of human nature. Deep study and care are necessary for the best development of these faculties; but the nerves must be left free to be guided to the true expression,—neither allowed to ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... the part of the general body of adventurers by enlarging their influence on the conduct of the company's affairs. It was the third charter which also authorized the establishment of the Virginia lottery—the first of many attempts in American history to exploit the gambler's instinct for the support of a worthy cause. In the charter the king also gave assurance that his courts would view favorably the company's ...
— The Virginia Company Of London, 1606-1624 • Wesley Frank Craven
... of the earlier Persians—that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was which sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders of your great nation. That book gave them their instinct of Freedom, tempered by reverence for Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made them not only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice ...
— Historical Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... of them; and thus, by dint of not being true to Goswell Street, and filing off into Aldermanbury, and bewildering himself in Barbican, and being constant to the wrong point of the compass in London Wall, and then getting himself crosswise into Thames Street, by an instinct that would have been marvellous if he had had the least desire or reason to go there, he found himself, at last, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... and lawn, and he and Leslie were hard at work giving them a good sweeping. They were wonderful rugs, just such as one would expect to come from a home of wealth where money had never been a consideration. Julia Cloud looked at them almost with awe, recognizing by instinct the priceless worth of them, and almost afraid at the idea of living a common, daily life on them. For Julia Cloud had read about rugs. She knew that in far lands poor peasant people, whole families, sometimes wove their history into them for a mere pittance; and they had come to mean something ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... century for supplying the natives with vinegar and oysters, as an addition to that delightful condiment. [Note received from Dr. D. P.] It is said, however, that, as the oysters were of the kind called natives in England, the natives of Sumatra, in obedience to a natural instinct, refused to touch them, and confined themselves entirely to the crew of the vessel in which they were brought over. This information was received from one of the oldest inhabitants, a native himself, and exceedingly fond of missionaries. ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... on his walk, resolving to go round by Gortnaclough on his way to Desmond Court, and then to return home from that place. The road would be more than twenty long Irish miles; but he felt that the hard work would be of service. It was instinct rather than thought which taught him that it would be good for him to put some strain on the muscles of his body, and thus relieve the muscles of his mind. If his limbs could become thoroughly tired,—thoroughly ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... appealed to the instinct of an artist; but so far as the lad was concerned he had only eyes for the perils with which he was surrounded, and his whole soul seemed wrapped up in the prompt meeting of each emergency ...
— Canoe Mates in Canada - Three Boys Afloat on the Saskatchewan • St. George Rathborne
... have said. In reality, he got a good deal of pleasure out of his fiancee's success. Letty, indeed, was enjoying herself greatly. This political world, as she had expected, satisfied her instinct for social importance better than any world she had yet known. She was determined to get on in it; nor, apparently, was there likely to be any difficulty in the matter. George's friends thought her a pretty, lively creature, and showed ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... had the predatory instinct strongly developed, and they were adepts at concealing the "evidence," which sometimes was very much more than fruit or eggs. On one occasion the convoy passed an old man driving a flock of sheep, of which one mysteriously ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... which also he went and preached to the spirits in prison." In the Revised Version the rendering is not "by" but "in," "which" referring to the word "spirit,"—not the third Person of the Godhead, but the human spirit of Jesus—in which spirit, separated from the body yet instinct with immortal life, He went and "preached to the spirits in prison," or rather to the spirits in custody. The passage marks an antithesis between "flesh" and "spirit." In Christ's "flesh." He was put to death. His enemies killed His body, but His ...
— Exposition of the Apostles Creed • James Dodds
... brute instinct of fighting was dominant; he began to strike out wildly, his blows falling either ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... then I made a bee line for upstream,—(as that is the way all lost hunters and tenderfeet go) after I had traveled about two miles I found a raveling on a briar and then I was sure I had a trail. This discovery gave me courage and I took up the labor with all the instinct of my nature. I followed his trail till pitch dark and camped under a maple tree till the gray dawn announced day—then I resumed my search; after going about four or five miles I found his hat—which had been discribed to me. this proved two ...
— Black Beaver - The Trapper • James Campbell Lewis
... was a kind of challenge in his eyes. A moment before he had made up his mind that no power on earth would induce him to spend a Sunday with his late partners at The Court. Now, acting upon some instinct or impulse, he ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... than 5000 feet above the level of the sea, and the coldness of the breeze quite surprised my son, who, being accustomed to the climate of the Terre-Temperee, had never before felt any thing like the atmosphere we were now in. As if by instinct, he held his fingers in his mouth, to prevent their getting numbed. But when the sun had reached a certain height, there was no longer any need to complain of ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... interests of gold are greater than the welfare of human flesh and blood and even the call of country. It seems hard, Jefson, that you should be risking your life and other brave fellows shedding their blood, for such men who have neither commercial instinct nor human feeling. I fully expected some of those firms to start their jobs as an incentive to others. We only want someone to start and do something big to galvanise the smaller investors into action. It's not ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... dress well, but she was as unhappy as though she had really fallen from her proper station; since with women there is neither caste nor rank; and beauty, grace, and charm act instead of family and birth. Natural fineness, instinct for what is elegant, suppleness of wit, are the sole hierarchy, and make from women of the people the equals of the very ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... Designing. The Commercial Instinct. First Requirements of Designing. Conventional Styles. The Mission Style. Cabinets. Harmony of Parts. Harmony ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... unconscious freedom of childhood, before his actions and manners have been modified by the restraints of artificial life, affords the best model of gesture. His instinct prompts him to that visible expression ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... last, Christine had them safely absorbed in a table-game, it was to realize that Roddy had suddenly disappeared. Calling Meekie to take charge of the little girls, she hastened, with beating heart, in search of the boy. Instinct took her in the direction of the dam, and she caught him up just as he had reached its brink. He looked at her brightly, no sign of shamefacedness or sulkiness on him, but would give no further explanation than that he ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... him that enthusiasm for the work of the world which, later, was to inspire his greatest pages; as finally leading him in Kim to a door whereby he was able to pass into the region of pure fancy where alone he is supremely happy, and as prompting in him the instinct to simplify which urged him into the jungle and into the minds of children. But all this has very little to do with India. So long as we are dealing with Mr Kipling's Indian stories as in themselves finished and intrinsic ...
— Rudyard Kipling • John Palmer
... assigned to him. There must be long arduous drills in a dozen particulars, from bucking the line, and carrying the ball, to making a flying tackle, or punting. Then the intricate system of signals must be thoroughly learned, so that instinct takes the place of reason in ...
— The Chums of Scranton High - Hugh Morgan's Uphill Fight • Donald Ferguson
... that some joke had been practised, or some mischief perpetrated, from the noise below, met the officer at the head of the gangway, and seeing the vermin crawling up his shoulders, and aiming at his head, with the instinct peculiar to them, exclaimed, 'Hoot mon! what's the maitter wi' your back!' * * * By this time many of them in their wanderings, had travelled from the rear to the front, and showed themselves, to the astonishment ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... was long undetermined between the Turks, the Arabs, the Khazars of the Caucasian region, and the Romans. According to some writers, after leaving Ctesiphon, with his wives and children, his two uncles, and an escort of thirty men, he laid his reins on his horse's neck, and left it to the instinct of the animal to determine in what direction he should flee. The sagacious beast took the way to the Euphrates; and Chosroes, finding himself on its banks, crossed the river, and, following up its course, reached with much difficulty the well-known Roman station ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... deputy warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the inbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for the little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and sometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window the wondering warden sourly ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... ideas to birth? Desire may bring the sexes together, but it is the association and organized relationships of the family which transform casual to permanent affection and shape our conceptions of its values. A herding instinct or a common need of defense or of food supplies may bring together early groups, and will to power may begin the state, but it is the living together which generates laws and wakens the craving for liberty ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts
... style. In short, the arsenal held the jettisoned cargo of the whole aforetime Egyptian Soudan, with much besides drawn from Abyssinia and Central Africa. Truly, the Khalifa must have been a strange man, with a fine acquisitive instinct abnormally cultivated. ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... was alert, his dramatic instinct was at play; recognizing the significance of Wylie's offer and its possible bearing upon Hanford's fortunes, he waved the waiter away, knowing better than to permit the rattle of dishes to distract ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... alone could neither supply the moral motive of 'a soul to be saved,' nor satisfy the metaphysical instinct of advancing mankind. To meet these wants, to supply 'soul,' with its moral stimulus, and to provide a phrase or idea under which the Deity could be envisaged (i.e. as a spirit) by advancing thought, Animism was necessary. The blending of the theistic and ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... certain stages of culture seem to trace many of the same rudimentary symbols and designs on pottery and in textiles, so in music, the archaic simplicity of the five-tone scale would seem almost a basic human art-instinct. Yet the highly developed civilization and the carefully defined musical systems of China and other nations of the farthest East retain the pentatonic scale in wide use, the Chinese in their philosophical and mystical theories ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918 • Various
... or the engineer's instinct; it's the same as the artist's," he said. "He can see the unapproachable, beautiful simplicity of perfection, and bad work hurts him. I don't know that it's a crime to throw away money, but it is to waste intelligence and effort that could accomplish a good deal properly directed. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... with a great bunch of wild iris that Crawford had brought her. Towards the end of the dinner she began to be frightened, but it was the instinct of the Castles to fight fear and ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... Mind, and Capacity for Business, are in a great measure the Effects of a well-tempered Constitution, a Man cannot be at too much Pains to cultivate and preserve it. But this Care, which we are prompted to, not only by common Sense, but by Duty and Instinct, should never engage us in groundless Fears, melancholly Apprehensions and imaginary Distempers, which are natural to every Man who is more anxious to live than how to live. In short, the Preservation of Life should ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... disgust at the mutilation of human nature and under pretext of its consummation, has arisen the "fleshly school," whose maxim is "obedience to Nature,"—leaving undefined what nature, the nature of the swine or the nature of the man,—which holds that every natural instinct ought to be obeyed, which takes the agreeable as the test of the right, and which goes in for the "healthy animal" with enlightened self-interest ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... me the oddest feeling," he told her gently. "In one way, I seem to be dreaming it. Under it all there's a conviction that I'm on the track of the mystery; that everything will be cleared up, for us both, in another minute or two. It's merely an instinct. I can't explain it. But one thing I know. Sooner or later—sooner, I hope—I shall be able to work it out ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... powerful features, and the deep-set eyes were gazing, not on the actual Loch Roag before them, but on the stormy sea that lies between Lewis and Skye, and on a vessel disappearing in the midst of the rain. It was by a sort of instinct that he guided this open boat through the channels, which were now getting broader as they neared the sea, and the tall and grave-faced keeper might have kept up his garrulous talk for hours without attracting ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... Bierce. The comparison with Bierce's work is legitimate; with the other books, I think, less so. Tolstoy and Zola see none of the traditional beauty of battle; they apply themselves to a devoted—almost obscene—study of corpses and carnage generally; and they lack the American's instinct for the rowdy commonplace, the natural, the irreverent, which so materially aids his realism. In "The Red Badge of Courage" invariably the tone is kept down where one expects a height: the most heroic deeds are ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... more intimate acquaintance with their manner belies this reputation. It is rather a drawl that afflicts the ear than a nasal twang. You notice in every sentence a curious shifting of emphasis. America, with the true instinct of democracy, is determined to give all parts of speech an equal chance. The modest pronoun is not to be outdone by the blustering substantive or the self-asserting verb. And so it is that the native American hangs upon the little words: he does not clip and slur "the smaller parts of speech," ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... on the duties of children to their parents (above all others), till Jem could hardly believe the relative positions they had held only yesterday, when she was struggling with and controlling every instinct of her nature, only because HE wished it. However, the recollection of that yesterday, with its hair's-breadth between him and a felon's death, and the love that had lightened the dark shadow, made him bear with the meekness ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... on the opposite side of the Seine is the immense area of the Champ de Mars, where, on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, was enacted the fairest scene of the Revolution. The whole population of Paris, with their marvellous instinct of order and co-operation, spontaneously set to work to dig the vast amphitheatre which was to accommodate the 100,000 representatives of France, and 400,000 spectators, all united in an outburst of fraternal ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... deaf towards colour or music; as something useful and agreeable, no doubt, but with which they might the more cheerfully dispense, as peculiar circumstances had always kept them in positive ignorance of its nature. The instinct of commercial greediness made the merchants of Holland and Zeeland, and especially those of Amsterdam, dread the revival of Antwerp in case of peace, to the imagined detriment of the great trading ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... I was not to know, I was all on fire to go over them. It was not mere curiosity, though I have my share of that. It was more a feeling of duty—a feeling that some good might come from my penetrating to this place. They talk of woman's instinct; perhaps it was woman's instinct which gave me that feeling. At any rate, it was there, and I was keenly on the lookout for any chance to pass the ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... but at the same time inseparable from them in such a sense that I can offer it as I can a portion of my reason or my knowledge, to any whom I might desire to benefit. It is in truth in its origin the gift of God, strengthened and exalted infinitely by reflection. It is an instinct. Were it otherwise, why could I not give to you all I possess myself, and possess because I have by labor acquired it? Whereas, though I believe so confidently myself, I find no way in which to bestow the same good upon you. But each one will possess it, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... Mr. Quiverful, dreadfully doubtful as to what his conduct under such circumstances should be, and fruitlessly striving to harden his nerves with some of that instinct of self-preservation which ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... truth, what the planters of Carolina and Louisiana say of black men with flat noses and woolly hair was strictly true of Barere. The curse of Canaan was upon him. He was born a slave. Baseness was an instinct in him. The impulse which drove him from a party in adversity to a party in prosperity was as irresistible as that which drives the cuckoo and the swallow towards the sun when the dark and cold months are approaching. The law which doomed him to be the humble ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... so many visions of the past, and such a vague, confused, bewildering future, of which she could form no definite idea what it would be. Was it with a pang that she foresaw that drawing towards another influence: that mingled instinct, curiosity, perhaps admiration and wonder, which already seemed to move her boy's unconscious mind? Elinor did not even know whether that would hurt her at all. Even now there seemed a curious pungent sense of half-pleasure in the ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... obligation arising under the ENTENTE CORDIALE, that in giving its incomparable fleet it had rendered all the service that its political interests, according to former standards of expediency, justified; and it could have been plausibly suggested that the ordinary considerations of prudence and the instinct of self-preservation required it, in the face of the deadly assault by the greatest military power in the world, to reserve its little army for the defense of its own soil. England never hesitated, when the Belgian frontier was crossed, ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... sumptuary laws, cropping out at fairly regular intervals. These laws, usually given under the pretext of safeguarding the morals of the people and accompanied by similar euphonious phrases were, like modern prohibitions, vicious and virulent effusions of the predatory instinct in mankind. We cannot give a chronological list of them here, and are citing them merely to illustrate the difficulty ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... her since her arrival in London, and, of course, he took her by the hand and kissed her. But it was the embrace of a brother rather than of a lover or a husband. Lady Glencora, with her full woman's nature, understood this thoroughly, and appreciated by instinct the true bearing of every touch from his hand. "I hope you are ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... and honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia." God and the king; true Christians and true Englishmen. The document reads with a calm dignity, a clear political instinct, a solemn religious faith, worthy of Englishmen. They may have braved English laws for conscience' sake, but there is no bravado; they may keenly feel the injustice they have experienced, ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... solitary spark of womanly feeling. The handsome face and figure of Le Gardeur de Repentigny was her beau-ideal of manly perfection. His admiration flattered her pride. His love, for she knew infallibly, with a woman's instinct, that he loved her, touched her into a tenderness such as she felt for no man besides. It was the nearest approach to love her nature was capable of, and she used to listen to him with more than complacency, while she let her hand linger in his warm clasp while the electric fire passed from ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... surprising if this quick and supple intelligence, who mastered without effort, and as if by instinct, the encyclopaedic knowledge of his age, who found himself at his ease amidst the deepest abstractions, did, at the beginning, take life as ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand |
