"Mastering" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the revolver. Then he slowly replaced it in his pocket. The Italian might only be bluffing, but it was best to take no unnecessary chances. Mastering his anger at Mascola's insubordination, Bandrist walked ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... Greystock lit his cigar and walked with it in his mouth from Pall Mall to the Temple. He often worked there at night when he was not bound to be in the House, or when the House was not sitting,—and he was now intent on mastering the mysteries of some much-complicated legal case which had been confided to him, in order that he might present it to a jury enveloped in increased mystery. But, as he went, he thought rather of matrimony than of ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... evening, monsieur Tricotrin, with a prodigious appetite, sat in the Cafe du Bel Avenir, awaiting the arrival of his host. When impatience was mastering him, there arrived, instead, a petit bleu. The impecunious poet took it from the ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... were for him games of skill. At thirty he looked at least ten years older. The life he led, with its ceaseless effort, endless mental work, perpetual anxiety, had made of him a fanatical worshiper at the shrine of trickery. He dried up visibly in body and grew old in mind, mastering all the difficult arts of his profession, and only gained confidence and serenity when he had reached the highest possible skill in every branch of his "work." From that moment he took a new lease of life; he grew younger, he became gay and self-confident, his health even visibly improved, ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... "Gunn's." Both the balm and the lavender were in full blossom; and the two scents mingled and separated and mingled in the warm air, like the notes of two instruments unlike, yet in harmony. The strong lemon odor of the balm, was persistently present like the mastering chords of the violoncello, and the fine and subtle fragrances from the myriad cells of the pale lavender floated above and below, now distant, now melting and disappearing, like a delicate melody. Dr. Eben was borne away from the present, out of himself. He thrust his ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Helen Jackson
... word was ever received, yet what you have intimated proves that Dalis has either been in mental communication with her, hoping to induce her to send a force against the Earth, and assist him in mastering the Earth, overthrowing we Sarkas—or has been biding his time against something of the thing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... impossible for a young child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry his attention off. And, for most people in middle life, the sort of intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... rustics, to English sailors, and to Irishmen universally. Fielding is open to the same stern criticism, as a deliberate falsehood-monger; and from the same cause—want of energy to face the difficulty of mastering a real living idiom. This defect in language, however, I cite only as one feature in the complex falsehood which disfigures Fielding's portrait of the English country gentleman. Meantime the question arises, Did he mean his Squire Western for a representative ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... the guidance of a familiar spirit. He refuses to let this rank as a delusion; and, urged no doubt by righteous indignation against the ills springing from kindred superstitions, he writes down as a liar rather than a dupe the man who, after mastering the whole world of ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... shipping: but Pendenis standeth higher, and stronger to defend it selfe. It should seeme, the fortifier made his aduantage of the commoditie, affoorded by the ground, and shot rather at a safe preferuing the Harbour, from sodaine attempts of little Fleetes, and the mastering of Pirates, then to withstand any great ...
— The Survey of Cornwall • Richard Carew
... humour, "that were difficult for any one who has ever looked upon thee. Pardon me, however, that, being a soldier upon my post, with my lance in my hand, I may not give to one of thy puissance the advantage of coming within my guard, or of mastering my weapon. Suffice it that I reverence thy dignity, and submit myself to thee as humbly as a man-at-arms ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... in silence, his head sunk in his hands; but yet, during the whole time, I did not notice a single tear-drop on his lashes. I do not know whether he was actually unable to weep or was mastering himself; but for my part I have never seen ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... respect your secret," he answered, mastering his voice with an effort. "I understand when I am bowled out. What is it ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... is, our miserable flesh with its sense-appetites—is overcome by the flesh of Christ, scourged and nailed on the wood of the most holy Cross, by mastering it with fast and vigil and continuous prayer, with burning sweet and loving desire. Thus sweetly shall we conquer and discomfit our foes by the power of the Blood of Christ. Thus shall you fulfil His will and my desire, which grieves when it beholds your imperfection. I hope by ...
— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa
... up in bed for a considerable time mastering the new code. He was awakened next morning while the east was still sealed with darkness, and found his grey-bearded ally standing like ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... and no more, obeyed her. She was mistress of the situation, and the crowd felt it. They made room for the dominant intellect, and awaited developments, watching, in suppressed excitement and trepidation, the figure—whom exhaustion was slowly mastering—high up above them. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... together with Whitman as much of the same piece. You get all this in all the great masters of painting and literature, Goethe, Shakespeare, Rubens, and the Greeks. It is the reaching out and the very mastering of life which makes all art great, and all artists into geniuses. It is the specializing on ideas which shuts the stream of its flow. I have felt the same gift for life in a still-life or a landscape of Cezanne's that I have felt in any of Whitman's best pieces. The element in common ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... disciplined men labour with a will, a large amount of work can be done in a short time; and thus, before night set in, we had the Thisbe fitted for sea, provisioned, stored, and watered. We shipped, likewise, four light guns, and a supply of small-arms and cutlasses, that we might make sure of mastering the pirates, in case the plan of taking them by surprise should miscarry. We were also ordered to take with us our rough clothes, that we might look as much as possible like merchant seamen. Our shipmates in the Harold gave us three cheers as we cast off ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... during the conflict. His hands were clenched, and every muscle stiffened with agony. Scorn at his own weakness, and dread, horrible undefinable dread, as he felt the omnipotent power mastering his proud spirit. The man who would have laughed at the shaking of a spear, and the loud rush of the battle, quailed before a woman's hate and ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... economies consumed by the hungry children of the authoritative woman. Practically it was obedient, for it had got the habit of supplying her. Though payment was long in arrear, the arrears were not treated as lost ones by Mrs. Fleming, who, without knowing it, possessed one main secret for mastering the custodians of credit. She had a considerate remembrance and regard for the most distant of her debts, so that she seemed to be only always a little late, and exceptionally wrongheaded in theory. Wrexby, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she whispered brokenly. "I wish I could . . . you were good to me once. Oh! Maurice, I'm not a bad woman, not a wicked woman . . . but I've my son to think of . . . his happiness." She paused, mastering, with an effort, the emotion that threatened to engulf her. "Nothing else counts—nothing! If you go to ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... as inconsistent, that, for any mastering idea, he should have endangered his freedom, and even his life. But I reflected that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart from all the habit of his existence to be to him what it would be to another man. I was not far out, since he ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... just as Harry was, by the aid of our scholarships. If we hadn't saved in our first two years, while we had our government allowances, we shouldn't have been able to stop up for our degrees at all. So if I don't get a fellowship I shall have to take to school-mastering or something of the sort, for a livelihood. Indeed, this at Pembroke will be my very last chance, for I can't hold on ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... throw a cricket-ball, he could not see to catch one after it was thrown to him, did he try to kick a football he missed it, and when he had run for five minutes he saw purple skies and silver stars and has cramp in his legs. He had, however, during these years at Mr. Lasher's, this great over mastering ambition. ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... without knowing Greek, he failed to see why it should be taught there, the chiefs of state, having attained the highest position in their respective countries without more than an inkling of international affairs, were unable to realize the importance of mastering them or the impossibility of repairing the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of his early boyhood have been preserved; but these go to show that his individuality soon appeared. "He was a pleasant child, quite handsome, with golden curls," is almost the first news we have of him; but his mastering sense of beauty soon made itself known. While quite a little fellow, he is reported to have said of a woman who was trying to be kind to him, "Take her away! She is ugly and fat, and has a loud voice!" ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... brow. Then his heavy-lidded, absorbing eye, his sympathetic voice, and the impression which he makes of starting from the broad bases of the universal human traits. (If Whitman was grand in his physical and perfect health, I think him far more so now (1877), cheerfully mastering paralysis, penury, and old age.) You know, on seeing the man and becoming familiar with his presence, that, if he achieve the height at all, it will be from where every man stands, and not from some special genius, or exceptional and adventitious point. He does not make the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... his breast. He waited—mastering his emotion before he spoke again. Now, at last, she knew him once more. Now he was the man, indeed, whom she had expected to see. Unconsciously she sat listening, with her eyes fixed on his face, with his heart hanging on his words, in the very ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... all one and the same. He tried in everything he took up to attain such success and perfection as would evoke praise and surprise. Whether it was his studies or his military exercises, he took them up and worked at them till he was praised and held up as an example to others. Mastering one subject he took up another, and obtained first place in his studies. For example, while still at College he noticed in himself an awkwardness in French conversation, and contrived to master French till he spoke ...
— Father Sergius • Leo Tolstoy
... Mastering in a moment his first natural astonishment at the liberty taken with him, Mr. Delamayn drew the inevitable conclusion that there was something wrong, and that there was an attempt (not to be permitted for a moment) to mix ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... it. Thackeray's style is mere ornament, existing independently of what he has to say; Mrs. Inchbald's is part and parcel of her matter. The result is that when, in moments of inspiration, she rises to the height of her opportunity, when, mastering her material, she invests her expression with the whole intensity of her feeling and her thought, then she achieves effects of the rarest beauty—effects of a kind for which one may search through Thackeray in vain. The most triumphant of these passages is the ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... wakened me: she was utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything in the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my heart. And ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... exasperated at times by one of my girl companions. She not only read her history aloud, but as she read she stopped to repeat each sentence five times with great vigor. Although the din interfered with my own work, I could not help but admire her endurance; for the physical labor of mastering a lesson was certainly equal to that of a good farm hand, for the same ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... the mind work that differentiates you from the herd. Mental culture calls for study—carefully planned, regular, 10 persistent. One or two hours a day, aiming at some distinct object, mastering what you learn, adding little by little, like a miser to his store, will in a few years make of you a broad, educated man, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the other was placed under the charge of Ieyasu's second son Hidetada, and was to take the route along the Nakasendo. The whole army consisted of 75,000 men, a number much smaller than the army of the league, but which had the advantage of being controlled by one mastering ...
— Japan • David Murray
... friend and comrade to the boy. They rode together, dissected animals and plants, and the young man assisted in operations. Linnaeus had the run of the Doctor's library, and without knowing it, was mastering physiology. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... over the awful volume which lies open for its inspection. Or again, as we deal with some huge structure of many parts and sides, the mind goes round about it, noting down, first one thing, then another, as it best may, and viewing it under different aspects, by way of making progress towards mastering the whole. So by degrees and by circuitous advances does it rise aloft and subject to itself a knowledge of that universe into which it has ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... seldom entered into the head of man to imagine. I was, on the one hand, a school-boy in a jacket, leading a humiliated life among my kind, all because I was sickly and weak; while, on the other hand, utterly alone and without a living soul to whom I could exchange an idea, I was mastering rapidly and boldly that which was then in reality the tremendous problem of the age. I can now see that, as regards its real antique bases, I was far more deeply read and better grounded than were even its most advanced ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... that came before the cabinet, these intellectual giants wrangled. Their quarrels were so sharp that Washington was often distressed. He respected both too deeply to be willing to lose either, but it required all his tact and mastering influence to hold them in check. Each found the other so intolerable, that he wished to resign that he might ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... him: a mastering wonder woke in Reinault's face. "Ta, ta, ta!" he clicked his tongue, very softly. Afterward he sprang to his feet and clutched Adhelmar by both arms. "No, no!" Reinault cried. "No, Adhelmar, you must not try that! It is death, lad,—sure death! It means hanging, boy!" the ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... many under them: and not to reign was to be ruined. So that the infantile autocrat Gabriella was being instructed in this way and in that way by the powerful, strong-minded, efficient grandmother as a tender old lioness might train a cub for the mastering of its dangerous world. She recalled these twilight drives when the fields along the turnpikes were turning green with the young grain; the homeward return through the lamp-lit town to the big iron entrance-gate, the parklike lawn; the brilliant supper in the great house, the noiseless ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... development, for races that have become kind, gentle and over-spiritualized (—Europe is not yet ripe for it—): it is a summons that takes them back to peace and cheerfulness, to a careful rationing of the spirit, to a certain hardening of the body. Christianity aims at mastering beasts of prey; its modus operandi is to make them ill—to make feeble is the Christian recipe for taming, for "civilizing." Buddhism is a religion for the closing, over-wearied stages of civilization. Christianity appears before civilization ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... Claes worked her way through this critical situation, by unwearying efforts, which love or necessity suggested to her. She tried to learn backgammon, which she had never been able to play, but now, from an impetus easy to understand, she ended by mastering it. Then she interested Balthazar in the education of his daughters, and asked him to direct their studies. All such resources were, however, soon exhausted. There came a time when Josephine's relation to Balthazar was like that of Madame ...
— The Alkahest • Honore de Balzac
... take a share in their toils, nurse their sick, weep with them that weep, and rejoice with them that rejoice. Make them feel that it is your own religion, rather than The Army system, that has made you come to them. Let them see by your sympathy and kindness that love is the over-mastering influence in your life, the influence that has brought you to them. Compel them to turn to you as a warm-hearted unselfish example of the truths you preach. Let them feel that you are indeed come from God to take them by the hand, as far as may be, and lead ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... that time, and his habits of business and order were very remarkable for one so young. At twenty, he took the direction of affairs, and with the help of experienced advisers, has managed them admirably for fifteen years. He and I have met but rarely, as my knack of mastering languages easily had caused me to be employed chiefly in the service of the house abroad, but I think our friendship is such as to stand the test of absence, ay, and of calumny too. I do not, cannot, believe he will endorse his brother's hasty ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... with iron diligence, and untiring enthusiasm, to her studies, which consisted, not only in the acquisition of languages, in music, and drawing, history and geography, but still more in the mastering the so-called bon ton and that aristocratic savoir vivre of which Madame Campan was a very model. While Hortense was thus receiving instruction on the harp from the celebrated Alvimara, in painting from Isabey, dancing from Coulon, ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... know not; I so grossly Mastering her spirit pure. O, how can her bird's breast My nervous and harsh ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... point of the battle in Helen's heart. Her power seemed to go from her with every turn of the wheels that brought her nearer to that dreaded place, and she became more and more silent, and more conscious of the fearful fact that her wretchedness was mastering her again. It seemed to her terrified imagination as if everything was growing dark and threatening, as before the breaking ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... or both of these methods there was a large body of poetic chants the property of the Nahuatl-speaking tribes, when they were subjugated by the Europeans. Among the intelligent missionaries who devoted their lives to mastering the language and translating into it the doctrines of Christianity, there were a few who felt sufficient interest in these chants to write some of them down in the original tongue. Conspicuous among these was the laborious Bernardino de Sahagun, whose works are our most valued sources ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... the baron, "wretch!" But quickly mastering himself, he remarked: "Yes, it's true that I gamble. People say, 'That great Baron Trigault is never without cards in his hands!' But you know very well that I really hold gambling in horror—that I loathe it. But when I ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... answered, 'I pitch into you, and into your Governments, one after another, for not mastering the facts of South African life. Why do you now refuse to protect your own highway into the Interior, and at the same time conserve the work of the missionaries whom you have supported for two generations, and thus put an end to the freebooting of the Boers, and of our own people who joined them? ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... infrequent in this class of poetry. Trivial as such a task may seem in these days of School Boards, it gave him infinite trouble and mental exertion, for he had not been called upon to commit anything of the kind to memory for many years, and after mastering that, there still remained a long chronological list (the dates approximately computed) of the leading events before and immediately after the Deluge, which was to be repeated ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... so in the case of the high adept, how much more necessary is it that the neophyte should be not only protected but that he himself should use all possible means to ensure for himself the necessary duration of life to complete the process of mastering the phenomena we call death! It may be said, why do not the higher adepts protect him? Perhaps they do to some extent, but the child must learn to walk alone; to make him independent of his own efforts in respect to safety, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... thrown upon the rise of the Huguenots by these and similar works, it has been my aim to make full use. At the same time I have been convinced that no adequate knowledge of the period can be obtained, save by mastering the great array of original chronicles, histories, and kindred productions with which the literary world has long been acquainted, at least by name. This result I have, accordingly, endeavored to reach by careful ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... to cousin. They were to be imparted, to begin with, on the smooth sward of the bowling green. The girls required to be persuaded a little to this humble curriculum, which, in truth, is a comfortable, serviceable, and labour-saving way of mastering the rudiments. Granted it is make-believe, yet not more than practising at a target. The pupils at last were convinced that it was a sensible means to an end, and began with a flower-pot saucer varying yards ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... and a score of others took part in these exhibitions, which included not merely feats in mastering vicious horses, but also feats of broken horses which the riders had trained to lie down at command, and upon which they could mount ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... was reluctant. He was sturdy, this young gentleman, but Ab possessed, somehow, the mastering spirit. It was settled finally that Ab should dig and Oak should watch. And so Ab slid down the tree, clamshell in hand, and began laboring vigorously at the ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... authorities; eloquent diction is no longer a substitute for matter, nor bold statements, or lively descriptions, a substitute for proof. This is that faculty of perception in intellectual matters, which, as I have said so often, is analogous to the capacity we all have of mastering the multitude of lines and colours which pour in upon our eyes, and of deciding what every one ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... fact, they share with the rest of breathing creation that self-protective instinct of instantaneous and almost automatic judgment, given to guard it from the dangers with which it is continually threatened at the hands of man's over-mastering strength and ordered intelligence. Ida was one of these. She knew nothing to Mr. Quest's disadvantage, indeed she always heard him spoken of with great respect, and curiously enough she liked his wife. But she could not bear the man, feeling in her heart that he was not only to be avoided ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... successful. If, then, we might, almost on the threshold of a public education, habituate the mind to itself, and aid it in some of the more simple essays of its own powers, it would seem, that we should prepare it for the readier perception of classic beauties, and for mastering more effectually the elements of mathematical, political, and moral science. Study in every department ceases to be a mechanical process, when the mind is thus accustomed, and then we have assurance that study will be a pleasure, ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... year I shall be embarking for England, and I have determined to employ the four months of my voyage in mastering the German language. I should be much obliged to you to send me out, as early as you can, so that they may be certain to arrive in time, the best grammar, and the best dictionary, that can be procured; a German Bible; Schiller's works; Goethe's ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... foremen and in machine shops for the misplaced geniuses, tried by wrong standards, underpaid for having other gifts. They would keep a lookout through all the schools and colleges, looking over the shoulders of scolding teachers and absent professors. They would go about studying the playgrounds and mastering the streets. ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... assistance in smoothing this difficulty, it would be the greatest benefit he could confer on me." I added, that "my mind had always had a mechanical and industrious turn, and that I did not doubt of soon mastering any craft to which I seriously applied myself. I had not been brought up to any trade; but, if he would favour me with his instructions, I would work with him as long as he pleased for a bare subsistence. I knew that I was asking of him an extraordinary kindness; but ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... illiterates, 1,443,956—two-thirds of the whole—are reported from the States lately known as Slave States. In these States, as is well known, there are peculiar reasons for the illiteracy of the white as well as of the colored native, outside of any consideration of the difficulty of mastering English orthography. This survey takes no account of the native children with foreign parents, as it would not materially disturb the percentage, nor of the populations of New Mexico, Arizona, Southern ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... never did I see so great an instance of the use of grammar, and knowledge how to tell a man's tale as this day, Bland having spoiled his business by ill-telling it, who had work to have made himself notorious by his mastering Norwood, his enemy, if he had known how to have used it. Thence calling Smith, the Auditor's clerk at the Temple, I by the Exchange home, and there looked over my Tangier accounts with him, and so to dinner, and then set him down again by a hackney, my coachman being ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... power of mastering it indicate one's breadth of thought and especially the breadth of one's thinking in a particular creative attempt. Every writer should strive for the greatest possible breadth, for the greater his breadth the more people there are ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... sudden shyness, her cheeks rosy once more, her eyes filling with the most distressingly unreasonable tears. He did not move for what seemed hours to her. She heard the sharp catch of his breath and felt the repression that was mastering some unwelcome ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... exclusively directed toward little girls of five or six years. At the age of twelve they ceased to attract him. He was quite indifferent to adults of both sexes, and never accomplished coitus. Having recognized in good time the anomaly of his appetite, he succeeded in mastering it all his life, and through education on the subject as well as a general physical development, he neutralized these morbid desires, particularly through the training of his mind to cleaner and ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... shallow end of the lake and wriggle piteously in hopeless failure. The afternoons were divinely restful by the varied shores of the limpid lake. Sometimes as the sun sloped there might come hollow blasts of wind that had careered for a brief space over the woods; but the brooding heat, the mastering silence, the feeling that multifarious quiescent living things were ready to start into action, all took the senses with somnolence. That drowsy joy, that soothing silence which seemed only intensified by the murmur of bees and the faint gurgle of water, were like medicine to the soul; and ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... severe by reason of the fact that my place of work was where I could see the happy children passing to and from school, morning and afternoons. Despite this disappointment, however, I determined that I would learn something, anyway. I applied myself with greater earnestness than ever to the mastering of what ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... about by a strap, and I made a little halter and a bridle for him. I didn't see why I shouldn't train him a little while he was young and manageable. I think it is cruel to let colts run till one has to employ severity in mastering them. Of course, I did not let him do much work. Colts are like boys—a boy shouldn't do a man's work, but he had exercise every day, and I trained him to draw a light cart behind him. I used to do all kinds of things to accustom ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... the waters, the animals and the rocks and the trees still speak to him in harmonies long since forgotten by civilized man. A great and secret joy, such as he had never before experienced, filled his soul; uplifting, consuming and mastering him.... But what would Blanch Lennox say? She with whose inner life he felt in perfect accord? She who was his ideal, the inspiration of his eager youth and well-spring of his ambitions of later years? The woman who always met his problems with ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... shut. It is good practice, also, to take an easy chant or hymn tune, hitherto unknown, and try to get some idea of its melody and harmony without playing it. When all this is done, one of the most important tasks remains: that of mastering time in all its branches. Slovenliness in this particular is fatal to all music, above all to that for the organ, which is meant to guide and control. A feeling for rhythm and a quick-sighted accurate knowledge of time, may be much improved by ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 353, October 2, 1886. • Various
... got on without them. Our mechanical contrivances seem to serve us; but they are really mastering us, crowding and crushing the beauty out of our lives, and making ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... study at the English Catholic College there. Later he became Rector of this College. The sketch of Wiseman at this period given by his biographer, Wilfred Ward, is most attractive. "Scattered through his 'Recollections' are interesting impressions left by his student life. While mastering the regular course of scholastic philosophy and theology sufficiently to take his degree with credit, his tastes were not primarily in this direction. The study of Roman antiquities, Christian and Pagan, was congenial to him, as was also the study of Italian art—in which he ultimately ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... unions: these suggest the bringing together of men and their resources into units for exploiting or controlling the new natural forces. Sometimes resisting the political, military, or ecclesiastical forces which were earlier in the lead, sometimes mastering them, sometimes combining with them, economic organization has now taken its place in the world as a fourth great structure, or rather as a fourth great agency through which man achieves his greater tasks, and in so doing becomes conscious of ...
— The Ethics of Coperation • James Hayden Tufts
... the oysters, laid it in a particular way upon the rock, gave it a smart blow over the muscular hinge, and then, taking advantage of the half-paralysed mollusc, he managed to get the edge of the axe between the shells, wriggled it about a little, and then, mastering the opposition offered by the singular creature within, he wrenched the two shells apart and used his knife to scrape out the flesh of the oyster, felt it well over and then thrust it into the bucket, which he half ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... conversations and discussions, what in letters and by mouth was a subject of repeated forebodings and warnings. Perhaps these pages may in some way explain a phenomenon almost unexampled in history,—that twenty millions of people, brave, highly intelligent, and mastering all the wealth of modern civilization, were, if not virtually overpowered, at least so long kept at bay by ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... these five weeks the work had gone slowly but steadily on circusward. Leander had become so expert a musician on the accordion, that he could play "Yankee Doodle" with all his fingers, "Old Hundred" with two; and was fast mastering the intricacies ...
— Mr. Stubbs's Brother - A Sequel to 'Toby Tyler' • James Otis
... in front, communicating with a common gallery that rose on its own pillars. Of course, I did not discover all this from the river, and in the moonlight. But, though I was there for many days, I did not succeed in mastering the inner topography of the building, so ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... advanced period; say in 1832. A watchful observer might see the Lord Chancellor in the Court over which he presided, from an early hour in the morning until the afternoon, listening to the arguments of counsel, and mastering the points of cases with a grasp that enabled him to give those speedy and unembarrassed judgments that have so injured him with the profession. If he followed his course, he would see him, soon after the opening of the House of Lords, addressing ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... lad left his job in the cook tent, never to return to it. After many hard knocks and some heavy falls he succeeded in so mastering the act that he was able to go through with it without great risk of serious injury to himself. The educated mule and the boy became a feature of the Sparling Combined Shows from that moment on, but after that Teddy took ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... joyful news to impart. He came into the Residency to find Bones engaged in mastering the art of ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... Mastering a desire to do the man violence, I leaned out and over the back of my seat and, taking Nobby by the scruff of his neck, hauled him struggling and growling across the barrier. Adele received him tenderly and endeavoured to soothe him. But the Sealyham was mourning a lost opportunity and ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... Mastering the feeling of shrinking which had come over him, Joey went down upon one knee, amidst the awful silence which prevailed, and stretched forth a hand to draw the figure out into a patch of sunlight, but a shout in chorus from ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... succeeded in mastering dread and aversion, and though her heart throbbed violently, and she expected to meet the worst, she reminded those who were repulsive to her and from whom her woman's weakness urged her to flee, of the God of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... much to my delight, being one of the number— practised all the afternoon at boat-pulling. In this my experience with father's wherry during the last three or four years stood me in good stead; though I had some little difficulty at first in mastering the usual man-o'-war stroke with the long ash oars in the heavy launch which we pulled, ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... From a blissful dream In a cave by a stream. My silent comrade had bound my side. No pain now was mine, but a wish that I spoke,— A mastering wish to serve this man Who had ventured through hell my doom to revoke, As only the truest of comrades can. I begged him to tell me how best I might aid him, And urgently prayed him Never to leave me, whatever betide;— When I saw he ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... vices of the period, while much of it, as when they taunt him with always drinking water instead of wine, implies on his part a creditable strength of will, which is further attested by his self-discipline in mastering his chosen art. What, after all, speaks the most strongly for the orator's character is the serious moral tone of his orations. This cannot have been simulated, and hence cannot have proceeded from a man ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... chair, and stood immoveable for a moment, gazing at a vase of red and white flowers that stood on the mantel before her eyes. Her snowy night dress fell negligently about her person, but its loose folds could not conceal the outline of her bosom which rose and fell under the touch of some strong mastering feeling. Sieur Sarpy, as he looked up at her, could not dissimulate his admiration of the lovely creature who was the comfort and glory of his life, nor restrain his tears at the thought, vague and improbable though it was, that perhaps this war might, in some unaccountable ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... 'a conceptual shorthand,' provided that its message be humanly intelligible. It no longer claims truth because abstractly and absolutely it 'corresponds with Nature,' but because it yields a convenient means of mastering the flux of events. ...
— Pragmatism • D.L. Murray
... through the established forms: and the prose versicles of Walt Whitman were achieved only after he had practised the ordinary rules of prosody. Not so with Moussorgsky, and while few youthful composers have been so carefully counselled, he either could not, or would not, take the trouble of mastering ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... that so great was its intricacy that only three men understood it— Mr. Gladstone himself, his Attorney-General for Ireland, and Mr. T. M. Healy. So far from shrinking from, he seemed to revel in, the toil of mastering an infinitude of technical details. Yet neither did he want boldness and largeness of conception. The Home-Rule Bill of 1886 was nothing less than a new constitution for Ireland, and in all but one of its most essential features had been practically worked out ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... least religious in the sense of creed and dogma. In all his life he had scarcely given a thought to religion. His knowledge of the Almighty by name had been largely confined to that of a word to conjure with in mastering an obstreperous bronco; but, in the broad sense of personal cleanliness and individual duty, he was religious to the core. He would not shirk a responsibility, and a responsibility faced ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... a clear voice, of great compass, pitched on rather a high key, but sweet and musical like the sound of a bugle. The young men used to fill the court-house to hear his arguments to juries. He became a very profound lawyer, always mastering the learning of the case, but never leaning too much upon authorities. Charles Emerson's beautiful phrase in his epitaph upon Professor Ashmun, "Books were his helpers, never his masters," was most aptly applied to Thomas. If he had any foible ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... this time with a violence that indicated impatience of delay. I tore myself from her arms, darted to the aperture, and kissing my hand in reply to the graceful waving of her scarf as she half turned in her own flight, sunk finally from her view; and at length, after making the same efforts, and mastering the same obstacles that had marked and opposed my advance, once more found myself at the point whence I had set out in pursuit of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... the meaning is written with the Corean letters, side by side with the Chinese form. The Corean alphabet is rather despised by the male "blue stockings" of Cho-sen, and is considered as fit only for poor people, children and women; in short, those whose brains are unable to undergo the strain of mastering and, what is more, of remembering, the meaning of the many thousands of Chinese characters. Not only that, but the spoken language itself is considered inadequate to express in poetic and graceful style the deep thoughts which may pass through ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... Catherine said, mastering her emotion with an effort, "that Julian Orden, whom we now know to be 'Paul Fiske', has escaped. Just what do ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... afraid?" said the lad, mastering the oppression and panting from which he suffered, as he picked up a fourth banana. "He means friends, and I'm blessed if I don't believe it's the same one as I tackled at the sham-fight, I wish I knew.—Want another, mate?" he continued, as the trunk-end curled ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... so hastily?" she inquired, mastering her indignation with difficulty. "The poor man may not be fit for hard work—I think he said so—and I cannot help growing wrathful at times when I hear the stories which reach me ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... had dypso-mania in his blood were enticed to drink often at parties where wine is freely dispensed? Would he not be taken, so to speak, unawares? Would he be any more responsible for acts that quickened into life an over-mastering appetite than the young girl who, not knowing that she had in her lungs the seeds of a fatal disease, should expose herself to atmospheric changes that were regarded by her companions as harmless, but which, to ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... and Latin; and thus the Catechism became the scholar's chief means of instruction. He learned to read from his Catechism; he learned Latin from his Catechism; he learned German from his Catechism; and thus, while mastering foreign tongues, he was being grounded at the same time in the articles of the Christian faith. He lived, in a word, from morning to night in a Christian atmosphere. For the same purpose a Brother named Matthias Martinus prepared a book containing extracts from the Gospels ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... sword of honour subscribed for by the merchants of the City of London, whose mails he had gallantly saved. These resources being barely sufficient to maintain him, still less to permit his helping a widowed sister whom he had partly maintained during his days of service, he eked them out by school mastering; and a dreadful trade he must have found it. In person he was slight and wiry, of a clear, ruddy complexion, with grey hair, and a grave simplicity of manner. He wore a tightly buttoned, blue uniform coat, threadbare and frayed, but scrupulously brushed, noticeably ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... mastering herself; "I can understand. There must be much of sadness in such a landscape, only it never comes that way to me. The sombreness and the sternness of it appeal to me, but not ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... the three orders presented its "portfolio of grievances" and its programme of reforms. It might seem, to one who has not noted closely the spirit which serf-mastering thrusts into a man, that the nobles would appear in the States-General not to make complaints, but to answer complaints. So it was not. The noble order, with due form, entered complaint that theirs was the injured order. They asked relief from familiarities and assumptions of equality ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... insufficient substitute," answered this person, with difficulty mastering his great rage, "may and shall offer words of explanation to the inspired Kin Yen, setting forth the reason of his pictures being used, not with the high-minded story of the elegant Tong-king for which they were executed, but accompanying exceedingly base, foolish, and ungrammatical ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... up for instance, the history of our own country, and then, when we have spent months in mastering the mere outline of those great events which, in the slow course of revolving centuries, have made England what she is, her earlier ages seem so far removed from our own times that they appear to belong to a hoary and most remote antiquity. But then, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... possessed neither the industry nor the capacity for acquiring it, some other method of earning a subsistence seemed to be necessary. Should it be the law? His resolution would have deserted him at the thought of mastering even the elementary treatises of Blackstone, and the sight of an ordinary law library would have appalled him. But employment he must have. He had cultivated a taste for style, and ease, and luxury, which it ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... sometimes hear in these days, from men of influence, serious doubts of democracy, and intimations that the country would be better off if it freely resigned itself to guidance by the geniuses who are mastering the economic forces of the nation, and who, it is alleged, would work out the prosperity of the United States more effectively, if unvexed ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... twilight regions of society, emerging by fits and starts into visibility, afflicted with a general vagueness as to the ordinary duties of mankind, and generally taking much more opium than was good for him. He tells us, indeed, that he broke off his over-mastering habit by vigorous efforts; as he also tells us that opium is a cure for most grievous evils, and especially saved him from an early death by consumption. It is plain enough, however, that he never really refrained for any length ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... German learning, like the elephants of Pyrrhus, is always in danger of turning upon what it was intended to adorn and reinforce, and trampling it ponderously to death. And yet what do we not owe it? Mastering all languages, all records of intellectual man, it has been able, or has enabled others, to strip away the husks of nationality and conventionalism from the literatures of many races, and to disengage that kernel of human ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... understand, now," he added, "that, with our insight into your minds, we have little difficulty in mastering your language." ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... thinking. People said things. An automatic box of phrases in him released answers. Tesla was replying, not so fawningly, the bay beneath his soft words mastering his sycophantic tones. Let him talk. He had something to talk about. He saw something. There was a new tableau in Tesla's brain. Let him keep murmuring things about it—suavely, ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... attacked the problem of steam, as we shall soon see, the same course was followed, although it involved the mastering of three languages, that he should ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... realization of his oneness with the Father, by mastering, absolutely mastering every circumstance that crossed his path through life, even to the death of the body, and by pointing out to us the great laws which are the same for us as they were for him, he has given us an ideal of life, an ideal for us to attain to here and ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... Of his difficulties in mastering shorthand he has written feelingly in that novel which contains so much autobiographical material—David Copperfield. "I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography ... and plunged into a sea of perplexity that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... or wandered on to the remoter coasts of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. It was the race which the Romans called 'the Barbarians,' but which they could never conquer. A stern history had trained it for a wonderful destiny. Christianity in mastering the Greek had possessed itself of the intellect of the world, and in mastering Rome had found access to all those vast regions conquered by Roman arms, opened out by Roman roads, governed by Roman law, and by it helped to the ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... and From Spy Glass Hill we've viewed the land; Through thickets dense we've followed Jim And shared the doubts that came to him. We've heard Cap. Smollett arguing there With Long John Silver, gaunt and spare, And mastering our many fears ...
— The Path to Home • Edgar A. Guest
... girls of the twentieth century, with your day schools and evening schools, libraries, colleges, and universities,—picking reading material from the gutter and mastering it by stealth! Yet this boy grew up to be the friend and co-worker of Garrison and Phillips, the eloquent spokesman of his race, the honored guest of distinguished peers and commoners of England, one of the noblest examples of a self-made man that ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... gazing at me from the wall, And wonder how you'd match your dreams with mine, If, mastering time's illusion, I could call You back to share ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... vivacity of conception, public opinion has gradually and steadily advanced to a more just appreciation of his power. He is the Shelley of English painting—the poet and the painter both alike veiling their own creations in the dazzling splendor of the imagery with which they are surrounded, mastering every mode of expression, combining scientific labor with an air of negligent profusion, and producing in the end works in which color and language are but the vestments of poetry. Of such minds it may be said in the words ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... multiply anecdotes, shewing the enthusiasm with which Mezzofanti entered on the study of language after language. He sought out new tongues with an insatiable passion, and may be said to have never been happy but when engaged in the mastering of words and grammars. No degree of bad health interrupted his pursuit. Till the day of his death, he was engaged in his darling task: life closed on him while so occupied. He died just as he had acquired a thorough proficiency in Californian—a ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... men applied the whole force of their talents to mastering the difficulties of the life-giving process; and in due time, ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... hovering like a judgment angel between heaven and earth; both hands free, with one foot in the rigging, and one somewhere behind you in the air. The sail would fill out Eke a balloon, with a report like a small cannon, and then collapse and sink away into a handful. And the feeling of mastering the rebellious canvas, and tying it down like a slave to the spar, and binding it over and over with the gasket, had a touch of pride and power in it, such as young King Richard must have felt, when he trampled down the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... flits in and out of this salon, whose fine qualities of soul shine so brightly in this morally stifling atmosphere that one forgets her errors in a mastering impulse of love and pity. There is no more pathetic history in this arid and heartless age than that of Mlle. Aisse, the beautiful Circassian, with the lustrous, dark, Oriental eyes, who was brought from Constantinople in infancy by the French envoy, and left as a precious heritage to Mme. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... sent him a lovely letter in the Taal making this appointment, causing his pachydermatous hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only last Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young woman capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be made useful in a variety of ways—some of them tortuous, all of them secret, as the Slabbertian ways were wont ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... life-size portrait as "Beethoven," and again as himself. In the midst of all is the master, seated at a table. In front of him, at the piano, stands the student. It is an English song she is at work on, for Mr. Bispham thoroughly believes in mastering English ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... intense. The step he had determined to take gives the measure of his eagerness in the pursuit of her—of his conviction that he could not live without her; and the object of this great, this intense, this all-mastering passion had been snatched away from him; the unappeasable agony of such a bereavement can, perhaps, only be adequately measured by ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... brown-red. They had come to lay their homage before him and to present an Indian robe. The Prince shook hands and chatted with the chiefs as well as their squaws, and with the missionary who had spent his life among these Red Men, and had succeeded in mastering the four or five sounds that ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... substance—so many cells and fibers, a pulpy protoplasmic mass weighing some three pounds and shut away from the outside world in a casket of bone. The mind is a spiritual thing—the sum of the processes by which we think and feel and will, mastering our world and accomplishing ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... West estate, given up and allowed to go back to a state of nature. Fruit-trees had been planted in abundance, but as the boys got farther from the house the wild vines and weeds were gradually mastering the useful trees, and in another year or two the plantations would have lost all trace of the hand of man and ...
— The Peril Finders • George Manville Fenn
... odds and ends of time may be worked up into results of the greatest value. An hour in every day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits would, if profitably employed, enable a person of ordinary capacity to go far towards mastering a science. It would make an ignorant man a well-informed one in less than ten years. Time should not be allowed to pass without yielding fruits, in the form of something learnt worthy of being known, some good principle cultivated, or ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... and features grouped around him, with a growing sense upon the hearer of what was really meant by the child being so "old-fashioned." But the ludicrous effect of those surrounding characters was nothing less than all-mastering in its predominance. ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... out his book on engineering, his boxes of instruments, his drawing paper, his profile paper, open the book of logarithms, mix his India ink, sharpen his pencils, light a cigar, and sit down at the table to "lay out a line," with the most grave notion that he was mastering the details of engineering. He would spend half a day in these preparations without ever working out a problem or having the faintest conception of the use of lines or logarithms. And when he had finished, he had the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 2. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... dog!" he cried. "Had I my way some of the insolence would be frozen out of you before morning." Mastering his passion, he turned upon Sophie with what he meant to be a gallant manner. "If you have a cellar with a good lock," said he, "the fellow may lie in it for the night, since you have done him the honour to take an interest in his comfort. I must have his parole that he will not attempt to play us ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... asked Conniston, coolly, mastering the sudden desire to take this little fat man into his two hands and choke him. "You know a great deal about what I intend to do, Mr. Swinnerton. And now, if you are not through talking your infernal nonsense, ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory |
