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Mentality   /mɛntˈæləti/  /mɛntˈælɪti/   Listen
Mentality

noun
1.
A habitual or characteristic mental attitude that determines how you will interpret and respond to situations.  Synonyms: mind-set, mindset, outlook.
2.
Mental ability.  Synonyms: brain, brainpower, learning ability, mental capacity, wit.



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"Mentality" Quotes from Famous Books



... distress are manifest to all. To such an one I would say: Assert your manhood, your womanhood. Brace up. Face the music. Remember these facts. You are dealing with men and women, youths and maidens, of the same flesh and blood, mentality as yourself. You average up with the rest of them. Why should you be afraid? Call upon your reasoning power. Assert the dignity of your own existence. You are here by the will of God as much as they. There is a ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James

... to accept the evolution of physical characteristics find it impossible to treat the history of human mentality as a subject for dispassionate consideration, because above all else the intellectual powers of mankind seem to be truly distinctive. It is only after constant use of the methods of science that we can bring ourselves to see how closely we resemble lower forms in physical make-up; still ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... not at first apparent, because Mama Therese was speaking, and what she said had exclusively to do with her estimate of Dupont's character, the mettle of his spirit, the stuff of his mentality, the authenticity of his pedigree (with especial reference to the virtue of his maternal ancestry) and the circumstances of his upbringing; which estimate in sum was low but by no means so low as the terms in which Mama Therese was inspired to ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... Mexican Chavez and Yellow Barbee, cowpuncher. Ready from the flip of the first card to concede that these gentlemen had had a rather wider experience with card-playing, none the less he realized the superiority of his mentality, his greater intellectual training, and fully expected something more than just an 'even break.' He concealed the faces of his cards cannily and gave his scholarly brain entirely to ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory

... with some man that she really loves—but no woman is born into mature society with a knowledge of its utter worthlessness. And even were you able to convince her of it now, it would be a sin to rob her sweet mentality of its blushes. No, the precious child must first suffer and ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr

... exactly what course he was going to follow. He had disembarked at ten o'clock the night before, and as it was not yet twenty-four hours since he had touched land, his mentality was still that of a man who comes from afar, across oceanic immensities, from boundless horizons, and is surprised at finding himself in touch with the preoccupations which govern human communities. After disembarking he had spent two hours in a cafe in Boulogne, listlessly ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... and the marvellous results of quickened mentality, a clear space was left in the new woman for harrowing doubt. She never again sank to the thought that Gaston could love her; but she could not utterly blind herself to the fear that he might be ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock

... stood stubbornly the width of the alcove from her, though he was conscious of all tender words rushing to his lips. She was so adorable; a woman in mentality, but the veriest girl as to the emotions his ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... before us was the Sodality's exquisite cookery. It was good to have Abel there. Since my coming to Friendship I had seen him often, and my wonder at him had deepened. He was alive to the finger-tips and by nature equipped to conquer through sheer mentality, but he seemed deliberately to have fore-gone the prizes for the tasks of the lower places. Not only so, but he who understood all fine things seemed to regard his tastes as naivete, and to have won away from them, as if he had set "above all wisdom and subtlety" ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale

... bit of high-soul, creative imagination, as well as to humanitarians, who become capable of knowing, advising and showing the better sides of life by lofty mental concentration, which ever lifts the thinker into the special soul atmosphere of each separate mentality, by the power of attraction and repulsion, verily, by the cosmic law of life, gaining thereby deeper insight into what seemeth best to think and to do for self and ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... was a short man with a spare, wiry body. Few men trusted him after a glance at the mutilated face. The thin, hard lips gave warning that he had sold himself to evil. The low forehead, above which the hair was plastered flat in an arc, advertised low mentality. ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... Also, Gabriel, had feigned stupefaction while in the cell. Thus he had simulated the effects of the drug, and had really thrown his tormentors off the track. For months and months they were convinced that they were weakening his will and destroying his mentality, while as a matter of fact his reasoning powers and determination never ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... respect for this gross tyrant's mentality came to me; it did not temper, it heightened, the hatred I felt for him. But now I recognized the subtlety of his attack; realized that unerringly he had taken the only means by which he could have gained a hearing; ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... which came to her son through another source than herself. That type of mother love is to be encountered every day, and that type of mother believes herself to be the most devoted creature on earth; while the fact is, she sits for ever in the boudoir of her mentality, gazing at her own reflection. She loves her children because they also reflect herself, and is incapable of unselfish pleasure in their happiness apart ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... looked, thought Henry, observing him furtively from under his pulled down hat brim, a little less elated than he had appeared five minutes earlier. His self-esteem had suffered some blow, thought Henry, who knew Charles's mentality. Mentality: that was the word one used about Charles, as if he had been a German during the late war (Germans having, as all readers of ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay

... a business man of exceptional brilliance, of a brilliance, indeed, that was almost pathological, and may have accounted in part for the curious mentality of Arthur. In a short, but incredibly active life, he had amassed a fortune that was considerable, even in the midlands where fortunes are made. I do not know what he manufactured, but his business was conducted ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young

... Mrs. Pantin twittered brightly on impersonal subjects, introducing topics which evidenced clearly that her mentality was of a higher order than that of the women about her, whose conversation consisted chiefly of gossip and trivial happenings, Mrs. Toomey came to think that she was mistaken and that this friendly ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... appealing to that region of the mind in which is stored the capacity for intuitively apprehending truth. We are endeavoring to speak in tones which will awaken a similar vibration in that part of your mentality, and if these vibrations be started into being, then will you be able to feel and know the truth, and then will your Intellect eagerly seize upon the new idea that it finds within itself, and will proceed to apply the same to the various ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... writing this where I sit leisurely in a store in Main street, Kansas City, a streaming crowd on the sidewalks flowing by. The ladies (and the same in Denver) are all fashionably drest, and have the look of "gentility" in face, manner and action, but they do not have, either in physique or the mentality appropriate to them, any high native originality of spirit or body, (as the men certainly have, appropriate to them.) They are "intellectual" and fashionable, but dyspeptic-looking and generally doll-like; their ambition evidently ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... of that?" I asked Andrew Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: "I never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself." I have been told that even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence. In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression of being ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... as the child grew older, she saw, only too plainly, that her grandmother was looked upon as different from the others: and the Indian regards all those of his kin, no matter how near, who display any peculiar form of mentality, either with reverence, as something of the divine, or with cruel hatred, when he believes the unfortunate individual possessed with the evil spirit. She saw, in the brief and infrequent visits the two made to the tribe, that her grandmother was regarded with distrust; that ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter

... Average Jones, gazing at his club-mate with increased interest, "you're the most remarkable specimen of inverted mentality I've ever encountered. D'you think a cat habitually rounds up two dozen rats and then chivies 'em out into the street for sport? McCue didn't have any cat theory. He figured that when rats come out of a place that way the place is afire. So he turned in an alarm and saved a two hundred and ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... find some explanation of the mental and moral inequalities that exist at birth. In the earlier days of the study of evolution it was usually asserted that the human being inherits his mentality and morality from his parents. But even if that were true the injustice of one being born a genius and another a fool would remain. It is the fact of inequality that constitutes the injustice, and it is of no importance whether it comes about through heredity or otherwise. ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers

... sprung from the same stock. A college-bred boy with all the advantages his father's wealth could give him, he had inherited from the parent only those characteristics which would have made him successful even if born poor—activity, pluck, application, dogged obstinacy, alert mentality. To these qualities he added what his father sorely lacked—a high notion of honour, a keen sense of right and wrong. He had the honest man's contempt for meanness of any description, and he had little ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein

... think a society which permits things to go on which I can prove go on in our federal prisons had better stop and take a fresh look at itself. To stand for that and then talk of democracy and idealism—oh, it shows no mentality, for ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell

... devastating change has come over our mentality with regard to the acquisition of money. Whereas in former ages men treated it with condescension, even with disrespect, now they bend their knees to it. That it should be allowed a sufficiently large ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... placenta form part of the system of interpretation of these phenomena: for the placenta was regarded as a mass of clotted blood (intimately related to the child which was supposed to be derived from part of the same material) which harboured certain elements of the child's mentality (because blood was ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... evolution of the race. It left an inherited impress on the perceptive and emotional nature, only to be awakened most felicitously, it would seem, at about the age at which the naturalistic phases of the youth's mentality were originally called ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... primitive conditions under which cave dwellers lived, as denoted by the artificial objects which they left, and the low mentality indicated by the skulls, Mr. W.H. Holmes suggests that a careful and extended study of these abodes may disclose a culture lower than that prevailing among out-door dwellers in the same localities. As no effort would be required to secure warmth and shelter, and as food was abundant and easily ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... world and a man among men. His conversation was decidedly less ponderous than his oratory, and there was no more desirable dinner guest in America. Even in Webster's lightest moments, his majestic head gave the impression of colossal mentality, and his eyes, when he was in earnest, almost hypnotized those upon whom he bent his gaze. A leading figure in public life for twenty-five years, he now attained administrative position for the first time, and his constant practice at the bar had given something ...
— The Path of Empire - A Chronicle of the United States as a World Power, Volume - 46 in The Chronicles of America Series • Carl Russell Fish

... positive knowledge. The highest exemplar of the former is Shakspere, Browning the profoundest interpreter of the latter. To achieve supremacy the one had to create a throbbing actuality, a world of keenest living, of acts and intervolved situations and episodes: the other to fashion a mentality so passionately alive that its manifold phases should have all the reality of concrete individualities. The one reveals individual life to us by the play of circumstance, the interaction of events, the correlative eduction of personal characteristics: the ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... personality. But for him, Richard Wagner had never written DIE KUNST UND DIE REVOLUTION. Emma Goldman is a similar personality. She is a strong factor in the socio-political life of America. By virtue of her eloquence, energy, and brilliant mentality, she moulds the minds and hearts ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... organization, in 1874; and England, Switzerland, and Austria, about 1892. The first American city to organize such classes was Providence, Rhode Island, in 1893. Since that time special classes for children of low-grade mentality have become a common feature of the large city school ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... from study. Such personal causes as mental defect are extremely important, indeed, many students maintain that bad economic and social conditions are negligible causes of crime, unless found in connection with low mentality and ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson

... wraiths in the moonshine! Be the wraiths the outcome of proximity in the garden under the silvery moon rays, which so often snap the trap about our unwary feet by rounding off the physical angles of our momentary heart's desires, or lending point to the stub ends of their undeveloped mentality; or the wraiths of the midnight soul, otherwise disarranged nervous or digested system, which float invitingly, distractingly, tantalisingly in front of our clogged-by-sleep vision at night; turning out, however, in the early light heralding the early cup ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest

... slipped away between the bushes, like something floating out of a dream, Barlow stood at the open door, a resurge of abasement flooding his soul. In the combat between his mentality and his heart the heart was making him a weakling, a dishonourable weakling, so it seemed. He pulled the door shut, and went back to his bed and finally fell asleep, a thing ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... rather maudlin mentality, generally speaking, in our way of regarding women criminals. To think, we say, that a WOMAN should do ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... method is another of the general lines of attack on psychological problems. The object here is to trace the mental development of the individual, or of the race. It may be to trace the development either of mentality in general, or of some particular mental performance. It may be to trace the child's progress in learning to speak, or to follow the development of language in the human species, from the most primitive tongues up to those of the great {16} civilized peoples of to-day. ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... America and democracy. The result of reading endless various American newspapers and articles, of following the actions of the American Government, of talking to representative Americans, is to realize the existence of a very clear, strong national mentality, a firm, self-controlled, collective will, far more considerable in its totality than the world has ever ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... partners disappeared. He must have speedily become the principal man in the firm, combining as he did the work of composer, reviser, and adaptor of plays with that of actor and working partner. We are thus dealing with a temperament or mentality not at all obviously original or masterly, not at all conspicuous at the outset for intellectual depth or seriousness, not at all obtrusive of its "mission;" but exhibiting simply a gift for acting, an abundant faculty of rhythmical speech, and a power of ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... German mentality disclosed itself in the Germans with whom I conversed in Berlin. I had a suspicion that one of them might have said England began it, if I had been other than an Englishman. Edward the Seventh who arranged the entente cordiale ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... neither, and stood instead, looking at them in silent anger, which quickly provoked endearments—such as: "Take it off," or "Keep it on," or "What cheer, Toppy!" but nothing more acute. And he meditated: Culture! Could culture ever make headway among the blind partisanships, the hand-to-mouth mentality, the cheap excitements of this town life? The faces of these youths, the tone of their voices, the very look of their bowler hats, said: No! You could not culturalize the impermeable texture of their vulgarity. And they were ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... opinion, judgment; temperament, humor, disposition. Associated Words: mental, mentality, mentally, intellectual, intellectuality, intellectually, psychic, psychical, psychiatry, psychography, psychology, psychologist, menticulture, alienist, alienism, telepathy, telepathic, noemics, nomology, nooelogy metaphysics, psychotherapy, psychotherapeutics, psychodynamic, psychopathology, psychopathic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... man feared me, then; yet he ranked my mentality no higher than that! In other words, remarkably clever though he might be, and as yet unthwarted, he could by no ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... Sir,—One of the most striking results of the War has been its effect on the mentality of birds and animals and even fishes. The papers have lately contained accounts of a halibut which swallowed a cormorant and survived the exploit only to fall a victim to the wiles of a North Sea fisherman. As the cormorant is generally regarded to be the dernier cri in voracity, the incident ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various

... of ill-fame. The explanation of so much immorality will be obvious when it is stated that of the 480 descendants 143 were known to be feeble-minded, and that many of the others were of questionable mentality. ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews

... 98, by the west wall, have an exhibit which shows that their march toward civilization includes well-grounded ambitions of art. Mentality, feeling, spirit, all reveal themselves in the canvases. Crudity is apparent, but it comes more from an untutored hand than from failure to grasp the significance of the subject. Many pictures are flamboyant, some are melodramatic, nearly all are big subjects handled with great boldness; what they ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... his life for Gus after the athlete had very deservedly whipped two town bullies that were making life miserable for him. Moreover, the youngster wanted to be like Gus and Bill, in the matter of mentality, and a promise of reward meant money with which he could ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron

... the rail a man came to the open doorway of the house and looked at him. He was a heavy-set man, dewlapped like a bloodhound, and his hard blue eyes were close-coupled. The reptilian forehead did not signify a superior mentality, even as the slack, retreating chin denoted a minimum of courage. It was a most contradictory face. The features did not balance. Racey Dawson was not a student of physiognomy, but he recognized a weak chin when he saw it. If this man were ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White

... Latin sharpness of mentality manifested in these clearly, sardonically etched portraits of a ship's crew. The whimsical humour revealed in final lines is a portent, in the present writer's opinion, of a talent which will probably come to maturity in a very different ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... driven out of the show business. If an actor would dare do such a thing in a company directed by me, I would go before the curtain and denounce him to the audience and refund the price of admission. An actor who would do a thing like that is called a "ham," which means a common person with no mentality or breeding,—a type that is practically extinct now in ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn

... discernment which is able, after experimenting, to recognize excessive roughnesses, over-slippery surfaces, dusty places that offer no resistance and, above all, the threads left by other excursionists. This is all or nearly all that my long acquaintance with the Processionaries has taught me as to their mentality. Poor brains, indeed; poor creatures, whose commonwealth has its safety hanging ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... soul for sense whenever this [20] word means the so-called soul in the body, and you will find the right meaning indicated. The misnamed human soul is material sense, which sinneth and shall die; for it is an error or false sense of mentality in matter, and matter has no sense. You will admit that Soul is the [25] Life of man. Now if Soul sinned, it would die; for "the wages of sin is death." The Scripture saith, "When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy

... Lombroso. For forty years he has been searching the dark for these strange forces, and yet he says: 'We create in these seances an imaginary being; we speak to it, and in its replies it almost always reflects the mentality of the experimenter. Spirits have taught us nothing. They have not led science forward a single step.... I must say that if there are spirits, or beings independent of us, in action, they know no more than we do about the other world's.' And yet as regards the physical facts ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland

... is health, spirit is health, God is health, I am health. Since there is but one mind, there is but one mentality. This mind and mentality is God; God is health. ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush

... Britishers, that Germans did not bear them any malice, that they rather pitied them and would fain be ready to come to terms with them. But declarations of this sort proved only how little the French mentality was understood this side of the Vosges. The French nation is too much impressed by the memory of her great past and the part played by her in European politics to stand being pitied and patted like children of tender age. It ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... possesses a good mentality, it scarcely occurs to us that this is just as surely heredity as is the transmission of the mental weakness ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen

... fix it; to admit that the mineral will remain a mineral throughout eternity, that the vegetable will ever reproduce the same types, that the animal will definitely be confined to his instincts and impulses, without the hope, some day, of developing the superior mentality of his torturers in human form; to admit that man will never be anything but man, i.e., a being in whom the passions have full play whereas the virtues are scarcely born; to admit that there is no final goal—perfection, ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... even though in strict accordance with law, is inexcusable unless absolutely necessary, and whatever goes beyond that is criminal." These were briefly the general principles on which he shaped his ends, and they are pretty safe guides. His mentality, as I have said, was so complete that it covered every subtle and charming form of thought and knowledge, even to the smallest affairs of life. No theologians knew more than he or could converse so clearly on the many different religions; ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman

... development appears to be essentially a non-Italian formation. Its connection with the Middle Ages already shows it to be foreign to the Latin mind, the mediaeval disintegration being the result of the triumph of Germanic individualism over the political mentality of the Romans. The barbarians, boring from within and hacking from without, pulled down the great political structure raised by Latin genius and put nothing in its place. Anarchy lasted eight centuries during ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various

... children of any race these stories can not fail to give pleasure by their vivid imaging of the simple things and creatures of the great out-of-doors and the epics of their doings. They will also give an intimate insight into the mentality of an interesting race at a most interesting stage of development, which is now fast receding into ...
— Myths and Legends of the Sioux • Marie L. McLaughlin

... long as nobody talks about it. But neither of these expressions is quite so bad as that dreadful thing you always find in American books, and that lots of people have caught up—especially palmists and manicures—mentality.' ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson

... duties, the work being carried out on repayment for Government departments, provincial governments and private corporations. The former method, allowing of independent commercial expansion, is better suited to British mentality and requirements, but its success will depend on a genuine endeavour to make commercial aviation the real and vital basis of our air power. Experience in commercial operation cannot be gained by the exploitation of air routes or the carriage of mails or passengers under Service auspices. ...
— Aviation in Peace and War • Sir Frederick Hugh Sykes

... reason, for Aristotle never had a glimmering conception of what the process of reasoning is. Yet all Concordians are not Aristotelians; some of them have more modern ideas, and a vigorous, though misdirected, mentality. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various

... they at all similar to the comic strips now appearing in the newspapers. Many of them are full of matter which is brutal, horrifying, and sadistic, and although to a certain extent they are published for and read by adults of feeble mentality they are also ...
— Report of the Juvenile Delinquency Committee • Ronald Macmillan Algie

... dogmas, Sir John. We do not believe in transmigration in the individual at all, but in the transmigration of classes. Thus, we hold that whenever a given generation of men, in a peculiar state of society, attain, in the aggregate, a certain degree of moral improvement, or mentality, as we term it in the schools, that there is an admixture of their qualities in masses, some believe by scores, others think by hundreds, and others again pretend by thousands; and if it is found, by the analysis that is regularly instituted by nature, that the proportions are just, the ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... into a false sense of being "exhausted" and "old." Neither of them is a fact except in your thought of yourself. All your powers are lying dormant. All your latent energies are lying unused. Back of your conscious mentality are tremendous energies awaiting the pull of your will. When your brain conceives of being something unusually great, at least so it may appear from your view-point, do not question your strength but go ahead unhesitatingly, fearlessly and steadily. Assert your life-force. Feel that you ...
— The Doctrine and Practice of Yoga • A. P. Mukerji

... intimated, Mr. Brockton's protegee was not a good actress; she was not even a competent actress. Deficient in mentality, lacking any real culture, she failed utterly to rise to the opportunity offered by the roles with which she was entrusted. Fortunately for her, summer audiences are not highly critical. Her youth and beauty pleased, and the local reviewers, susceptible ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... sense of proportion. The letters that are hardest to answer, and which remain the longest unanswered, are from people who have merely intellectual views; those who are holding things in their minds with such force that their real message is obstructed. I dislike aggressive mentality; it may be my weakness, but much-educated persons disorder this atmosphere. They want things; they want to discuss. A man is not free to give nor to receive when his hand or brain is occupied with holding. I have had the choicest relations with honest ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... in the remark. She was thinking what a simple, what a glorious thing was a love such as Stransky's and Minna's: the mating of a man and a woman whose brains were not oversensitized by too complicated mentality; of a man and a woman direct and sincere, primarily and clearly a man and a woman. Such happiness could never be for her now; for her who had let a man make love to her for his ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... might be said that in the mentality of the ancient Greeks there was a strain which would have rendered them indisposed to take such an idea seriously, if it had been propounded. No period of their history could be described as an age of optimism. They were never, by ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... threaten the project. Travis never learned why the ship had crashed, nor why he and the other Apache agents had been shot into space without warning and under Redax control, a machine which had returned them to ancestral mentality. ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... intelligent enough," Klayung agreed absently. "Their average basic I.Q. is probably higher than that of human beings. A somewhat different type of mentality, of course. Well, when the cubicle arrives, I'll question the ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz

... that the Japanese are inherently deficient in the higher mental faculties. They consider mediocre mentality to be an inborn characteristic of Japan and assert that it lies at the root of the civilizational differences distinguishing the East from the West. The puerility of Oriental science in all its departments, the prevalence of superstition ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick

... higher race they would have put us down. But a more detailed assignment of qualities between the two peoples is possible. In general it may be said that the two stood on much the same level of mentality, but that they had specialised on different subjects, the Normans on war and politics, the Irish on culture. Of the many writers who help us to reconstruct the period we ought to signalise one, Mrs A.S. Green, who to a rare scholarship adds something rarer, the genius of common sense. ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... Volga, in the summer of 1920, that I first realized how profound is the disease in our Western mentality, which the Bolsheviks are attempting to force upon an essentially Asiatic population, just as Japan and the West are doing in China. Our boat travelled on, day after day, through an unknown and mysterious land. Our company were noisy, gay, quarrelsome, full ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... resolutely from the mind every conception of right we have inherited from our ancestors—conceptions long since crystallized into inimitable principles of law and confirmed in our charters of liberty. In the German mentality these conceptions do not exist; they think in other sequences; they act according to another principle, if it is a principle, the conviction that there is only one right, one privilege, and that it belongs exclusively to Germany, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... abhorred, and nothing awakens a more lively hatred than centralization and State power. The vast extent of small industry, with the apprentice, journeyman, and master-workman, has wielded an influence over the mentality of the French workers. Berth, for instance, follows Proudhon in conceiving of the future commonwealth as a federation of innumerable little workshops. Gigantic industries, such as are known in Germany, England, and America, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... develops, those who regard it with tenderness or impatience are seldom even approximately correct in their analysis of its intellectual movements, largely because, if there is anything to record, it defies adult definition. One curious freak of mentality I must now mention, because it took a considerable part in the enfranchisement of my mind, or rather in the formation of my thinking habits. But neither my Father nor my stepmother knew what to make of it, and to tell the truth I hardly know what ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... that this attribute remains to me one of the most unfathomable aspects of the complex juvenile mentality as commonly encountered at present. Though still a comparatively young man—thirty-eight on Michaelmas Day last past—I cannot conceive that as a lad I was ever animated with the restless, and I may even say mischievous, spirit that appears ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

... I'm not at all interested in that addlepated, monkey-faced nincompoop. He's after my daughter, but he shall never marry her. Why, if wives could be supported for fifty cents a year, that empty-headed specimen of vacuous mentality couldn't even keep ...
— Writing for Vaudeville • Brett Page

... want to—any more than you would step on an ant who asked you to help him move a twig. That's about how much ahead of us they probably are. Of course, we struck a pure mentality once, who came darn near dematerializing us entirely, but I'm betting that these folks haven't got that far along yet. By the way, I've got a hunch ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... such a plaint in the poet's ears? Very probably, for one and all of Nadaud's rural poems breathe the very essence of the fields, the inmost nature of the peasant, from first to last they reveal Jacques Bonhomme to us, his conceptions of life, his mentality and limitations. ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... a preposterous incongruity. Sometimes, after listening to a sustained invective concerned with a dull and, on the face of it, absurd subject known as military "courtesy," he suspected that the dim purpose of the war was to let the regular army officers—men with the mentality and aspirations of schoolboys—have their fling with some real slaughter. He was being grotesquely sacrificed to the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... world, and Germany's only prospect of success lay in the chance that most of the world would fail to perceive its implications or delay too long its effective intervention. It was the defect of her self-idolatry and concentration that she could not develop an international mind or fathom the mentality of other peoples. She could not conceive how England would act on a "scrap of paper," and never dreamt of American participation. But she saw that Russia and France would inevitably and immediately be involved in war by the attempt at ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... mental powers that we acquaint our children with God: "Faith cometh by hearing." Parents can not be too careful about the impressions made in the mentality of their children; it may affect their morality and spirituality in the whole of after life. Select such books for them as will develop the mental faculties, something that contains food for the brain. There are certain articles of diet that do not contain sufficient nutrition for the development ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr

... spiritualistic bias, with unsophisticated believers in a supernatural source of all psychic phenomena, with scoffers convinced that every medium is an impostor, and that nothing but a little common sense is needed for the exposure. The results have been largely dependent on the mentality of the investigators. Failure to understand this is responsible for much of the disappointment and contempt with which otherwise intelligent critics have dismissed the subject. The accumulated thought-power, the collective mind ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... summons from the fiscal office of Vernon, where I have a little country place on the Seine, to pay the sum of two francs, which is the annual tax for a float I had there for boating purposes. This trivial paper, coming in amidst the whirlpool of mobilization, displays the mentality of the provincial officials. ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard

... its own deductions. If resistances are not too strong it is often possible to introduce healthy ideas by way of the conscious reason, to break up old habits, and make over the mentality without going to the trouble of uncovering some of the reactions which ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... which remains saturated with theocratic ideals in the sharpest conflict with the Twentieth Century. In the pamphlet of Yang Tu (Chapter VIII) which launched the ill-fated Monarchy Scheme and contributed so largely to the dramatic death of Yuan Shih-kai, we have an essentially Chinese mentality of the reactionary or corrupt type which expresses itself both on home and foreign issues in a naively dishonest way, helpful to future diplomacy. In the Letter of Protest (Chapter X) against the ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... I had with him he impressed me as a man of vigorous mentality, of obstinate wilfulness, and overwhelming confidence in his own judgment and the courage of his convictions. His weakness was alcoholism. He made a fearful exhibition of himself at the time of his inauguration ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... humanity. Ever soaring into the ideal, philosophizing by the aid of his emotional impulses, Shelley possessed, like all true Hermetists and Theosophists imbued with mysticism, a wonderful power of continued abstraction in the contemplation of the Supreme Power. His mentality, described by one of his critics as essentially Greek, "simple, not complex, imaginative rather than fanciful, abstract not concrete, intellectual not emotional," contributed its share to his belief in a pantheistic philosophy, making him find Supreme ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran

... measure to its proper use under the control of the will. Something is lacking in a performance, however perfect the vocalisation as regards intonation and quality, if it fails to arouse enthusiasm or to stir up the feelings of an audience by the expression of passion or sentiment through the mentality of ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott

... Mind is an absolute necessity for the existence of any creation whatever, for the reason that if each individual mind were an entirely separate center of perception, not linked to all other minds by a common ground of underlying mentality independent of all individual action, then no two persons would see the same thing at the same time, in fact no two individuals would be conscious of living in the same world. If this were the case ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward

... Parliament for the borough—also belonged to the Society and occasionally attended its meetings. Others took up district visiting as a hobby; they had nothing to do, and being densely ignorant and of inferior mentality, they had no desire or capacity for any intellectual pursuit. So they took up this work for the pleasure of playing the grand lady and the superior person at a very small expense. Other of these visiting ladies were middle-aged, ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... day he revolved from time to time indistinct ideas of somehow giving this girl a chance. He wished Josephine would and could help, or perhaps his sister Ursula. It was not a matter that could be settled, or even taken up, in haste. No man of his mentality and experience fails to learn how perilous it is in the least to interfere in the destiny of anyone. And his notion involved not slight interference with advice or suggestion or momentarily extended helping hand, but radical ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... America. The selection of immigrants to be admitted should be a part of a national policy of eugenics,[17] which aims to improve the racial quality of the nation by checking the multiplication of the strains defective in respect to mentality, nervous organization, and physical health, and by encouraging the more capable elements of the population to contribute in due proportion to the maintenance of a healthy, moral, and efficient population. In such a view, a eugenic opportunity is presented in the selection and ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... more of a mentality than Hanlon had ever guessed dogs had—and he knew they were far from stupid. This one's mind, he could now see, was immature ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans

... further article we hope to deal with the effect of hard hats on the conductivity of the branches of the Vth nerve, the mentality of the Hairy Ainus and other ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various

... fertile valley of the Columbia, which we now call the Inland Empire. But here on the Coast were the "Digger" tribes, who subsisted chiefly by spearing salmon and digging clams. Their stooped figures, flat faces, downcast eyes and low mentality reflected the life they led. Contrasting their heavy bodies with their feeble legs, which grew shorter with disuse, a Tacoma humorist last summer gravely proved to a party of English visitors that in ...
— The Mountain that was 'God' • John H. Williams

... of mental and nervous disorders has been so loosely applied that some definition may be necessary. By the term "idiocy," is meant a condition of undeveloped mentality. Idiocy exists in various degrees, from the complete absence of intellectual faculties to a condition of mere irresponsibility in which the subject is capable of self-help, and sometimes of self-support under the careful guidance of other. Under the generic term "idiot" may be ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner

... and Mr. WINSTON CHURCHILL'S famous synonym for "lie" is permanently enshrined in the annals of circumlocution. One of the most offensive words in the language is "idiot"; yet it can be shorn of nearly all its sting when replaced by the definition, "a person of infra-normal mentality." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various

... skilful criminal can long conceal a capital crime. It is not true. No one knows how many murders and other crimes go unsolved or even unknown. The trouble with murderers, as I knew well enough, was that they lacked mentality. And often I said to myself that were it in my heart to kill a man, I assuredly could do so, and all my life ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough

... precluding a successful reference to the minutes of past meetings. Now, sir, tell me, as man to man, can I consult with, or listen to suggestions—even to suggestions, though worthy of a gigantic intellect—can I listen to suggestions coming from the mentality of a non-member of our learned body? Before replying, let me say that our society is known throughout all of Egypt—that is, you know, Egypt, Illinois. When a medical savant in Paris, or Leipsig, or London, alleges a discovery, we determine the ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... would not ruin a person of my inclinations. The others of my family had been to college; I always have been too thankful for words that circumstances intervened which saved my brain from being run through a groove in company with dozens of others of widely different tastes and mentality. What small measure of success I have had has come through preserving my individual point of view, method of expression, and following in after life the Spartan regulations of my girlhood home. Whatever I have been able to do, has been done through the line ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter

... presence. Jesus was very winsome. He drew men. He said that if He were lifted up He would draw men. They who heard that could believe it, for He drew them before He was lifted up. He drew the crowds. Yet many a leader that has drawn the crowds has led them astray. He drew men—men of strongest mentality, scholarly, cultured, thoughtful men, and every other sort. Yet men have often been befooled in their leaders. He drew women. Here is a great test. Men may be deceived in a man. But woman, true strong woman, pure womanly ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon

... institution of intelligence in idiots dated from falls upon the head, but extra mentality has been conferred by such an event Pritchard tells of three idiot brothers, one of whom, after a severe head injury, brightened up and became a barrister, while his brothers remained idiotic. 'Father Mabillon,' says Winslow, 'is said to have been an idiot ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... will-power I regained control over my tottering mentality, and so successful was I that the next time that the light came I sat quite still and looked indifferently at the fresh and tempting food almost within my reach. Glad I was that I had done so, for it ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... more reasonable, than to ascribe, as many do, the whole to either, some to paternity, others to maternity. Still this decision go which way it may, does not affect the great fact that children inherit both the physiology and the mentality existing in parents at the time they received being ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... knows a period of blissful rest. But the longings of its immortal nature urge on the soul. So we see that the sign Cancer symbolizes tenacity to life; to live we must breathe and eat and assimilate upon every plane of our being. It necessarily follows that, the mentality expressed by Cancer must be susceptible to inspirational currents; to inspire is to indraw. In its application, we find that this sign symbolizes love. How beautiful the harmony and contrast of the constellation and its ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... labor, muscular effort is a mental demonstration! The keener the mentality controlling the muscles, the more satisfactory the work accomplished. The more interested and the healthier and happier the laborer is in his work, the easier it becomes for him to produce superior results. For centuries, farm work has been considered the natural ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... breathing and the grip of her hands how agitated she was; but as the car glided smoothly along, driven skilfully by mentality, guided by the controlling thought of a tiny lame back, she became easier and clutched less frantically. He kept the comfort over her head. She had enough to make the change, to see so many strangers all at once, without being excited by unfamiliar things ...
— Michael O'Halloran • Gene Stratton-Porter

... how to control the less self-conscious modes of the spirit by the more self-conscious mode, while the patient has not yet attained to this knowledge; and what the healer does is to substitute his own objective or conscious mentality, which is will joined to intellect, for that of the patient, and in this way to find entrance to his sub-conscious mind and impress upon it the ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... for weak mentality and physique—the Seven Seas. And to this school went John Quinbey, first, however, putting in one season on the Georges Bank, where, in a lucky craft, he made money. Richer than ever before in his life, he returned home, to try again for the heart and ...
— The Grain Ship • Morgan Robertson

... seem. The other party to the bet is bound by the ironclad codes of Wolf to inflict no permanent physical damage (no injury that will not heal with three suncourses). But from sunrise to sunset, any torment or painful ingenuity which the half-human mentality of Wolf can devise must ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... being warned by bonfires that enemies had landed. This hazardous life of perpetual danger and ceaseless struggle had produced a people habituated to the shedding of blood, to the defense of their rights, weapons in hand; the farmers and fishermen of the present day possessed the mentality of their ancestors, and kept up the same customs. There were no villages; there were houses scattered over many kilometers, with no other nucleus than the church and the dwellings of the curate and the alcalde. The only town was the capital, the one called in ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... it! Stanley, it isn't easy to tell it, but I'm going to; I feel as if an X-ray had been turned upon my mentality, showing me what a blamed fool I've made of myself during the last few years, making me wish I could blot it all out and take a sharp turn in another direction. How's that for humble pie! I declare, I don't know myself!" he ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... navigator that he should take the Captain a little brandy in case he was not feeling well, but the navigator declared he was going to stay down in the warmth till he was sent for. Alten is a great coarse brute. Fancy allowing a material substance such as alcohol to grip one's mentality. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon

... like enough to many others in the annals of the nineteenth century movement for education, but in its overtones so intimately Spanish and individual that it came as the explanation of many things I had been wondering about and gave me an inkling of some of the origins of a rather special mentality I had noticed in ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... complete records of it? The majority of us believe that the Masters coded their records in such fashion that the Stretts, even if they conquered the Omans or destroyed them, could never break that code; since it was keyed to the basic difference between the Strett mentality and the human. Thus, they left it deliberately for some human race ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith

... were others who professed not to believe the testimony and who talked loudly of action against the coroner for having introduced the evidence of a woman known by every one to be lacking in balanced mentality. There were others who, by their remarks, showed that they were concealing the real truth of their thoughts and only using a cloak of interest to guide them to other food for the carrion proclivities of their minds. To all of them Fairchild and Harry made the same reply: that ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... soldier. He was tall, well set-up, and almost offensively erect. He was a handsome man of perhaps forty-eight. His cleanshaven face was firm, aggressive, domineering. There was not a trace of grey in his dark hair. He typified strength, mentality, shrewdness and that most essential quality in the standards of wealth and power,—arrogance. In a word, he ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... come to consider the mentality of the Oriental races we certainly have to acknowledge that Oriental culture—ethical, metaphysical, and poetical—has given birth to some of the grandest and noblest thoughts that mankind possesses, and has ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon

... another writer, "often has fear stamped upon him before his entrance into the outer world; he is reared in fear; all his life is passed in bondage to fear of disease and death, and thus his whole mentality becomes cramped, limited, and depressed, and his body follows its shrunken pattern and specification ... Think of the millions of sensitive and responsive souls among our ancestors who have been under the dominion of such a perpetual nightmare! Is it not surprising ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... principles formulated by the Roman jurists, to say nothing of the minute psychological analyses of the Stoic casuists. In this range of ideas also, the maintenance of the most striking contrasts characterizes Egyptian mentality, which was never shocked by the cruelties and obscenities that sullied the mythology and the ritual. Like Epicurus at Athens, some of the sacred texts actually invited the believers to enjoy life before the sadness ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... such that a fly could be heard buzzing on the wing, and for the space of a whole year not a single pupil sneezed or coughed in class, and so complete was the absence of all sound that no one could have told that there was a soul in the place. Of this mentor young Chichikov speedily appraised the mentality; wherefore he fashioned his behaviour to correspond with it. Not an eyelid, not an eyebrow, would he stir during school hours, howsoever many pinches he might receive from behind; and only when the bell rang would he run to anticipate his fellows in handing ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... of the trail is something that is stronger than anything else in Muller's mentality, and now and then it brings him into conflict with the department,... or with his own better nature. Sometimes his unerring instinct discovers secrets in high places, secrets which the Police Department is bidden to hush up and leave untouched. Muller is then taken off the case, and left idle ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner

... spiritual vision perhaps filtering through your father's mentality, which has welded past, present and future. At least, that is the way I see it with the material eye, which is all I have to view it with—if we can call the recognition of beauty ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... affair. But it seemed to throw some light on the mentality of the German army. It also made me reflect upon the state of mind of this little unarmed country living next door to the big military machine and directly on the open way to France. Yet we all laughed ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke

... to Hypnotic thought, or suggested mental action. I would infer that, according to what I have said, there may be two kinds of mentality, or working of the mind—the one under certain conditions as effective or resultant as the other; the first being—as it was in the order of time—Unconscious or Instinctive; the ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland

... the Scriptures declare, it must have been from the mentality of others; since all suffering comes from mind, not from matter, and there could be no sin or suffering in the Mind which is God. Not his own sins, but the sins of the world, "crucified the Lord of glory," and "put him to an ...
— Unity of Good • Mary Baker Eddy

... Plotinus. Values for life, subsisting in themselves, become objects [p.50] of meditation, of "browsing," and of the deepest activity of the soul. Life is now viewed as consisting in a great and constant quest after these religious ideals. It sees its meaning beyond and above the range of mentality or even morality, though it is well that it should pass as often as possible through the gate of the former, and is bound to pass always through the gate of the latter. A break takes place with the "natural self"; the mental life of concepts, though necessary, is now seen as insufficient; ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones

... fact that the Parliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing black slavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. The slave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be called blackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality to deny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce represented in this the real wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction against Calvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there is something romantic in the English mind which ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... will ever make large captures of the general reader, but she is certainly a very interesting figure for the critic and the amateur of fiction. In Pointed Roofs and Honeycomb, for example, her story is a series of dabs of intense superficial impression; her heroine is not a mentality, but a mirror. She goes about over her facts like those insects that run over water sustained by surface tension. Her percepts never become concepts. Writing as I do at the extremest distance possible from such work, I confess I find it altogether too much—or shall I say altogether too little?—for ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton



Words linked to "Mentality" :   intelligence, attitude, mental attitude, mental, wit



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