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Paternity   /pətˈərnɪti/   Listen
Paternity

noun
1.
The state of being a father.
2.
The kinship relation between an offspring and the father.  Synonym: fatherhood.
3.
The act of initiating a new idea or theory or writing.  Synonym: authorship.



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"Paternity" Quotes from Famous Books



... sullen lake on dark days, yet grateful for his kindness as the field flowers to the sun after a hard rain. She was a child with a woman's heart, but the woman's heart closed to him by the secret of Boy's paternity. Her smiling lips greeted him. She dropped the flowers and two arms stole around his neck. Young drew her very close. How dear, how very dear, she had grown in ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... had spoken those few words as one speaks to an afflicted child. There was a mellow softness and an undisguised paternity in his tones—and what more natural, the girl being ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade

... Jacob (Gen. ch. xxx., 1, 22, 23); and Elisabeth, the wife of Zacharias, the high-priest, who were the parents of John the Baptist (Luke, ch. i.). Whether children be a "blessing," notwithstanding all that has been said and sung about the exquisite joys of paternity and maternity, is perhaps doubtful, generally speaking: one thing is certain, that many an honest fellow has had too much cause to "wonder why the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... walnut-husks, and the ripening or ripen'd long-round walnuts, The continence of vegetables, birds, animals, The consequent meanness of me should I skulk or find myself indecent, while birds and animals never once skulk or find themselves indecent, The great chastity of paternity, to match the great chastity of maternity, The oath of procreation I have sworn, my Adamic and fresh daughters, The greed that eats me day and night with hungry gnaw, till I saturate what shall produce boys to fill my place when I am ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... dozen gentlemen had stood talking in low voices in front of the fireplace. All were friends; all were deeply exercised by the same idea of paternity. They seemed to be mutually excusing themselves, and they looked as confused as if they had done something clumsy. Eventually, however, they put a bold face on the matter. It had nothing to do with them: the fault was hers! What a stunner ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... almost to be dragged in to meet us. That spiritual face—such a face as you might see among the preachers of Westminster or Oxford—and the little shy Indian girl-wife and the children, plainly a throw-back to their red-skin ancestors, not to the Cambridge paternity! What was the explanation? Where was the story of heartache and tragedy—I asked myself, as we stood in our tent door watching the York boat come in with provisions for the year under a sky of such diaphanous northern lights as leave you dumb before their beauty and their ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... newspaper correspondents did not exist in those days. Had Joseph been skilfully "interviewed," it is highly probable that the world would have been initiated into his domestic secrets, and enlightened as to the paternity of Mary's eldest son. The Holy Ghost is rather too shadowy a personage to be the father of a lusty boy, and no young lady would be credited in this age if she ascribed to him the authorship of a child born out of wedlock. Most assuredly ...
— Arrows of Freethought • George W. Foote

... taught to the church in Ohio. In later years, in Nauvoo, Smith seemed willing to accept its paternity, and in an article in the Times and Seasons of April 15, x 842, signed "Ed.," when he was its editor, he said that he was the first to point it out. The article shows, however, that it was doubtless written by Rigdon, as ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... neglect her—this she had made an article of religion. The young girl had every appearance of being happier in Isabel's society than in that of any one save her father,—whom she admired with an intensity justified by the fact that, as paternity was an exquisite pleasure to Gilbert Osmond, he had always been luxuriously mild. Isabel knew how Pansy liked to be with her and how she studied the means of pleasing her. She had decided that the best way of pleasing her was negative, and consisted in ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to suppress those fundamental natural tendencies. The position of the man as the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage bond and the stern insistence on wifely ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... putative father of it, and it might well have come from one of his pliancy and calibre; but as Slavery itself, embodied in the person of Calhoun, scouted the feeble bantling, there was soon no one so mean as to confess the paternity. Abandoned of its begetters, Squatter Sovereignty wandered the streets like a squalid and orphaned outcast, begging anybody and everybody to take it in, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... occupation to me. I have gather'd my Jargonels, but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature. I can now understand in what sense they speak of FATHER ADAM. I recognize the paternity, ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold

... they are accompanied by those of their female slaves who are young and pretty. Their morals are farther characterized by the fact that descent is in the female line, which is usually due to uncertain paternity. The women are ugly and masculine, and Chavanne does not mention a single fact or act which proves that ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... relief as well, to find no sympathy in his sons for his own career. The daughters whom the young wife of his old age brought him lived to be like him; which it is said is the only good fortune in paternity likely to ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... wrote. Peter vowed that no infant had ever been given the world's greeting in so magnificent a manner; certainly he had never himself surpassed that first essay. As he told the parson, to write twelve odes on paternity, twelve greetings to the new-born soul, is a severe tax even on ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham

... should have had a right to blame him if he had made me a woman. Can I acknowledge an affection which is not based on any personal regard? Could personal regard be present before the existence of its object? In what, then, consists the sacredness of paternity? Is it in the act itself out of which existence arose? as though this were aught else than an animal process to appease animal desires. Or does it lie, perhaps, in the result of this act, which is nothing more after all than one of iron necessity, and which men would ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... purposely remained absorbed in the contemplation of his finger nails; then he shot a sudden comprehensive glance which took in the young woman, her burden and all the supposed conditions. There was no doubt in his mind that here was another "paternity case," as he catalogued them in his ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... if any references to the rebellion appear in the minutes of the year 1745. No references appear, as a rule, for that year; but, under 1746, there are brief accounts of church discipline being exercised in the case of a few illegitimate births,—the paternity being ascribed ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... another feeling she had never dreamt him capable of,—an intense and fierce pride in his affection for his child. And it was the more hopeless to her that it was not the mere sentiment of reciprocation, but the material instinct of paternity in its most animal form. And it seemed horrible to her that the only outcome of what had been her own wild, youthful passion for this brute was this love for the flesh of her flesh, for she was more and more conscious as he spoke that her yearning for the boy was the yearning of an ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... the Duchess, after that night of thought which had so shaken her old heart, had decided to be a necessity if her plan of never telling of her discovery of Maggie's real paternity were to be a success. The major portion of her note dwelt upon a generality with which Larry already was acquainted: Joe's desire to keep clear of all talk touching upon the deeds and the people of his past. And then in a careless-seeming last sentence ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott

... violent murder of the provincial was divulged, an auditor went to [the fathers of] St. Augustine, by order of the royal Audiencia, to inquire into it. All the religious were assembled, and when all were in the hall of his Paternity, the auditor ordered all of them to kiss the hand of the dead provincial. On kissing it, father Fray Juan de Ocadiz began to tremble, etc., ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIV, 1630-34 • Various

... and paternity belong to God the Father. The Father sends the Son. The Father and the Son send the Holy Spirit. Neither the Son nor the Spirit, nor both together, ever send the Father. The Father "created all things by Jesus Christ." Jesus Christ cast out devils "by the Spirit ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark

... Paternity, however, is a condition with which his hearers may be supposed to sympathize; and he is absolutely eloquent, when he describes the desire he has cherished for a son, and the burning pain which filled him when he knew that it had been defrauded. He tells the story of his wife's intrigue and ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... snub, or aquiline reversed; his mouth large, and mine small; his eyes red and ferrety, and mine projecting; and, moreover, as she was a very handsome woman, and used to pay frequent visits to the cave of a sainted man in high repute, of whom I was the image, when she talked of the janissary's paternity, I very much doubted ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Frederick Marryat

... whom she scarcely knew, examining and touching all that she had been accustomed to consider as precious and sacred. Her father had made his will at her birth. With the pride of newly and late-acquired paternity, he had considered the office of guardian to his little darling as one which would have been an additional honour to the lord-lieutenant of the county; but as he had not the pleasure of his lordship's acquaintance, he selected the person of most ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... enactments too came evidence of the Kirk's paternity. It settled the salary (200 pounds Scots) of a new master for the grammar-school, agreed to pay the fees of divers poor scholars, instructed the administering of the funds in the poor's-box, fixed a levy on the town for the following ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... than the latter principle. It may, of course, be argued that brothers succeed as children of the same mother; but against this must be set the fact that they are also children of the same father; for uncertain paternity can only be a vera causa where pirrauru and similar customs are found; and even here the pre-eminence of the primary husband might well be held to determine the legal paternity of the children, which ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... of her and spoke of her as English, notwithstanding her French paternity. For her appearance and her temperament she had inherited from her English mother, who had given her also English training. Miss Delarue laughed at the forlorn dejection of Wellesly's ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... would hoot at you if you assigned any mortal paternity to the aqueduct. He calls it the Devil's Bridge, and tells you this story. The Evil One was in love with a pretty girl of the upper town, and full of protestations of devotion. The fair Segovian listened to him one evening, when her plump arms ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... the man in a lower voice, as he glanced about to see if any of his fellows was listening. "Paternity, you ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... the holy joys of home and family lose their divine attractions; he prefers the cold life of an ignominious celibacy to the humiliation and opprobrium of the questionable privileges of an uncertain paternity. ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy

... of history, Through the times that were dark with mystery, From the cities of man's captivity, By the shed of The Child's nativity, And over the hill by the crosses three, By the sign-post of God's paternity, From Yesterday into Eternity,— Runs The King's High Way. And wayfaring men, who have strayed, still say It is good to travel ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham

... returned to the house in Versailles to find a visitor there; and now he realized the fulness of her relief when the frail boy said that he did not like his father. Her travels had spoken the restlessness of flight in search of oblivion to the very fact of his paternity. The "I give! I give!" of the portrait was the giving of the infinity of her fine, sensitive being to him to make him all hers. His feeling which had held him on the desert when he should have gone home, that feeling of literal revulsion toward his inheritance, was a thing born in him which ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... the previous Turkish War had covered him), at any rate Constantine restrained himself. Why the devil couldn't these Serbs understand that they were his gallant allies! Let them wipe out the unhappy past. Had they never heard of that magnificent French actress who, being asked about the paternity of her son, replied that she really did not know? "Alas!" she said, "I am so shortsighted." Well, it was true that in 1915 he had been neutral and unable to tolerate the presence of Serbian soldiers on his territory; if they found ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... convinced me that the friars' incontinence was generally regarded with indifference by the people; concubinage being so common among the Filipinos themselves it did not shock them in the pastor's case. Moreover, women were proud of the paternity of their children begotten in their relationship to ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... the conception is of doubtful paternity, we committed every conceivable blunder in our methods of carrying out the plan. Few minds were engaged that had any knowledge of the character of the Turks' fighting qualities and the geography of the country. Never before in this war has ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... this same Vinaya of the Mulasarvastivadins probably gives us a fragment of history when it tells us that the Buddha had three wives, perhaps too when it relates how Rahula's paternity was called in question and how Devadatta wanted to marry Yasodhara after the Buddha had abandoned worldly life[656]. The Pali Vinaya and also some Sanskrit Vinayas[657] mention only one wife or none at all. They do not attempt to describe Gotama's domestic life and if they make no allusion ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... snuff-box was only understood by those who had seen the article referred to; and on the whole, the performance was considered a very clever jeu-d'esprit by the faculty, who knew nothing of its paternity, and set it down as his own. Still, as being hardly in keeping with the gravity of the occasion, it was rejected as a part of the public exercises of the commencement. Anticipating this result, however, Daniel ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone

... close clasp of the longing man the child felt the unmistakable throb of paternity penetrate his heart ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris

... habits. The daughter who stood by his side on the watch tower was a young girl of charm, a fair, frail maiden, a slender lily under the towering shadow of her dark father. The citizens did not, perhaps, understand his instincts of paternity; and, indeed, if they understood them they would not have given them the sanction of their approval. The people only saw that the young girl, his only child, was condemned to what they called a life of virtual imprisonment in the mansion. She was a warm-blooded young creature, ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly

... with understandable trepidation. My father had been explicit in his advice before I departed for America, but on no point had he been more emphatic than secrecy concerning himself. He assured me that revelation of my paternity would bring ridicule and unhappiness upon me. The advice was sound, of course, and not even Joanna knew that our journey's end would bring us to the estate of a large, cultured, and conversing cat. I had deliberately fostered ...
— My Father, the Cat • Henry Slesar

... not she ask if the girl was his daughter? What is that look of paternity and of maternity which observing and experienced mothers and old nurses know so well ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... sisters, who must hear a bear-story from Arthur, and kiss the big brother good-night; two delicate flowers on the rough stem of life, that filled Horace Endicott with bitterness and joy when he gathered them into his embrace; the bitterness of hate, the joy of escape from paternity. What softness, what beauty, what fragrance in the cherubs! Trumps, their big brother called them, but the world knew them as Marguerite and Constance, and they shared the human repugnance to an ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... more acceptance than the later story, in the same key, which credits Shakespeare with the paternity of Sir William D'Avenant. The latter was baptised at Oxford on March 3, 1605, as the son of John D'Avenant, the landlord of the Crown Inn, where Shakespeare lodged in his journeys to and from Stratford. The story of Shakespeare's parental ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... her; that her ambitious hopes once ruined by my marriage, the countess, in her selfish egotism, has abandoned our child to mercenary hands, and that my daughter perhaps died from want of care. It is also my fault; I did not then know the extent of the sacred duties of paternity. When the true character of Sarah was suddenly revealed to me, I should have at once taken my daughter from her, to watch over her with love and solicitude. I ought to have foreseen that the countess could never be more than an unnatural mother. It ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... claim any paternity in these lines: but not the most judicious action of all my youth was to publish certain dramatic sketches, and his Lordship had the printed book in his possession long before The Giaour was published, and may ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... the Catstane was a monument to the grandfather of Hengist and Horsa, the inscription upon it should not have read 'In hoc tumulo jacet Vetta f(ilius) Victi,' but, on the contrary, 'Victus filius Vettae.' In other words, he holds that the inscription reverses the order of paternity as given by Bede, Nennius, etc.[1] But all this is simply and altogether a mistake on the part of the writer. All the ancient genealogies describe Hengist and Horsa as the sons of Victgils, Victgils as the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... of Whitelaw and Walsh, in their history of that city, may be more correct,—viz. that "Sir Oliver Chamberlaine was descended from a respectable English family that had been settled in Dublin since the Reformation." I should be glad to be informed on this point, and also respecting the paternity of this Sir Oliver, who is not only distinguished as one of the progenitors of the Sheridans, but also of Dr. William Chamberlaine, the learned author of the Abridgement of the Laws of Jamaica, which he for some time administered, as ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 51, October 19, 1850 • Various

... gave the title of "The Comedy of Human Life." It is a comedy, mingled with lurid tragic touches, of society in the French capital in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The leading character in this story is, of course, Old Goriot, and the passion which dominates him is that of paternity. In the picture which Balzac draws of Parisian life, from the sordid boarding-house to the luxurious mansions of the gilded aristocracy in the days of the Bourbon Restoration, the author exhibits ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various

... recent times. The prolonged absence of a husband, or it may be of a wife, could be explained by some wild legend of having been "stolen by the fairies," when a more frank avowal dared not be offered. And although "strange tales were told" regarding the paternity of "Brian," in The Lady of the Lake, and although Scott adheres to those legends in his poem, he does not fail to point out in his appended Note that the story could be explained in a much more rational manner. There ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie

... furnishing an indispensable portion of the materials of life, and somehow or other, contributes parentally to the formation of the constitutional character of their joint product, appears far 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 ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... good manuscripts. The "piter" probably denotes fatherly protection, though it may have meant originally physical paternity. On this point cf. W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, lecture ii, and the various stories of the birth ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy



Words linked to "Paternity" :   initiation, paternal, family relationship, innovation, state, relationship, institution, foundation, instauration, origination, kinship, introduction, founding, creation



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