"Prescient" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... overhanging apple-blooms, but immobile as if carved from pearl,—perhaps it was just such a face as hers that fronted Jason, amid the clustering boughs of Colchian rhododendrons, when first he sought old AEetes' prescient daughter,—the maiden face of magical Medea, innocent as yet of murder, sacrilege, fratricide, and plunder,—eloquent of all possibilities of purity and peace, but vaguely adumbrating ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... the dales dwells The prescient Dis, From Yggdrasil's Ash sunk down, Of alfen race, Idun by name, The youngest of Ivaldi's Elder children. She ill brooked Her descent Under the hoar tree's Trunk confined. She would not happy ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... this piece of casual information, as careful housewives store seemingly worthless shreds and fragments for which their prescient minds anticipate a possible use some day. Before I left my old friend, she gave me the address of a respectable old-fashioned inn in the City, which, she said, my uncles used to frequent ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... As Nature fain would typify The sadness of a closing scene, The loss of that which should have been. But, where thy native mountains bare Their foreheads to diviner air, Fit emblem of enduring fame, One lofty summit keeps thy name. For thee the cosmic forces did The rearing of that pyramid, The prescient ages shaping with Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith. Sunrise and sunset lay thereon With hands of light their benison, The stars of midnight pause to set Their jewels in its coronet. And evermore that mountain mass Seems climbing from the shadowy pass To light, as if to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... soughed through it symbolized the "pestilence that walketh in darkness." Lonely calls drifted across the warm lake waters from the dripping jungle like the hollow echoes of lost souls. Rosendo tossed fitfully, and now and then uttered deep groans. The atmosphere was prescient with horror. He struggled to his feet and paced gloomily back and forth along the brow of the hill. The second church stood near, deserted, gloomy, no longer a temple of God, but a charnel house of fear and black superstition. In ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... lay upon his couch at rest Among his officers, he seemed to be Prescient of his fate; for he addressed His friends in verses from an Elegy, And to this line a special accent gave: "The paths of glory lead ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... while, very wistfully, at the Chasseur, where he stood under the Lebanon boughs; then her glance swept bright as a hawk's over the terrace, and lighted with a prescient hatred on the central form of all—a woman's. There were two other great ladies there; but she passed them, and darted with unerring instinct on that proud, fair, patrician head, with its haughty, stag-like carriage and the crown ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... that neither in practice nor in speculative questions were the English thinkers of the time prescient of any coming revolution. They denounced abuses, but they had regarded abuses as removable excrescences on a satisfactory system. They were content to appeal to common sense, and to leave philosophers to wrangle over ultimate results. They might be, and in fact ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... because it enabled Colwyn to identify the tiny yellow fragment adhering to the cock of the pistol. He picked up the wick and observed that one end was cut clean, but the other end was blackened and burnt. At that discovery there entered his mind the first prescient warning of the possibility of some deep plan in which the pistol and the wick played important parts. With his brain seeking for a solution of that possibility, he proceeded to ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... under the despotic and truly lamentable influence of this belief, the Author is bound to admit that they are far more consistent and logical in their notions of Deity than perhaps any other section of Theists, for it cannot properly be denied that the doctrine of an Omnipotent and Prescient God destroys all distinction of virtue and vice, justice and injustice, right and wrong, among men. Let the omnipotency and prescience of a First Cause be granted, the corollary of 'whatever is, is ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... Or from Lord Prig extort the Privy Seal, Or our Field-marshal-Treasurer fix on thee, A legal admiral, to rule the sea, Or Chancery-suits, beneath thy well known reign, Turn to their nap of fifty years again; (Already L—, prescient of his fate, Yields half his woolsack to thy mightier weight;) Oh! Eldon, in whatever sphere thou shine, For opposition sure will ne'er be thine, Though scowls apart the lonely pride of Grey, Though Devonshire proudly flings ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... smiled a little prescient smile. "Skinner," he said, "send in a stenographer. I'm going to ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... great, intelligent, expectant eyes? Suddenly the roar of waves at the farther shore! Look at that head! strong and quiet no more; terror erects the quivering ears; the nostril sinks and contracts with fear; the eye glares and glances from side to side, mad with prescient instinct; the corded veins that twist forkedly from the lip upward swell to the utmost tension of the fine skin; that sweeping mane rises in rough undulations, the forelock is tossed back, the shoulder grows rigid with horror, the chest rises with a long indrawn breath ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... did, but feeling in a contentious mood, prolonged the discussion by leisurely loading and capping a revolver; but, prescient of my argument, Mr. Masthead avoided refutation by hastily adjourning the debate. I sent him a note that evening, filling-in a few of the details of the policy that I had before sketched in outline. Amongst other things I submitted that it would be better for us ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... restore his darkened mind to sanity. And thou, O sleep, subduer of ill, the spirit's repose, thou better part of human life, swift-winged child of Astraca, drowsy brother of cruel death, mixing false with true, prescient of what shall be, yet oftener prescient of sorrow, peace mid our wanderings, haven of man's life, day's respite, night's companion, that comest impartially to king and slave, thou that makest trembling mankind to gain a foretaste of the long night of death; do thou bring ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... accommodate several hundred people, and around the walls were cane seats, deftly constructed and artificially whitened, making, according to an old writer, "very genteel settees or couches." Tired with the stress of mental depression and anxiety as physical effort could not tame him, and vaguely prescient of evil, Otasite had flung himself down on one of these, which was spread with dressed panther-skins, his hands clasped under his head, his scalp-lock of two auburn ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and exasperated. But he had a haunting thought about a lanky colored kid in Jarviston, Minnesota. A guy with a dream—or perhaps a prescient glimpse of his ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites. It is a thing not uncommonly happening to the whale-boats in those swarming seas; the sharks at times apparently following them in the same prescient way that vultures hover over the banners of marching regiments in the east. But these were the first sharks that had been observed by the Pequod since the White Whale had been first descried; and whether it was that Ahab's crew ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... know by instinct how to treat her, and will, perhaps, be often rewarded for some little deed by the pleased surprise with which she will say, "How did you know I wanted it done?" You need not tell her how you knew, but you may be sure she will appreciate you all the more for your prescient thoughtfulness. Her pillows may be flat and hot, her hair uncomfortable, her under sheet wrinkled or untucked from the bottom; all these and a dozen more little things can be arranged so easily, and they conduce so much ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... objects of interest in San Sebastian was a merit. At the end we were satisfied that it was a well-built town with regular blocks in the modern quarter, and not without the charm of picturesqueness which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the older parts. Prescient of the incalculable riches before us, we did not ask much of it, and we got all we asked. I should be grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing else than the two very Spanish experiences I had there. One concerned ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... coin from me? Thou art a man of early date— Of '27 or '28— in Bytown's history, and 'tis said, Though hard to drive, thou may'st be led, That is, if one could just agree In view and argument with thee; When standing in the days of yore At "Pooley's Bridge," thine eye ran o'er The picture with a prescient glance; Experience taught thee that thy chance Was then—thy foresight came To aid thee in life's winning game. Although no silver spoon was in Thy mouth, when to this world of sin Thou camest, thou hast forged from fate A path in life most fortunate; To praise thee I shall ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett
... name of the son of Eylimi, the brother of Hiordis. He ruled over lands, and was of all men wisest and prescient of the future. Sigurd rode alone, and came to Gripir's dwelling. Sigurd was of a distinguished figure. He found a man to address outside the hall, whose name was Geitir. Sigurd ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... a rough plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must stay on a few days, and you must immediately, both of you, meet him at dinner." In addition to which Maud claimed the merit of having by an instinct of pity, of prescient wisdom, done much, two nights before, to prepare that ground. "The poor child, when I was with her there while you were getting your shawl, quite gave herself ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... silent. The prescient spirit of his famous great grandfather, Henry Ware, had descended upon his valiant great grandson. Hope had not gone from him, but it did not enter his mind that they ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... justice by paying homage to the sincerity of his belief in himself and his mission. In that belief he was honestly loyal. His conception of his duty was of the highest, and in its interest he would, and did, make every sacrifice in his power. If some prescient tongue could have told Leichhardt that the end of his quest would be an unknown death, he would have accepted the fate without a murmur, provided ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... ancient writer) with plunder, fire, and slaughter. In time of peace men would believe themselves incapable of the deeds they commit in time of war: "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" as one said of old when before the prescient seer who foresaw in the ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... until he answered Yea. And indeed he durst not otherwise; for they were come into his kingdom. So that then it was fulfilled, as God had long ere foreshowed; and else it could not be; as he himself saith in his gospel: that "not even a sparrow on the ground may fall, without his foreshowing." The prescient Creator wist long before what he of her would have done; for that she should increase the glory of God in this land, lead the king aright from the path of error, bend him and his people together to a better way, and suppress the bad customs which the nation formerly ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... aside, will perhaps always remain a mysterious passage of our political history, nor have we space on the present occasion to attempt to penetrate its motives. Perhaps the monarch, with a sense of the rising sympathies of his people, was prescient of the magic power of youth in touching the heart of a nation. Yet it would not be an unprofitable speculation if for a moment we paused to consider what might have been the consequences to our country if Mr Pitt had been content for a season again to lead ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... is the genuine course, the aim, and end Of prescient reason; all conclusions else Are abject, vain, ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... he had impaired his usefulness and marred his record. Even so there was that which rescued his work from the stigma of failure. He had guarded his people from the tomahawk and the scalping-knife. With prescient eye he had foreseen the imperial greatness of the West. Whatever his shortcomings, they had not been ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... A hundred generations of divines have never been able to ree the riddle; a million will fail. The difficulty is insurmountable to the Theist whose Almighty is perforce Omniscient, and as Omniscient, Prescient. But it disappears when we convert the Person into Law, or a settled order of events; subject, moreover, to certain exceptions fixed and immutable, but at present unknown to man. The difference is essential as that between the penal code with its narrow ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the tear-drop gems her eye. Sweet Sensibility, who dwells inshrined In the fine foldings of the feeling mind; With delicate Mimosa's sense endued, Who shrinks, instinctive, from a hand too rude; Or, like the anagillis, prescient flower, Shuts her soft ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... prescient at a time when the Prince Regent of Prussia was making most melancholy wails over the fall of the Neapolitan King. The Prussian Government issued a formal protest, which Cavour met by observing that Prussia, of all Powers, had the least reason to object, as Piedmont ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... on, Mischief assailed our Spanish comrades' ships; Several ran foul of neighbours; whose new hurts, Being added to their innate clumsiness, Gave hap the upper hand; and in quick course Demoralized the whole; until Villeneuve, Judging that Calder now with Nelson rode, And prescient of unparalleled disaster If he pushed on in so disjoint a trim, Bowed to the inevitable; and thus, perforce, Leaving to other opportunity Brest and the Channel scheme, with vast regret Steered southward ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... we look into another's soul we may enter Paradise. There is an indescribable grace in the air this first day of prescient autumn. The summer has taught me the secret of loneliness and the infinite way of satisfying its desire. To be alone with God we must be intimate with the beauty in the eyes of every face, and yet absolutely detached save from one's family and friend. Life's ideal is to see the end in the beginning, ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... regard should be given unto them; that their communication from the invisible to the visible world was a mere chimera, without any solid foundation. For, first, said he, if dreams were from the agency of any prescient being, the motives would be more direct, and the discoveries more plain, and not by allegories and emblematic fancies, expressing things imperfect and obscure. 2. Since, with the notice of evil, there was not a power given to avoid it, it is ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... Hatfield House and Hampton Court. This single room has been the nucleus round which all subsequent buildings—Chapel and Library and School-Rooms and Boarding-Houses—have gathered; and, as long as it exists, Harrow will be visibly and tangibly connected with its Founder's prescient care. ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... ratified his election. But, when we remember the almost mechanical system of advancement to the higher offices which prevailed at this time, it is equally possible that Metellus's day had come, that the senate was fortunate rather than prescient in its choice of a servant, and that, although the people in their present temper would probably have rejected a suspicious character, they accepted rather than chose Metellus. The existing system did ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... strewn with stars. A tonic north-east wind hummed over the high moors, and seemed to prick old Dapple, prescient of his own straw and rack, to his very best trot. It was a penetrating wind, too; but Doctor Unonius, wrapped in his frieze coat, with the famous Penalune brandy playing about the cockles of his heart, defied its chill. At ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... astonished at the vast mass of fresh water that was pouring into the Gulf of Paria. He correctly divined the cause, and made the deduction that a river with such a volume of water must come from a great distance. His prescient mind showed him the mighty river Orinoco, the wide savannas, and the lofty range of the Andes; but the trammels of the erroneous measurements of astronomers bound them to Asia, and prevented him from ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... which are two in ours; And reason raise o'er instinct as you can, In this 'tis God directs, in that 'tis man. Who taught the nations of the field and wood To shun their poison, and to choose their food? Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand, Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand? Who made the spider parallels design, Sure as Demoivre, without rule or line? Who did the stork, Columbus-like, explore Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before? Who calls ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... there was a tender feeling of comradeship with the proud and passionate boy, and a longing to admit him of their crew. Byron, indeed, said that he was insane; but Shelley, in "Adonais," classes him with Keats among "the inheritors of unfulfilled renown." Lord Houghton testifies that Keats had a prescient sympathy with Chatterton in his early death. He dedicated "Endymion" to his memory. In his epistle "To George Felton Mathew," he asks him to help ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... but one world to conquer, betrayed the majesty of his restless genius when but a youth. Had Aristotle been nigh when, solicited to join in the course, the princely boy replied, that "He would run in no career where kings were not the competitors," the prescient tutor might have recognised in his pupil the future and successful rival of ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... forth smoke. This was the Earth, the real broad-bosomed Mother Earth. What he had left was the Hell upon Earth. What he was going to might be Paradise, but Paul's imagination rightly boggled at the conception of a Paradise more perfect. And, as Paul's prescient wit had conjectured, he was learning many things; the names of trees and wild flowers, the cries of birds, the habits of wayside beasts; what was good for a horse to eat and what was bad; which was the Waggon, and Orion's Belt and the Bunch of Keys in the heavens; ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... stand as the great Magna Charta, which, by the prescient wisdom of our fathers, dedicated in advance of the coming civilization the fertile and beautiful Northwest, with all its possibilities, for all time, to freedom, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... melodies ineffective, and encouraged the use of a great variety of embellishments and the spreading out of harmonies in the form of arpeggios. It is obvious enough that Bach, being one of those monumental geniuses that cast their prescient vision far into the future, refused to be bound by such mechanical limitations. Though he wrote Clavier, he thought organ, which was his true interpretative medium, and so it happens that the greatest sonority and the broadest style that have been developed ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... or by what prescient timidity, it may be difficult to discover, he was true to the British interest, and remained obstinately deaf to the seductive animosity of the Sikh council, which was prone to take advantage of the disasters in Caubul, and to attack the avenging army of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... opened their houses to the general world at an unusually early period. Their entertainments rivalled those of Zenobia, who with unflagging gallantry, her radiant face prescient of triumph, stopped her bright vis-a-vis and her tall footmen in the midst of St. James' Street or Pall Mall, while she rapidly inquired from some friendly passer-by whom she had observed, "Tell me the names of the Radical ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... his head was a very wide hat, the stuff of which I could not see in the darkness. Now and again he would turn and beckon me, and he always went on a little way before. As for me, partly because he beckoned, but more because I felt prescient of a ...
— On Something • H. Belloc |
