"Receptivity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... degree of culture and learning, but associated with a certain vulgarity of thought and conduct. The psychic is essentially impressionable, liable to mental contagion, easily stirred by suggestion. The tendency to instability, to emotional excess, is part of this receptivity which culminates in the state of being "controlled." An untrained psychic who is mastered by his impressions, instead of being their master, may easily be induced to tell lies and give false messages by a visitor who is determined to discover fraud. The same psychic may ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... immorality in either sex is commonly due to a certain inability to appreciate consequences, to visualize the inevitableness of cause and effect, combined sometimes with a sex-hyperesthesia and lack of self-control. Criminality in its worst forms is similarly due to a lack of appreciation of or receptivity to moral ideas. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... explain this world's delightful shows, as the scattered fragments of a poetry, till then but half-understood, might be taken up into the text of a lost epic, recovered at last. At this moment, his unclouded receptivity of soul, grown so steadily through all those years, from experience to experience, was at its height; the house ready for the possible guest; the tablet of the mind white and smooth, for whatsoever divine fingers might choose ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... glimpse of the Cathedral towers, though they loomed scarcely huge enough for our preconceived idea of them. But, as we drew nearer, the great edifice began to assert itself, making us acknowledge it to be larger than our receptivity could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... day merely with the general idea of acquiring information, or of increasing ability, was not in me." "Anything like passive receptivity is foreign to my nature; and there results an unusually small tendency to be affected by others' thoughts. It seems as though the fabric of my conclusions had in all cases to be developed from within. Material which could be taken in and organized so as to form part of a coherent structure, there ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... given by the operator, is found to be analogous to dreaming. Say the authors: "For suggestion to succeed, the subject must have naturally fallen, or been artificially thrown into a state of morbid receptivity: but it is difficult to determine accurately the conditions of suggestionability. However, we may mention two. The first, the mental inertia of the subject: * * * the consciousness is completely empty: an idea is suggested, ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... plant consists in still receptivity, but in what exact and severe outline is this passive life inclosed! In the animal kingdom the strife between Life and Form seems first properly to begin; her first works Nature hides in hard shells, and, where these are laid ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... within. The knowing mind was only a passive recipient of impressions thus imparted to it. It was as wax under the stylus, tabula rasa, clean paper waiting to be written upon. Kant departed from this radically. He declared that all cognition rests upon the union of the mind's activity with its receptivity. The material of thought, or at least some of the materials of thought, must be given us in the multiformity of our perceptions, through what we call experience from the outer world. On the other hand, the formation of ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... receptivity to new ideas and practices, the capacity to adapt and to assimilate the outside elements which are constantly incorporated into the growing, expanding empire ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... may estimate the due appreciation and expression of those objective ideas, which are bound up with the culture of the human race, still the spiritual life of man is built up not so much on a devout and docile receptivity of these ideas as on their free and subjective recognition, which modifies while it accepts, and necessarily passes through a phase ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... immaturity means something positive, not a mere void or lack. It is noteworthy that the terms "capacity" and "potentiality" have a double meaning, one sense being negative, the other positive. Capacity may denote mere receptivity, like the capacity of a quart measure. We may mean by potentiality a merely dormant or quiescent state—a capacity to become something different under external influences. But we also mean by capacity an ability, a power; and by potentiality potency, force. ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... that were quickening my own faculties; for they were in direct contrast with each other; one, the animated debates and attempted logical presentation of a subject with its related facts, as presented at the Worcester Academy; and this new method of passive receptivity, this opening of the inner eye of the mind to receive impressions. It was a long time before I could experiment with any success in this new direction, for I was of an active and impatient temperament, longing to hurry to ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... recently told is lacking in poor Goldsmith, we are requested by Mr. Shorthouse to refrain from all brutal laughter, but, with a shadowy smile and a profound seriousness, to attune ourselves to the proper state of receptivity. Old-fashioned, coarse-minded people may perhaps ask, "But if we are not to laugh at 'Don Quixote,' at whom are we, please, to laugh?"—a question which I, for one, would hardly dare to answer. Only, after r eading the following curious sentence, extracted from a lately ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the "philosophic temper," in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... former, He finds something still to appeal to. There is more or less receptivity to receive the Grace of God, as there is more or less life still in the germ formerly implanted. When He comes to the latter class there is nothing to work on. The foundations must be laid. A receptivity must be brought about, a new life must be inbreathed. In other words, in the conversion of the latter the Holy Spirit must do what He has already done in the former. The one is the conversion of a once regenerate but now lapsed one. The other is ...
— The Way of Salvation in the Lutheran Church • G. H. Gerberding
... time when there was no widespread interest in birds or beasts, unless they had a part to play in hunting. Shakespeare's references to the chase are accurate and suggest first-hand observation, coupled with the keen instincts of the sportsman, and it is easy to see that the extraordinary receptivity of his mind enabled him to take impressions from ...
— William Shakespeare - His Homes and Haunts • Samuel Levy Bensusan
... dear," replies the prodigal, with a generous attempt at candour and conciliation, "all other places shu'rup!" Keene drew this admirably in 1871 (p. 71, Vol. LXI), and Mr. du Maurier most delightfully again in 1883 (p. 14, Vol. LXXXIV.). These and many more examples of unconscious receptivity and reproduction by professional humorists will strike the attentive reader of Punch's pages. He will see how to both Leech and Mr. Ralston occurred the idea of an over-dressed vulgarian in morning clothes protesting in angry dismay against the opera-house officials' suggestion that he ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the limits of each group; but none of the first four are ever in the lists degraded to the second or third group, and none of these are ever promoted beyond their own class. So there were apparently degrees among the Twelve, depending, no doubt, on spiritual receptivity, each man being as close to the Lord, and gifted with as much of the sunshine of His love, as he was ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... on arms, and fastening helmets upon heads; but we have, by our own effort, to clothe ourselves with God's great gift, which is of no use to us, and is in no real sense ours, unless we do. It takes no small effort to keep ourselves in the attitude of dependence and receptivity, without which none of the great gifts of God come to us, and, least of all, the habitual practice of Christian virtues. The soldier who rushed into the fight, leaving armour and arms huddled together on the ground, would soon fall, and God's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... embarrassment, "your mind interests me exceedingly. It is not complex, nor subtle, but remarkably intuitive. You have imagination and humor, and great receptivity." ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... spread with precisely the rapidity of thought, is tardy enough, owing solely to lack of receptivity in its only known medium, namely, the human subject. But—and here is the old-man fact of the ages— Light is inherently dynamic, not static; active, not passive: aggressive, not defensive. Therefore, as twice one is two, the momentum ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of innovating forces in human affairs there has actually grown up a cult of receptivity, a readiness for new ideas, a faith in the probable truth of novelties. Liberalism—I do not, of course, refer in any way to the political party which makes this profession—is essentially anti-traditionalism; ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... technique to see yourself successfully responding to the foot test. When you have actually accomplished test No. 4, you see yourself accomplishing the "hand levitation" test—No. 5. In other words, you use each step to enhance a greater receptivity for the following progressive test. As you couple this approach with posthypnotic suggestions that you will go deeper and deeper into the hypnotic state at a given stimulus, you set into motion a conditioned response mechanism which must ultimately guide you ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... the realization of it; an invention which proposes to substitute for the languishing feeble motion which is involved in the study of books—the kind of books which this author found invented when he came—for the passive, sluggish receptivity of another's thought, the living glow of pursuit and discovery, the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... owing to his self-induced receptivity of mind, redreaming the evil dreams of those who had ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... possess in all Berlin a single friend or relative of her own family, yet she soon felt at home in the capital. She loved my father. Heaven gave her children, and her rare beauty, her winning charm, and the receptivity of her mind quickly opened all hearts to her in circles even wider than her husband's large family connection. The latter included many households whose guests numbered every one whose achievements in science or art, or possession of large wealth, had rendered them ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the sights of the city, he did not come to them with the naive receptivity of Purdy. It was, besides, hard to detach his thoughts from the disagreeable affair that had brought him to Melbourne. And as soon as banks and offices began to take down their shutters, he hurried off to ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... certain for all and at all times. These are such as: the excellence and authority of the highest moral ideal; the obligations of purity, truth, and honesty; love as the true attitude; receptivity toward ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... the masters too much—I mean, from the amateur's view-point; in the case of an artist it depends on the receptivity of his temperament. Velasquez didn't like Raphael, and it was Boucher who warned Fragonard, when he went to Rome, not to take the Italian painters too seriously. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it sometimes ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... can be attributed, in part, to a certain quality of intellectual receptivity, by virtue of which he was enabled to appropriate to himself the genius of two of his predecessors for whom he had a special affinity. His epoch-making work was rendered possible through Shakespeare and Beethoven, who served him as models all ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... semi-cylindrical form of roof after the De Lorme pattern, which he proposes for his house, is entirely practicable, for he himself had "used it at home for a dome, being 120 degrees of an oblong octagon." He was characteristically American in his receptivity to new ideas from any source. A chance item about Eli Whitney of New Haven arrests his attention and forthwith he writes to Madison recommending a "Mr. Whitney at Connecticut, a mechanic of the first order of ingenuity, who invented the ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... of his keen questioning eye, would once more lapse into silence, while the surveyor, loving to do what he could do well, was lured on in his favorite subject by the renewed appearance of receptivity ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... that isolated it could attain the highest civilization, or that if it did touch a high one it could long hold it in a living growth, cut off from the rest of the world. I do not believe it. For no state, however large, is sufficient unto itself. No state is really alive in the highest sense whose receptivity is not equal to its power to contribute to the world with which its destiny is bound up. It is only at its best when it is a part of the vital current of movement, of sympathy, of hope, of enthusiasm of the world at large. There ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... goodness of things and in the future of humanity, just as Victor Hugo and Dumas pere, those other forces of Nature, did, at about the same time. A soul foreign to her own had entered into her, and it was the romantic soul. With the magnificent power of receptivity which she possessed, George Sand welcomed all the winds which came to her from the four quarters of romanticism. She sent them back with unheard-of fulness, sonorous depth and wealth of orchestration. From that time forth a woman's voice could be heard, added to all the ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... this unexpected mood of receptivity, however unwilling, came a sharp corrective in the person of the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... trouble, and in such cases was sure to give overweight, or even to let the heavy penny or two fall accidentally into the purchase. His donkey had something the same expression of patient good-humored receptivity. The children climbed over the barrow and even on the donkey's back, and though Widgeon made great feint of driving them off with a very stubby whip, they knew well that it would always just miss them, ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... Before we proceed to the question of government, we must nicely discriminate the boundaries of sense, understanding, and reason. Sense is a receptivity - ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... strange preface, if only some small coin was to follow. It kindled some flicker of hope of he knew not what in the beggar. He expected to receive 'something' from them, and, no doubt, was asking himself what. Expectation and receptivity were being stirred in him, though he could not divine what was coming. We have no right to assume that his state of mind was operative in fitting him to be cured, nor to call his attitude 'faith,' but still he was lifted ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... follow this native bias is the first rule, the second is concentration.—To the bias of the individual mind must be added the most catholic receptivity for the genius ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of children at school. Children of even the same family manifest different degrees of receptivity to certain studies. Some "take to" one thing, and some to another. Some find arithmetic so easy that they almost absorb it intuitively, while grammar is a hard task for them; while their brothers and sisters find the exact reverse ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... with small, Omniscience with intelligency, God With man—the thunder glow from pole to pole Abolishing, a blissful moment-space, Great cloud alike and small cloud, in one fire— As sure to ebb as sure again to flow When the new receptivity ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... missed their imagined destiny. And thus, though naturally of a gentle and pleasant disposition, he grew to be not so tenderly regarded by his acquaintances as it is the lot of some of those persons to be. The winning and sanguine receptivity of his early life developed by degrees a moody nervousness, and when not picturing prospects drawn from baseless hope he was the victim of indescribable depression. The practical issue of such a condition was improvidence, ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... and readier to be musical than you think. I can at any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the sunlight striking him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you have an image of the passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold it good to aim at, if at the same time I may keep my characters at blood-heat. I shoot my arrows at a mark that is pretty certain to return them to me. And as to perfect success, I should ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... essentially anthropocentric, and involve, when used in metaphysics, an attempt, however veiled, to legislate for the universe on the basis of the present desires of men. In this way they interfere with that receptivity to fact which is the essence of the scientific attitude towards the world. To regard ethical notions as a key to the understanding of the world is essentially pre-Copernican. It is to make man, with the hopes and ideals which he ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... about it was that he did not know very clearly which plays were unpleasant and which were pleasant. "Pleasant" is a word which is almost unmeaning to Bernard Shaw. Except, as I suppose, in music (where I cannot follow him), relish and receptivity are things that simply do not appear. He has the best of tongues and the worst of palates. With the possible exception of Mrs. Warren's Profession (which was at least unpleasant in the sense of being forbidden) I can see no particular reason why ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... loiterers; all that drifting and iridescent scum of life which variegates the surface above the depths. Everywhere he was accepted without question, for his old experience on the hoof had given him the uncoded password which loosens the speech of furtive men and wise. A receptivity, sensitized to a high degree by the inspiration of new adventure, absorbed these impressions. The faithful pocket-ledger was filling rapidly with notes and phrases, brisk and trenchant, set down with no specific purpose; almost mechanically, in fact, but destined to future uses. Mallory, himself ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... consistent, shall the man be removed, shall he change his habits, shall the law regarding instruction in hygiene be changed, or shall other provision be made for bringing child and essential facts together in a way that will not dull the child's receptivity? ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... artist's business to catch the suggestion and make it his own. For nature seldom works out her own suggestions. The effect as nature gives it is either not complete, or is so evanescent as to be uncopyable. But the habit of constant receptivity on the part of the artist makes nature an infinite ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst
... life of the poor were in store for me, I should at least know something at first hand and have the solace of daily activity. I had confidence that although life itself might contain many difficulties, the period of mere passive receptivity had come to an end, and I had at last finished with the ever-lasting "preparation for life," however ill-prepared I ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... the greatest possible mutability and extensiveness. Since personality is permanence in change, the perfection of this faculty, which must be opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action (autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under manifold aspects, the more it is movable and offers surfaces to phaenomena, the larger is the part of the world seized upon by man, and the more virtualities he develops in himself. Again, in proportion as man gains strength and depth, and depth and reason gain ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... thought, and in the sub-conscious depths of every man's feeling, to enlighten our understanding and purify our desires. To every man he gives all that he can receive of light and power. To many his gifts are but meagre, because their capacities are small and their receptivity is limited; but there are always in the world open minds and docile tempers, to whom he imparts his larger gifts. Thus we have the order of prophets and inspired men, whose words are full of light and leading. In the Bible we have a record of the messages given by such men ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... that of love. Yet there is no sphere which in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their deepest impulses—their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their emotional receptivity—were used, with no conscious and deliberate Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the asceticism of Christianity, ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... wall-architecture perhaps excelled their instructors. Etruscan art is a remarkable evidence of accomplishments mechanically acquired and mechanically retained, but it is, as little as the Chinese, an evidence even of genial receptivity. As scholars have long since desisted from the attempt to derive Greek art from that of the Etruscans, so they must, with whatever reluctance, make up their minds to transfer the Etruscans from the first to the lowest place in the history ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... that, where the mind does not have exercise for its body, but relics simply on idle cessation for its reinforcement, it will get too much lymph. Work is worship; but work without rest is idolatry. And rest is not, as some seem to think, a swoon, a slumber; it is an active receptivity, a masterly inactivity, which alone can deserve the fine name of Rest. Such, we believe, our favorite game secures better than all others. Besides this direct use, one who loves it finds many other incidental uses starting up about it,—such as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... as I stood, trembling and striving not to be tense, which destroys the receptivity, there came thrilling round and round my spiritual essence the throb of the Master-Word, beating steadily in the night, as doth that marvellous sound. And then, with all that was sweet in my spirit, I called with my brain elements: "Mirdath! ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... in the country, my receptivity and hospitality of consciousness, became in the town my misery ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... is the analysis of our second type or element of music. The successful recognition of this depends not only upon the susceptibility of the hearer to delicate shades of sensation, but also upon the receptivity of the hearer and his power to accept freely and unrestrictedly the mood shadowed forth by the composer. Such music cannot be looked upon objectively. To those who would analyze it in such a manner it must remain an unknown language; its potency depends entirely ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... us to watch for a little display of Mancji power. They ran out some kind of antenna. I'm getting a loud static at the top of my short wave receptivity." ...
— Greylorn • John Keith Laumer
... were in 1830, when I first startled them with that doctrine." This sentence refers to the theory elaborated in my father's geological observations on South America (1846), but the gradual change in receptivity of the geological mind must have been favourable to all his geological work. Nevertheless, Lyell seems at first not to have expected any ready acceptance of the Coral theory; thus he wrote to my father in 1837:—"I could think of nothing for days after your lesson ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... to be so I cannot question; but what you term 'open-mindedness'—implying a state of receptivity—is in fact an utter rejection of all established spiritual truths. The open-minded and the atheistical draw dangerously closer day by day. The only thing of which they are sure is that they are sure of nothing and ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... problem of Study is not to be approached by any high priori road; in other words, by setting out from abstract principles as to the nature of the mind's receptivity and the operation of book-reading upon that receptivity. A humbler line of approach will ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... sulphur [Symbol: Sulphur] like a crust and hinder it from its free radiation. Sulphur is to be regarded as a symbol of the expansive power, as individual initiative, as will. Mercury stands opposite to it as woman does to man, as that which goes to the subject from without, or as absolute receptivity. Salt is midway between both; in it the equilibrium between [Symbol: Sulphur] and [Symbol: Mercury] is found. It is a symbol of what appears as the stable being of man. In the first degree the purification of the salt is worked ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... natural receptivity, I figure that, as flambeaux banish eve, My sombre image, warped by insidious heave Of those less forthright, must ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... of slightly exalted life. Food alone is enough for one person, perhaps,—talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now just where it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... movement never troubled, in all its repose never stagnating; and on the other side is the empty aridity of our poor weak natures. Faith opens these to the influx of that great sea, and 'according to our faith,' in the exact measure of our receptivity, does it enter our hearts. In itself the gift is boundless. It has no limit except the infinite fulness of the power which worketh in us. But in reference to our possession it is bounded by our capacity, and though that capacity enlarges by the very fact of being filled, and so every moment becomes ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... previous more distinct prophecies of Isaiah were certainly known and acknowledged by them. We must never forget that it is from above that each of the prophets received his share of the prophetic spirit, and that this depended partly upon the measure of his receptivity, which might have been greater with the former than with the latter prophets,—and, partly, upon the wants and capacities of those for ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... people here [in Munich] have an extraordinary receptivity for music, which is much cultivated. But it appears to me that everything makes an impression and that ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... thinking logically and distinguishing the true from the false, the faculty of combining aesthetic thoughts and sensations, all constitute human values which are much superior to the faculty of rapid assimilation or receptivity, and a good memory for ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... existence of this difference by describing the receptivity and all-comprehensiveness of Hinduism. "It has something to offer which is suited to all minds, its very strength lies in its infinite adaptability to the infinite diversity of human characters and human tendencies. It has its highly spiritual and abstract side, suited ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... wistful falls drooping softly as a flower, seemed wonderful to her as an angel's song. She and the bird, sheltered under the grey-silver feathers of the trees, lived their great moments of creation and receptivity until suddenly there was a sharp noise of hoofs, the song snapped, the willow was untenanted, and Reddin's horse ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... services. If his aim be happiness, the more of a man he is, the larger is his capacity of enjoyment; for as a dog gets more enjoyment out of life than a zooephyte, and a man than a dog, so does the fully and symmetrically developed man exceed in receptivity of happiness him whose nature is imperfectly or abnormally developed. Now it is through the thorough training and faithful exercise of his moral faculties and powers that man is most capable of influence, best fitted for usefulness, and endowed ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... the pleasure of reading, and have no sinister wish to transform themselves by that process into what are called "cultivated persons." The compiler feels that any one who succeeds in reading, with reasonable receptivity, the books in this list, must become, at the end, a person with whom it would be a delight to share that most classic of all pleasurable arts—the ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... ingenuity, was a surprise, and it attracted her, as it would have attracted a French-woman of the eighteenth century. Her maimed life had made her perforce an 'intellectual'; and in these letters, the man's natural poetry and force stirred her enthusiasm. Hence a new interest and receptivity in her, quickened by many small and natural incidents—books lent and discussed, meetings in picture-galleries, conversations in her father's house, and throughout it that tempting, dangerous pleasure of 'doing good,' that leads astray so ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a scholar, was a man of wide and varied reading. When it is further considered that only a fraction of what any author reads leaves a mark that can be identified on what he writes, we shall readily allow that in the matter of study Shakespeare showed an activity and receptivity of mind that harmonizes with the impression received from ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... this book will find in the succeeding portions thereof, from time to time, certain general instructions regarding the cultivation of psychic receptivity and sensitiveness. These general instructions are also applicable to the cultivation of telepathic power, and may be properly applied to that end. There is really but one general principle involved in all the many forms of psychic receptivity, namely that of (1) shutting the senses to ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... ignorant class of Southerners. They needed no preparation for the bloody work perpetrated by those lawless organizations, those more cruel than Italian brigands. They instinctively hate the black man; because the condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and receptivity of useful knowledge, place him a few pegs higher than themselves in the social scale. So these degraded white men, the very substratum of Southern population, were ready tools in the hands of the organized chivalrous brigands (as they had been of the slave oligarch), ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... of mind, and an uncommon receptivity and docility, and soon became to all that got acquainted with her a dear and precious object. To declaim passages from her Brother's Poems was her greatest joy; she did her recitation well; and her Swabian accent and naivety of manner gave her ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... was strange with emotion, pale but brilliant-eyed, his long features bending to her. She was utter receptivity. Neither knew until afterward how rare and perfect was ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... consciousness upwards. She can obtain a hand even over her sex receptivity. She can divert even the electric spasm of coition into her upper consciousness: it was the trick which the snake and the apple between them taught her. The snake, whose consciousness is only dynamic, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... always looked well. In winter, wearing a tweed coat-and-skirt and a small hat of black fur pulled over her eager, palpitant face, she seemed to move down the street in a drifting motion of suspense and exceeding sensitive receptivity. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... anything like it," said Joe, sinking back in his chair. "Of course we know that the human body has electrical capacity and that operators sometimes have to use metal shields to protect the tube from the influence of the hand. And in our loop aerial at Ocean Point you noticed that the receptivity of the tube was modified when we touched it with ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... not the same as a logical one. It does not say simply that as a matter of fact it always does please—-even if we add the limitation those who for, as we know, our varying mood and state of receptivity make a profound difference in the fulness of the aesthetic enjoyment. It is a "judgment of value'' which claims for the rose aesthetic rank as an object properly qualified to please contemplative subjects. This value, it is plain, is relative to conscious subjects; yet ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Original Thought Memory Reason Receptivity in Training Efficiency in Execution Nervous Energy Keenness of the Senses Use of ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... principles can have but imperfect application because of local limitations. The failure of a particular field of grain does not disprove the universal principle of vegetable growth. The imperfection of the healer, and the lack of receptivity in the patient, are local limitations. There are sudden cures, but as a rule recovery will be in the nature of a progressive growth. Lack of immediate results often causes disappointment, and leads to an abandonment of the treatment before the seed has had time to take root. The healer ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... universality, because it is so distinctly French,—a familiar paradox in literature. He was French in his feeling for the social unit, in his keen receptivity to ideas, in his belief in Church and State as the social organisms through which man could best work out his salvation. We find him teaching that humanity, in terms of Gallic temperament, and ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... of De Brosses' book was calculated to make a telling appeal to the French nation, with their love of eclat and their ready receptivity. It was made, too, in the age of Voltaire, when the great man was living at Lausanne; and when, too, another of equally enduring fame, Edward Gibbon, was, in the same neighbourhood, polishing those balanced periods in which he has related the degeneracy of the successors of the Caesars. It was ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... think, should be kept independent of the regular school exercises. Children should be encouraged to read for the pure delight of it. The attitude of the child toward his books should be that of unconscious receptivity. The great works of the imagination ought to become a part of his life, as they were once of the very substance of the men who wrote them. It is true, the more sensitive and imaginative the mind is that receives the thought-pictures and images of literature, the more nicely the finest lines ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... they have fulfilled Keats' aspiration, they do live a life in which the emphasis lies on sensation rather than on thought: for the state which he then struggled to describe was that ideal state of pure receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the essence of things, of which all artists have a share, and which a few great mystics appear to have possessed—not indeed in its entirety, but to an extent which made them, as they say, ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... matter is only an effect produced upon our senses by the motion of atoms,—that is to say, by our unceasing receptivity to sensations. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... immortal parts she has left undeveloped or debased, as we find them here; and having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, let me now suggest that old men have a kind of susceptibility to moral impressions, and even (up to an advanced period) a receptivity of truth, which often appears to come to them after the active time of life is past. The Greenwich pensioners might prove better subjects for true education now than in their school-boy days; but then where is the Normal School that could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... the afternoon, and the toil of afternoon into the peace of evening. I earnestly desire to grow old gracefully; to know when to stop, when to slip into a wise and kindly passivity, with sympathy for those who are in the forefront of the race. And yet if one does not practise wonder and receptivity and hope, one cannot expect them to come suddenly and swiftly to one's call. There comes a day when a man ought to be able to see that his best work is behind him, that his active influence is on the wane, that he is losing his hold on the machine. There ought to come a patient, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Rockport, Indiana, conducted for four seasons in co-operation with Mr. J. F. Wilkinson. There the Busseron was found to be a protandrous variety, shedding most of its pollen, and in some years all of it, before the period of receptivity of its pistillate flowers. "With Butterick ... the order was reversed, as the period of receptivity began first," and it was classified, therefore, as regularly protogynous. "... Furthermore, upon close observation it has been found," he said, that trees of the Butterick ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... un homme ne vaut rien. The rash dictum had certainly no application to himself. It is true that, under the strain of the long tropical years, his bodily health declined as he approached the age of sixty. But his mental activity, his marvellous receptivity, were not merely maintained, but seemed steadily to advance. He continued to be consumed by that lust for knowledge, libido sciendi, which he admired in the ancient Greeks. When the physicians forbade him, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... risky venture in stocks. These affairs were conducted with an air of great secrecy in violent whisperings, emphasized by blows of the fist upon the back of the chair. The favored patients were deftly informed of "a good thing," the dentist taking advantage of the one inevitable moment of receptivity for his thrifty promotions. The schemes, it must be said, had never come to much. If Dr. Leonard had survived without any marked loss a dozen years of venturing, he might be said to have succeeded. He had no time for other games; this was his poker. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... a grim smile, "have no receptivity. They must originate, or they are naught. Parents and children—they are all the same. I am convinced that there is no scholarship to be established here. It has been tried and the attempt has failed a hundred times. It's not in the nature of things. Get on the good ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... filled. He sent for books about the great composers; descriptions of the classics; how the themes were developed through different instruments. Then he wanted the history of all music; and for weeks his receptivity never faltered. No neophyte ever brought a purer devotion to the masters. His first loves—the Andante in F, the three movements of the Kreutzer Sonata, a prayer from Otello, the Twelfth Rhapsody, ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... progression, the increase of difficulty suits the increase in the child's power of comprehension and receptivity. He is being developed thus far, not by rapid changes in material or greater exercise in number, but by practice with differing forms, each one bringing with it new knowledge and experience. The organs of perception are being ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... sketch, not a picture finished in detail; and that the expressed or implied similitude in parabolic teaching cannot logically and consistently be carried beyond the limits of the illustrative story. In the parable we are considering, the Teacher depicted the varied grades of spiritual receptivity existing among men, and characterized with incisive brevity each of the specified grades. He neither said nor intimated that the hard-baked soil of the wayside might be plowed, harrowed, fertilized, and so be rendered productive; nor that the stony impediment to growth might ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... more certain would be the doctor's success, and the clergyman's conversion of sinners. And if only the pulpit would encourage faith in God in this direction, and faith in Mind over all other influences governing the receptivity of the body, theology would teach man [15] as David taught: "Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the most High thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... as it is in mathematics. But to many this appears too much like a reversion to the viewpoint of the mediaeval convent schools which classed music in the quadrivium along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Neither the creative power nor the aesthetic receptivity is considered in such courses as these, and the spirit of music revolts against this confinement and gives ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the problem. Beth did humorous things at this time, but she had no sense of humour; she was merely experimenting. Her big eyes looked out of an impassive face solemnly; no one suspected the phenomenal receptivity which that stolid mask concealed, and, because the alphabet did not interest her, they formed a poor opinion of her intellect. The truth was that she had no use for letters or figures. The books of nature and of life were spread out before her, and she was conning ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... informed and alert to his tasks, the other to float his soul off its sandbars on the rising tide of spiritual reassurance and power. Every normal man needs two attitudes: one when he goes into action determined to do his work and to do it well, and the other when he subdues his spirit to receptivity and with ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... intermingled. This is our real and self-conscious soul, the thing in us which says, "I am I," of which the physical body is only one expression, and of which all the bodily senses are only one gateway of receptivity. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of his years had crept upon him and was deepening; and he felt his youth slowly withering under their fallen leaves. With more education, and perhaps more receptivity than most farmers, he had married a woman he fervently loved, whose rarely truthful nature, to which she had striven to keep true, had developed the delicate flower of moral and social refinement; and her influence upon him had been of the eternal sort. While many of their neighbors were vying with ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... things especially which it is necessary for us to keep continually in view. The first is that the organism contains within itself only one-half of what is essential to life; the second is that the other half is contained in the Environment; the third, that the condition of receptivity is simple union between the organism ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... as a dead wall to stem the wild devastating flow of Asiatic barbarism upon European civilization. The virtue of the Slavonic race is thus first of all passivity; and as the virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow, so the virtue of the Russian is first of all passive receptivity. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... the actual, from the child's poetic interpretation of life to life's practical version of itself, is too gradual to be noticed while the process is going on. It is only in the retrospect we see the change. There is still, for yet another stage, the same and even greater receptivity, - delight in new experiences, in gratified curiosity, in sensuous enjoyment, in the exercise of growing faculties. But the belief in the impossible and the bliss of ignorance are seen, when looking back, to have assumed almost ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... secret, indispensable to us all. The beloved maiden attracts us, as a ray of light attracts the wanderer in the dark. Yet we know that every creature of her kind can shed this radiance about her, and that it is simply our own accidental receptivity that, among so many thousands, gives to this one creature in particular her ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the third act that the audience became, for her, anything but a colloid mass—something that you squeezed and thumped and worked as you did clay, to get into a properly plastic condition of receptivity, so that the jokes, the songs, the dances, even the spindling little shafts of romance that you shot out into it, could be felt to dig in and take hold. It never occurred to her to think of it with a plural pronoun; it was "it" simply, an ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... production of quasi-material results; and his success in doing this will be gauged in due course by an "examination,"—a periodic test which is designed to measure, not the degree of growth which the child has made, but the industry of the teacher as indicated by the receptivity ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... the civilized uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife's attitude implied the same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more and more into Flamel's intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing preference for the kind of people who have their thinking done ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. And having said thus much, I think that I may let the matter of ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... leverage. He had the intelligence to perceive that these people had no pressing wants which they looked to him to supply, that they were apparently impervious to any message he could deliver. His power to deliver a message was vitiated by this utter absence of receptivity. He was, and realized that he was, as superfluous in Lone Moose as sterling silver and cut glass in a house where there is neither food ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Yet some day it will be considered clear as crystal. It was not the "nature" of man which shrank from it, but his "errors." These errors not only make man incapable of production, but are in themselves hostile to receptivity. Thus it often happens that the pioneers of salvation are persecuted by a sort of unconscious ingratitude, which is the fruit of ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... all mental exertion. As long as it was certain that a composer would present just so many themes in a prescribed order and treated in the routine fashion, listening to music was a comparatively easy task. Since Berlioz, music has made ever greater demands on the hearer; who only when his receptivity is of an equal degree of cultivation with the creative power of the composer, can grasp the full meaning of the music. The first step, therefore, toward an appreciation of Berlioz is to recognize the peculiar, ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... share of genius which belongs to the man who can take infinite pains. Add to this a beautiful personal character, and an almost perfect receptivity. Add again the power of sympathetic realisation in a purely literary sense, and you have the man. Let me make my last addition clear. It is a common habit of his to think as his literary favourites would have thought He could ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... by having been the speech of men who have made their mark in the world's history. The islands of Indonesia have never startled the Eastern world with an Akbar, or charmed it with a Hafiz or a Chand. Receptivity, not originality, is the characteristic of the Malay races. But the importance of Malay, when the traveller heads eastward from the Bay of Bengal, has been recognised by Europeans since the sixteenth century, when Magellan's ...
— A Manual of the Malay language - With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay • William Edward Maxwell
... it myself! I saw you kneeling beside it. I helped to sort it, afterwards. The actual heap on the floor was the broken chair, Ronnie mixed up with it; and, on top of both, that unholy Infant, whose precocious receptivity is responsible for the entire business. I exonerate the Florentine chair; I exonerate poor Ronnie. I shall always maintain that that confounded 'cello worked the whole show, out ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay |
