"Spontaneity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her life. That fatal supper had wrecked the peace of their little home. Or perhaps it had merely precipitated the wreck. Sooner or later, he told himself, she was bound to have wearied of the dullness of her lot. At any rate, dating from shortly after that disturbing night, a lack of ease and spontaneity seemed to creep into their relations. A blight ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... by forgery could not have failed to notice this; the consequence is that if we were to have a forgery, we should have a very close reproduction of this style of expression, and it would show itself to be forgery, by being without the boldness, spontaneity and novelty of the original; it would be timid, forced, and elaborately close and cramped. Now just this copying of a fabricator is what we find in the Annals. Exactly corresponding, to Tacitus's "wounds" instead of "the wounded," is seeing blood streaming in families," ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid law of mine and thine must now restore ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... sensation as Thatcher appeared, moving slowly down the crowded main aisle to join the delegation of his county. His friends had planned a demonstration for his entrance, and in calling it an ovation the newspapers hardly magnified its apparent spontaneity and volume. The man who had undertaken the herculean task of driving Morton Bassett out of politics was entitled to consideration, and his appearance undoubtedly interrupted the business of the convention for fully five minutes. Thatcher ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... restraint and lack of spontaneity about their conversation of which both were acutely conscious. The note was forced, as though from too great an effort to strike the right key. A curious psychological change had swept over both since they ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... Drum Taps, with their Sequel. The peculiar title, Leaves of Grass, has become almost inseparable from the name of Whitman; it seems to express with some aptness the simplicity, universality, and spontaneity of the poems to which it is applied. Songs before Parting may indicate that these compositions close Whitman's poetic roll. Drum Taps are, of course, songs of the Civil War, and their Sequel is mainly on the same theme: the chief poem in this last section being the ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... peculiar gift of writing a novel as if he were telling you a story viva voce and interesting you in it, not only by reason of its plot, but also by his way of narrating it. There is a spontaneity about his style which to the Baron is most refreshing: it is like listening to two clever men, one of whom is telling the story, and the other is enlivening it with his sharp and appropriate comments, always dropped in parenthetically. Mr. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... fond of sport in every way, but the aristocrats lack sporting spontaneity; they like it, or pretend to like it, because it is the fashion, and they take up one sport after another as it becomes the fad. That this is true can be shown by comparing the Englishman and the American ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... had spent with him he had missed the spontaneity he had known in the little child, and, without being able to analyze it, felt that something was wanting in the girl. She had been sweet and winning, yet under it all had been a manner quite incomprehensible to him, as though she did not feel quite sure ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... in August, 1861, and the first number of "Our Mutual Friend" appeared in May, 1864. This was an unusual interval, but the great writer's faculty of invention was beginning to lose its fresh spring and spontaneity. And besides he had not been idle. Though writing no novel, he had been busy enough with readings, and his work on All the Year Round. He had also written a short, but very graceful paper[30] on Thackeray, whose death, on the Christmas Eve of 1863, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... Howard's thoroness as a workman and his masterly sense of proportion, makes such rewritings the more probable. The effect, however, of his rewriting, wherever it may have been, and the slow additions of his daily contributions, was that of spontaneity. ...
— The Autobiography of a Play - Papers on Play-Making, II • Bronson Howard
... story of a mind, of a spirit, ever seeking, ever striving, and pressing onward and upward to new truth and light. Her works are the mirror of this progress. In reviewing them, the first point that strikes us is the precocity, or rather the spontaneity, of her poetic gift. She was a born singer; poetry was her natural language, and to write was less effort than to speak, for she was a shy, sensitive child, with strange reserves and reticences, not easily putting herself "en rapport" with those around her. Books were ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... to consider how much originality and spontaneity emanate from these various individuals who, on the preceding evening, did not even know each other, and who are now, for several days, condemned to lead a life of extreme intimacy, jointly defying the anger of the ocean, ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... sat before the fire at night—took in the tawdry surroundings of his lodging-house room with nothing of that apathy of resignation to his personal [Greek: ananke] which of all moods is to Fortune, the goddess of spontaneity, the most antipathetic. Indeed, he felt his wit, like Romeo's, to be of cheveril; and his conviction that it needed only the pull of circumstance to stretch it "from an inch narrow to an ell broad" expressed but the very wooing quality of a ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... lacked her usual spontaneity. And she felt, if she did not explain, the wideness of her eyes. Her father did not look as if anything worried him. It was a way of his, however, not to show stress or worry. Lenore ate in silence until Rose left the dining-room, ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... origin of reflection is not to be found in what may be called the mythical creation of nature, which is the necessary result of the spontaneity of the intelligence, both in man and animals; it is developed after long duration of barbarism and ignorance. M'Lennan and others have shown how the era of reflection and hypothesis begins in the evolution of human intelligence. Sekesa, an intelligent Kaffir, said to Arbrousset,[13] ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... members of the class suffered no such uncertainty. They voted solidly for spontaneity in a self which ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... and, though he is perfectly right in every reason which he gives for setting Erechtheus above Atalanta in Calydon, the fact remains that there is something in the latter which is not, in anything like the same degree, in the former: a certain spontaneity, a prodigal wealth of inspiration. In exactly the same way, while the ode on Athens and the ode on the Armada are alike magnificent as achievements, there is no more likelihood of Swinburne going down to posterity as the writer of those two splendid poems than there is of Coleridge, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... every form of the national character, were gratefully exhibited in reunions, of which he was the presiding genius, and to which his American friends were admitted with fraternal cordiality. It was then that his clear and strong mind often displayed itself with the spontaneity of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... dramatic happen. At that moment a thin voice in the gallery exclaimed, "Hurrah for Blaine!" Instantly the audience was on fire. The burst of applause brought out by Smith's opening reference to the "never vanquished hero of Appomattox" had been disappointing because it lacked spontaneity and enthusiasm, but the sound of the magic word "Blaine," like a spark flying to powder, threw the galleries into a flame of cheering which was obstinate in dying out. Conkling, in closing the debate ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... he insisted on it; I will not say that he affected minute daily acts of devotion, for that word would not accord with the spontaneity of his nature; but he accented his demonstrations, he spoke constantly of his religion. Without any intention to wrong the serious side of his religious feelings, it seemed to be a bravado put on for the incredulous, a toy which he converted into ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... failure in a project or an action. It is another aspect of the same idiosyncrasy. "The point I have reached seems to be explained by a too restless search for perfection, by the abuse of the critical faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first thoughts, first words. Confidence and spontaneity of life are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can no longer act." For abuse of the critical faculty brings with it its natural consequences—timidity of soul, paralysis of the will, complete self-distrust. "To ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... reality the first of a series of English writers who combined the traditions of regular pastoral with the wayward graces of native inspiration. It is true that in Spenser the natural pastoral impulse has lost the spontaneity of the earlier examples, and has passed into the realm of conscious and deliberate art; but it is none the less there, modifying the conventional form. The individual debts owed by Spenser to earlier ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... parliamentary discussion, which Colonel Benton likened to "shooting on the wing." So deficient is Mr. Schurz in this talent, that he has been known to use a manuscript in an after-dinner response, a style of speech whose chief merit consists in its spontaneity, with apt reference to incidents which ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... condescension to literature of which we speak is that it has that quality of spontaneity that does not presuppose either a capacity or a call. There is no mystery about the craft. One resolves to write a book, as he might to take a journey or to practice on the piano, and the thing is done. Everybody can write, at least everybody ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a singularly enthusiastic theater party, oblivious of surroundings, and lost in wonder at the strange sights. Billy's laugh rang out frequently, with refreshing spontaneity. Their enjoyment was so evident that Redding was surprised, at the close of the first act, to see them put on their wraps and march solemnly out of the theater. He hastened to the lobby, and touched ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... Abstaining from speech marks him who is obeying the spontaneity of his nature. A violent wind does not last for a whole morning; a sudden rain does not last for the whole day. To whom is it that these (two) things are owing? To Heaven and Earth. If Heaven and Earth cannot make such (spasmodic) actings last long, ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... romantic belief. The nineteenth century was an age of romance as certainly as the Middle Ages was an age of reason. Mediaevals liked to have everything defined and defensible; the modern world prefers to run some risks for the sake of spontaneity and diversity. Consequently the modern world is full of a phenomenon peculiar to itself—I mean the spectacle of small or originally small things swollen to enormous size and power. The modern world is like a world in which toadstools should be as big as trees, and ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... continued. "They have the mark of spontaneity; of the first disgust of one grasping the fact ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... easy to shake our heads over the self-importance of the nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a friend, "You will ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... companions and in his play he is a veritable searchlight laying bare those manly and ante-professional qualities which must underlie an efficient ministry. Later life, indeed, wears the mask, praises dry sermons, smiles when bored, and takes careful precautions against spontaneity and the indiscretions of unvarnished truth; but the boy among his fellows and on his own ground represents the normal and unfettered reaction of the human heart to a given personality. The minister may be profoundly benefited by knowing and heeding the frank estimate of a "bunch" ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... of the consciousness. The first is the faculty of receptivity of impressions; the second, the faculty of cognition of an object by means of these impressions or representations, this second power being sometimes styled spontaneity of concepts. By the first, an object is given to us; by the second it is thought of in the mind. Thus intuition and concepts constitute the elements of our entire knowledge, for neither intuition without concepts, nor concepts without intuition, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... deal with. Upright and perfectly sincere herself, she had no sympathy with or commiseration for any lack of principle or any display of selfishness in others. A little cold, a little reserved, a little lacking in spontaneity, though always correct and always generous in her gifts and often in her acts, her whole nature would rise at any evidence of meanness or ingratitude, and though she said little, you would feel her disapprobation ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... scientific people. Gazen, who enquired into the matter, was told by Otare, himself an artist, by the way, that science in their opinion had a tendency to destroy the illusion of Nature and impair the finer sentiments and spontaneity of the soul; hence they left the systematic study of it to the few who possess a decided bias for it. As a rule they are content ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... only the interned who had food to spare. The Ruhlebenites gave, they had the facts before them. And "the people of Spandau turned out in force to wish us 'Godspeed' on our departure for home; and the send-off they gave us was astonishing in its enthusiasm, arresting in its spontaneity, and ...
— The Better Germany in War Time - Being some Facts towards Fellowship • Harold Picton
... unless you like it. I think you are quick, receptive, and polite—all that is to the good. But are you serious? I found in you a very quick perception, and you held up a flattering mirror with great spontaneity to my mind and heart—that was probably why I liked you so much. But I don't want people here to reflect me or anyone else. The whole point of my scheme is independence, with just enough discipline to keep things together, like the hem ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... ambiguity, and that Panurge, with equal obstinacy and ingenuity, invariably twists the oracles according to his own wishes. But what no reader, who came fresh to Rabelais and fasting from criticism on him, could anticipate, is the astonishing spontaneity of the various dealings with the same problem, the zest and vividness of the whole thing, and the unceasing shower of satire on everything human—general, professional, and individual—which is kept up throughout. There is ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... church is a confession of failure; while to urge that one has but to ask for the key to be able to enter a church is no true reply, since hospitality, whether to the body or the soul, loses in sweetness and effect as it loses in spontaneity. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... minds the conception of a definite order of the universe—which is embodied in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the laws of Nature—and to narrow the range and loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other than such as arise out of that ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... often some virtue in spontaneity which is difficult to define; perhaps it bears more convincing witness to the artist's integrity than slower and longer labours, from which it is difficult to ward all duplicity of intention. The finishing-touch is ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... unhappy, he spoke slowly, without the spontaneity and force that he had used before; once he made a long pause and you could feel throughout the Chapel a wave of nervous apprehension, as though every one were waiting to see whether he would fight his way through ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... self-expression, rests upon the patent fallacy of assigning certain fixed and finite limits to human interest and activity, so that any encroachment from the side of routine lessens the absolute scope of human spontaneity and interest. If, as there is reason to believe, human desires and the activities which are engaged in satisfying them are boundless, the assumption that an increase in the absolute amount of state-control or routine-work implies a diminution of the field for individual ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... or statute, for the regulation of matters between the government and the several tribes. So far as the law is concerned, complete anarchy exists in Indian affairs; and nothing but the singular homogeneity of Indian communities, and the almost unaccountable spontaneity and unanimity of public sentiment within them, has thus far prevented the attention of Congress and the country being called most painfully to the unpardonable negligence of the national legislature in failing to provide a substitute for the time-honored policy which ...
— The Indian Question (1874) • Francis A. Walker
... God knows no evil, and when we become one with Him, through the Mediator, we shall regain our previous state. Knowledge is the effect of sin, and is perhaps destined to correct itself. Consciousness and knowledge go together. Spontaneity and life are one. Knowledge is no gain, for it gives nothing. I can only know what has been given through spontaneity. Spontaneity is unity, one; knowledge is division of being. If Adam had not been separated he would doubtless not have sinned. 'The woman that Thou gavest me said ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... Scott in regarding the translations as "much finer than the originals," but, however this may be, there is no question whatever as to the excellence of the ballads in their English form. They have vigor and swiftness of movement, grace and picturesqueness, simplicity and spontaneity. And there are exquisite lyrics amongst them, witness The Wandering Knight's Song. Mr. Lang has made a few selections from Lockhart's scattered verse in Blackwood as further illustrations of his poetic gift,—a number of admirable stanzas (in the character of ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... neither care nor danger had intruded on mankind, is the community of possessions: strife and fraud were totally excluded, and every turbulent passion was stilled by plenty and equality. Such were indeed happy times, but such times can return no more. Community of possession must include spontaneity of production; for what is obtained by labour will be of right the property of him by whose labour it is gained. And while a rightful claim to pleasure or to affluence must be procured either by slow industry or uncertain hazard, there will always be ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... the completest of Complete Letter-Writers has failed to provide are met by Mr. Parker with consummate discretion. His letters are to Senators, Shakers, Professors, Doctors, Slaveholders, Abolitionists, morbid girls, and heroic women: they are all equally rich in spontaneity, simplicity, and point. Keen criticisms of noted men, speculations upon society, homely wisdom of the household, estimates of the arts, and consolations of religion, all packed in plain and precise English, seem to have been ever ready for delivery. If Mr. Parker had not chosen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... contemporaries; he gives the main outlines of their character with a spirited touch. And yet one somehow feels that Hazlitt is not at his best in Shakespearian criticism; his eulogies savour of commonplace, and are wanting in spontaneity. There is not that warm glow of personal feeling which gives light and warmth to his style whenever he touches upon his early favourites. Perhaps he is a little daunted by the greatness of his task, and ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... training quite young children in their first stage of educational development, where their training and instruction shall be based upon their own free action or spontaneity acting under proper rules, these rules not being arbitrarily decreed, but such as must arise by logical necessity from the child's mental and bodily nature, regarding him as a member of the great human family; ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... but eminently good for all of them. And then suddenly it ceased. He made an effort, but there was no spontaneity in him. He came in quietly, never whistled, and ate very little. He began to look almost gaunt, too, and Edith, watching him with jealous, loving eyes, gave voice at last to the thought that ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Ordinarily there was a suspicion of hardness in her face but there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child which she once had been—a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity utterly ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... before Becky and Rawdon, after the clear daylight that reigned in Thackeray's description of them; they appear upon the scene, as they should, but it must be owned that the scene has an artificial look, by comparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before. And this it is exactly that shows how and where Thackeray's skill betrays him. He is not (like Dickens) naturally inclined to the theatre, the melodramatic has no fatal attraction for him; so ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... I have enjoyed it!" he said. "It is the ideal plan for this kind of work. Narrative writing is always disappointing. The moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With shorthand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table—always a most inspiring place. I expect to dictate all the rest of my life, if ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Milton, that it exhibits too constant a perfection of this kind. It sometimes forces upon us too great a sense of consciousness on the part of the composer. We miss the first sprightly runnings of verse,—the ease and sweetness of spontaneity. Milton, I think, also too often condenses ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... youngster who looked on, this love-making seemed an idyll without a disturbing breath. Joanna, though she had lost the gay spontaneity of her Paris holiday, smiled none the less adorably on Paragot and myself. She wore a little air of defiant pride when she introduced him to her acquaintance as "my cousin, Monsieur de Nerac," which was very pretty to behold. Convention forbade the announcement of their engagement ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... Indeed, I begin to think them peculiarly wise. There is the spontaneity of animals about their play, and a good deal of the unembarassed movements of animals—with something very human superadded. One reads often enough about the love-light in the eyes of lovers, and sometimes one catches sight of it. Either frank ridicule, or else great reverence, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... forgive a slight for which apology has been made, are the height of discourtesy. It is invariably true that the same spirit with which you mete out social slights will be shown you in return. Resent each one, whether intentional or a mere oversight, and you will surely crush the spontaneity out of all attentions shown you, and be met ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... There are many passages of Jane Austen which read like transcripts of actual conversations: one might suppose them to have been done by a skillful reporter. In George Eliot's books, on the other hand, the spontaneity of the actors is checked by the brooding, analytical spirit of the author: their verisimilitude is perfect, but their dramatic capabilities do not always have the free play necessary to their complete exhibition and appropriate effect. Turning now to Mr. Reade, we find ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... impression of coldness and reluctance; but she could not help it. She could not forget that he had never spoken to her of marriage till Mr. Royall had forced the word from his lips; though she had not had the strength to shake off the spell that bound her to him she had lost all spontaneity of feeling, and seemed to herself to be passively awaiting a ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... two, three, or four missions before the papal approbation? Of what consequence are the names of those early disciples who are entirely secondary in the history of the Franciscan movement? All these things took place with much more simplicity and spontaneity than is generally supposed. There is a wide difference between the plan of a house drawn up by an architect and a view of the same house painted by an artist. The second, though abounding in inexactitudes, gives a more just notion ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... He is embodied humor; fun and naive pathos alternate with the most startling rapidity in his wild but loving soul, in which the feminine element of passion generally predominates over sustained virile strength; he is spontaneity itself—and the reflective Anglo-Saxon race will learn to appreciate such promptings of our basic nature. He is happy in serving, and as ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... propose to give a description of the life at the courts of Provence. The news of it travelled north, and everywhere roused a desire to imitate it. The need of a renewed life was powerfully stirring all hearts. Men yearned for beauty and spontaneity, for passionate life, unprecedented and romantic. This was especially the case in the north, in France and in Germany, and above all in Wales, the country of the imaginative and highly-gifted Celts. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... button on your waistcoat. Fin is the unexpected, the ever-bubbling, and the ever-joyous; restless as a school-boy ten minutes before recess, quick as a grasshopper and lively as a cricket. He is, besides, brimful and spilling over with a quality of fun that is geyserlike in its spontaneity and intermittent flow. When he laughs, which he does every other minute, the man ploughing across the river, or the boy fishing, or the girl driving the cow, turn their heads and smile. They can't help it. In this respect he is better than a dozen farmers ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... but yet only an illustration of one of the ordinary phases of human nature after all, as father would have said, I thought, this reflection passing through my mind with that instantaneous spontaneity with which such fancies do occur to one, as Rooney placed me in my assigned position. Then, recalling my mind to the present, I noticed that Matthews, my whilom fellow apprentice and lately promoted ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... individual. It must be joyfully done: there must enter into work the vitality of a happy spirit. It must be spontaneous. This is why machine-work can never be thoroughly beautiful: it lacks the spontaneity of life. The hand never makes two things alike. With the mood, the weather, the occasion, there are little touches added which a machine cannot give. Life always varies and ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... murmured, but without spontaneity. It was evident that the doldrums were very real with him, for he made no effort to take part in the ensuing conversation, in spite of the fact that the subject was one which might have aroused him ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... minds. He could not have made Slieve-na-Mon nor Slieve Fua incredible and phantastic enough, because that prolonged study of a past age, necessary before he could separate them from modern association, would have changed the spontaneity of his mood to something learned, ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... while I was so extremely pleased with these particulars that I thought I could never be weary of beholding them: then dropped of a sudden into a causeless sadness; and then, with the same swiftness and spontaneity, arrived at the conclusion that I was drunk and ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... occasion to express or even to feel regret," he answered, and his eyes twinkled delightfully; "if youth lost its spontaneity it would at one and the same moment lose its charm. Did your cry refer to this?" He pointed with his umbrella to a scrimmage which was taking place a few yards away ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... heads and emphatically declared that they did not believe that any such thing had happened. And when further asked for their opinion as to what had happened, they simply answered that they did not know what to think. But to Harry it seemed that there was a certain lack of spontaneity in this reply, which caused him to doubt whether the speakers were quite ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... you and I get each day just as much as, by putting our hand to the plow of activity, we are able to encompass by faithful plodding. Hard work is the price of all that is valuable. All the great strides in the world's achievements were made possible only by forced activity and prolonged effort. Spontaneity is a foreign element in the process of healthy and rugged development. The spider spins its web and the morning bespangles it with dew, creating a thing of beauty, but valueless. It would require the entire existence of several hundred silkworms to produce ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... rest of the day for her visit. If she had kissed the children out of policy Mrs. Jocelyn would have been resentfully aware of the fact; but they were "kissable" children, and no one knew it better than the fond mother, who was won completely by the spontaneity of the act. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... gracious than the compliments passed between them in their subsequent correspondence. There are two published letters from Holbach in Mr. Hedgecock's recent study of Garrick and his French friends, excellent examples of the happy spontaneity and sympathy that were characteristic of French sociability in the eighteenth century. [19:27] Holbach in turn spent several ...
— Baron d'Holbach • Max Pearson Cushing
... instinct for society-making among children and youth lies one of the greatest opportunities for the prevention of crime and immorality the world has ever known. To turn to good ends this spontaneity of action, to divert into channels of usefulness these currents of child-activity, will be to add immensely to the equipment of mankind in the struggle with vice. A certain bishop of the early Christian Church is credited with ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... physico-chemical phenomena on the one hand, and vital phenomena on the other. At present, however, we assuredly know of none; and I think we shall exercise a wise humility in confessing that, for us at least, this successive assumption of different states (external conditions remaining the same)—this spontaneity of action—if I may use a term which implies more than I would be answerable for—which constitutes so vast and plain a practical distinction between living bodies and those which do not live, is an ultimate fact; indicating as such, the existence ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... Furnival's young girl. He measured the difference by the power she had of making Furnival—as Straker put it—different from himself. She had made him grave and quiet, too. Not that he had by any means lost his engaging spontaneity; only the spontaneous, the ungovernable thing about him was the divine shyness and the wonder which he ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... of all art: it is true that they began by recognizing, as perhaps no other revolutionary government would, the importance and spontaneity of the artistic impulse, and therefore while they controlled or destroyed the counter-revolutionary in all other social activities, they allowed the artist, whatever his political creed, complete freedom to continue his work. Moreover, as regards ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... does not mean memorising. Memorising utterly destroys the freedom of reminiscence, takes away the spontaneity, and substitutes a mastery of form for a mastery of essence. It means, rather, a perfect grasp of the gist of the story, with sufficient familiarity with its form to determine the manner of its telling. The easiest way to obtain this mastery is, I think, to analyse ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... without a reflection beyond the thought that money was in his hand; and wondering at the apparition of the curricle, Evan was joined by Harry Jocelyn, and Harry linked his arm in Evan's and plunged with extraordinary spontaneity and candour into the state of his money affairs. What the deuce he was to do for money he did not know. From the impressive manner in which he put it, it appeared to be one of Nature's great problems ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... may be jotted down and distributed over the days of the week for use in due rotation. Such schemes, however, if drawn up and used, should be revised from time to time, and not suffered to become a mechanical burden or a legal bondage. There should be freedom and spontaneity in a Christian's prayers. It is well to have rules, and to try not to be prevented by mere slackness from keeping them. But it is important to see to it that the self-imposed rule is so framed as to prove genuinely conducive to reality in prayer, and suitably ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... interesting stranger had made his appearance at Waddy; he was believed to be a drover, and he was on the spree and 'shouting' with spontaneity and freedom. His horse, a fine upstanding bay, stood saddled and bridled under McMahon's shed at the Drovers' Arms by day and night. His behaviour in drink was original and erratic. He would fraternise ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... agent, and thought of it as rising, resting, waking, expanding, growing old, shrinking, becoming atrophied, or resuscitating; he described its life, and specified all its actions by the strangest words in our language, speaking of its spontaneity, its strength, and all its qualities with a kind of intuition which enabled him to recognize all the manifestations of its ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... bright audacity, unconventionality, and high spirits, which did not, however, amuse him as greatly as his later suspicion that she was playing a self-elected role, often with difficulty, opposition, and feverishness, rather than spontaneity. He remembered how he had watched her in the obtrusive assumption of a new fashion, in some reckless departure from an old one, or in some ostentatious disregard of certain hard and set rules of St. Kentigern; but that it never seemed to him that she was the happier for it. He even fancied ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... two is not one of family or race, but a purely accidental external resemblance; the result of some strange fancy and intellectual want in the poet, whose powerful imagination, while having recourse only to his own spontaneity for the creation of ideal beings and types, yet required to rest always on reality, for painting the material world and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... all convention in politics and morality and overstep that union between religion and the State which has for thousands of years supported society. According to his views, the practical wisdom of men could not have a higher object than the introduction into society of the greatest spontaneity and freedom, but precisely because of this one should safeguard as sacred and irrefragable the natural laws of society—one should respect the existing order of things and, continually verifying it, inculcate ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... marked degrees of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... themes,—the hayfield, the chimney-nook, milking-time, the blossoming of "high-boughed hedges"; but it is not every one who has sung out of the fullness of his heart and with a naive delight in that of which he sung: and so by reason of their faithfulness to every-day life and to nature, and by their spontaneity and tenderness, his lyrics, fables, and eclogues appeal to cultivated readers as well as to the rustics whose quaint speech he made ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and it is above all the negation of the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... gentlemen have independence enough to set aside, in their own houses, some of the more disagreeable features of this conventionalism, and the success of two or three, who held weekly soirees through the winter, on a more free and unrestrained plan, may in the end restore somewhat of naturalness and spontaneity to ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... expression of the girl's face changed. All the animation seemed to leave her manner. For a moment she clung instinctively to her companion. Afterwards she looked at him no more. She came to Saton at once, and held out her hand without any show of reluctance, yet wholly without spontaneity. It was as though she was ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... any sort of competition in any respect; and therefore all the brood of heart-burnings and hatreds, engendered on Earth by the strife of man with man, is unknown to the people of Mars, save from the study of our planet. When I asked if there were not, after all, a lack of spontaneity, of sense of freedom, in leading lives fixed in all details beforehand, I was reminded that there was no difference in that respect between the lives of the people of Earth and of Mars, both alike being according to God's will in every particular. We knew ...
— The Blindman's World - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... I shrink from the notion of a formal shaping out of design in any great life, so unlike the endless freedom and spontaneity of nature (and He is the Nature of nature), I cannot help observing that his first miracle was one of creation—at least, is to our eyes more like creation than almost any other—for who can say that it was creation, not knowing ...
— Miracles of Our Lord • George MacDonald
... original composition and not a translation of Valmiki's work is one of the great religious poems of the world and not unworthy to be set beside Paradise Lost. The sustained majesty of diction and exuberance of ornament are accompanied by a spontaneity and vigour rare in any literature, especially in Asia. The poet is not embellishing a laboured theme: he goes on and on because his emotion bursts forth again and again, diversifying the same topic with an inexhaustible variety of style and metaphor. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... not a too light, off-color, gleaming gray, but more the tone of slate, deep when one chanced to find oneself peering deep into them. And they were old. Any spontaneity of youth which might have flashed from them at one time had faded entirely and left a sort of wistful sophistry behind, an almost plaintive hunger which made the pity of his shoulder-stoop—still mercifully ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... have conceived "Patroclus," nor could she herself hope to complete it successfully at any other period of her life. Any earlier she would have been too immature to adapt herself to its demands; any later she would have lost the spontaneity, the jeunesse, and the freshness which were to contribute ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... clapped over the unruly mouth. When she promised to speak lower she was allowed to proceed. "But think of missing the court room scene! I am sure she went through a Lady Macbeth act and tried to stab poor old Sour Sandy!" Again the spontaneity of Dozia illustrated the talk, and she made a jab at Jane with the ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... confidence and readiness with which these soldier-students of music sang at sight the most difficult intonations, major and minor, the facility with which they read in all the keys, and, finally, the certainty and spontaneity with which they all, without exception, recognized and named various sounds vocalized, showed clearly that they possessed a very superior knowledge of intonation. All the pieces which they sung were rendered with irreproachable correctness, though the professor did not beat the time, except ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... selection. Creative work, when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... corner of New England where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. One of the prettiest, sweetest, and quaintest of old-fashioned love stories * * * A rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity. A dainty volume, especially ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... have as little of truth as of imagination in their details. The basis of the system is a declaration of the eternity of matter, and its submission at remote intervals to decay and re-formation; but this and the organisation of animal life are but the results of spontaneity and procession, not the products of will and design on the part of an all ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... rather as an almost spontaneous uprising of the people under several independent leaders, among whom men like Hans Tausen, Jorgen Sadolin, Claus Mortensen, Hans Spandemager and others merely stand out as the most prominent. And it was probably this very spontaneity which invested the movement with such an irresistible force that within in a few years it was able to overthrow an establishment that had exerted a powerful influence over the country ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... what Madame Merle had been—deeply, deeply, deeply. Isabel's Aunt Lydia had made this discovery long before, and had mentioned it to her niece; but Isabel had flattered herself at this time that she had a much richer view of things, especially of the spontaneity of her own career and the nobleness of her own interpretations, than poor stiffly-reasoning Mrs. Touchett. Madame Merle had done what she wanted; she had brought about the union of her two friends; a reflection which ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... Alumnae) have seriously discussed the question whether the college course in literature made them nearer or farther from creating literature themselves. The Editor of Harper's Monthly has recorded that "the spontaneity and freedom of subjective construction" in certain American authors was only made possible, probably, by their having escaped an early academic training. The Century Magazine has been so struck with the fact that hardly a single writer ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... one side of his nature as much as he was hypertrophied upon the other. Courage, obedience, and endurance were developed in excess; but the free play of passion and thought, the graces and arts of life, all that springs from the spontaneity of nature, were crushed out of existence under this stern and rigid rule. "None of them," says Plutarch, an enthusiastic admirer of the Spartan polity "none of them was left alone to live as he chose; but passing their time in the city as though it were ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... is the best maker of mosaic. The actual craft of construction is similar everywhere, but the use of what we may regard as the pigment has possibilities similar to the colours of a painter. The manipulation being of necessity slow, it is more difficult to convey the idea of spontaneity in design than it is in ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... unlike the other arts, lacks any model in the realm of nature, it has had to work out its own laws, and its spontaneity and directness are the result. It has not become imitative, utilitarian or bound by arbitrary conventions. As Berlioz says in the Grotesques de la Musique: "Music exists by itself; it has no need of poetry, and if every human language were to perish, it would be ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... these conditions by emphasizing the unity of the universe; while in those periods in which established order, system, and authority were disturbed, the philosophy of the time emphasizes the idea of multiplicity as opposed to the unity of the universe, laying stress on freedom, creative action, spontaneity of effort, and the reality of change. There can be little doubt that this is the chief reason why Bergson's philosophy has found such an amount of acceptance in a comparatively short period. The response to his thought may be explained very largely by this, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... descriptions of men as the leaders and aggressors in love is not fiction but the common fact of real life. Man's tendency towards leadership in love is not scientifically explained by any superficial assumption that established social conventions have repressed an original spontaneity of women. On the contrary, there are the best of physiological and psychological reasons for believing that the social conventions have arisen as an expression of masculine aggressiveness and natural tendency towards leadership in affairs of the heart. The accepted fact is that many young ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... retain the many advantages of the uncancelled ancient. Thus gently does a maternal Old England let them down. Projectors of Companies, Directors, Founders; Railway magnates, actual kings and nobles (though one cannot yet persuade old reverence to do homage with the ancestral spontaneity to the uncrowned, uncoroneted, people of our sphere); holders of Shares in gold mines, Shares in Afric's blue mud of the glittering teeth we draw for English beauty to wear in the ear, on the neck, at the wrist; Bankers and wives ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... has become so clear that he can express it in a less real way. Few children fail to draw and paint reasonably well when afforded this opportunity that should be denied to none. In order to secure the best results the teacher should be careful not to repress spontaneity by criticising too severely; on the other hand she should induce the child to make such comparisons of his work with his image and with the object when present, as to prevent the formation of careless ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... stretched out, his hands applauding in a soundless way. Beneath the sword of Louis the Martyr, the great treasure of the parish, presented to this church by Marie Antoinette, sat Monsieur Garon, his thin fingers pressed to his mouth as if to stop a sound. Presently, out of pure spontaneity, there ran through the church like ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... her, rather puzzled by her sudden change of attitude since their last interview, was forced to admit mentally that her reasoning, if it lacked spontaneity, was, at all events, indisputably sound; and while he found himself doubting whether the victim was not better versed in worldliness than he had at first suspected, he still felt a curious reluctance which, though he was half ashamed of his delicacy, prevented him from suggesting that, sentimental ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... was asleep in the bed next his. Like a pageant, he passed, in review scene after scene, turning it over, and wondering at significances that he had not before, imagined. He recalled their first meeting, that instantaneous attraction, and he asked himself what had caused it. Her spontaneity, freshness, and utter lack of conventionality, he supposed, but that did not seem to explain all. He wondered at the change that had even then come about in himself that he should have been so entranced by her, He went over his early hopes and fears; he thought again ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... artist seems to be poured forth freely and spontaneously. There is no evidence of calculation, of carefully directed effort, of attention to the workings of the voice, in the tones of a perfect singer. Yet if the accepted idea of Voice Culture is correct, this semblance of spontaneity in the use of the voice can result only from careful and incessant attention to mechanical rules. That the voice must be managed or handled in some way neither spontaneous nor instinctive, is the settled conviction of almost every authority on the subject. All authorities believe ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... goal, must have determined the character of his part-writing. In spite of his remarks in Playford's book, it is plain that he looked at music horizontally as well as vertically, and constructed it so that it is good no matter which way it is considered. His counterpoint has a freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school. Though he was pleased with musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill. Handel frequently adopted his free ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... spiritual things. Treffinger had been a man who lived after his imagination; and his mind, his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In the Marriage of Phaedra MacMaster found the ultimate expression of this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger's ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... failure, Kropotkin rightly praised the qualities of which the American working people had just given proof: 'This movement will have certainly impressed profoundly the proletariat of Europe and excited its admiration. Its spontaneity, its simultaneousness at so many distant points communicating only by telegraph, the aid given by the workers of different trades, the resolute character of the uprising from the beginning, call forth all our sympathies, excite our admiration, and awaken our hopes.... But ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... be a certain period of self-consciousness in the process of finding our true self-control, but it is for the sake of an end which brings us more and more fully into a state of happy, quiet spontaneity. If we are working carefully for true self-control we shall welcome an unexpected searchlight from another mind. If the searchlight brings into prominence a bit of irritation that we did not know was there, so much the better. ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... point of view, society, or the collective man, is especially distinguished from the individual by spontaneity of action,—in other words, instinct. While the individual obeys, or imagines he obeys, only those motives of which he is fully conscious, and upon which he can at will decline or consent to act; while, in a word, he thinks himself ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... a spontaneous ripple of mirth, the full measure of her relief. "Goodness," she said with utter spontaneity. "There's certainly never been a monster like that in this house, has ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... sonatas on her eyebrow—to borrow Peter's variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare's "write sonnets on his mistress's eyebrow"—and, indeed, he knew she could be no fit mistress for him—this starveling drudge, with passive passions, meek, accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out of her. The women of his dreams were quite other—beautiful, voluptuous, full of the joy of life, tremulous with poetry and lofty thought, with dark amorous orbs that flashed responsive to his magic ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... any one who is acquainted with the history of science will admit that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... was afterward evident. It was during this time that they managed to identify themselves completely with their grandfather in the estimation of the people of Morningquest. Charming manners were a family trait, and the Heavenly Twins had always been popular in the city on their own account; their spontaneity and extreme affability having usually been held to balance their monkey tricks. Hamilton House, however, was ten miles distant from Morningquest, and they had hitherto been thought of as Hamilton-Wells; but after that year ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... he came into the room, she hardened again in spite of herself. She simply could not display her feelings. Upbringing, habit, environment were too much for her, and spontaneity was checked. Had she been alone with a dog she would have spent herself passionately on the dog, imaginatively transforming the dog into Louis; but the sight of Louis in person congealed her, so that she became a hard mass with just a tiny ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... gift and his growing skill, and he found a welcome fast enough. Before he had advanced beyond his stripling youth, his untutored facility had gained a rude mastery over the instrument; he played with a sort of fascination and spontaneity that endeared his art to his uncritical audiences, and his endowment was held as something wonderful. And now it was that Laure-lia, hearing him, far away in the open air, play once a plaintive, melodic strain, fugue-like with the elfin echoes, felt a strange soothing in the ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... attended Normal; but when she found that she was doomed to finish her last year at school under Nancy Ellen, to work double so that her sister might go to school early and remain late, coming home tired and with lessons to prepare for the morrow, some of the spontaneity left Kate's efforts. ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... spontaneously given, then our internal intuition would be intellectual. This consciousness in man requires an internal perception of the manifold representations which are previously given in the subject; and the manner in which these representations are given in the mind without spontaneity, must, on account of this difference (the want of spontaneity), be called sensibility. If the faculty of self-consciousness is to apprehend what lies in the mind, it must all act that and can in this way alone produce an intuition of self. But the form of this intuition, which lies ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... art of helplessness. That, with other social graces, would perhaps come in good time. She would soon acquire the habits and ways of her friends and acquaintances, without his trying to force upon her a series of affectations, which would only embarrass her and cloud the perfect frankness and spontaneity of her nature. Of one thing he was quite assured—that whatever mistakes Sheila might make in society they would never render her ridiculous. Strangers might not know the absolute sincerity of her every word and act, which gave her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... spoke of Whigs as rascals, and maintained that the first Whig was the devil. If his intellect was wider, his heart was as warm as Johnson's, and in conversation he merited the generous applause and warm emulation of his friends. Johnson was never tired of praising the extraordinary readiness and spontaneity of Burke's conversation. "If a man," he said, "went under a shed at the same time with Burke to avoid a shower, he would say, 'This is an extraordinary man.' Or if Burke went into a stable to see his horse dressed, the ostler would say, 'We have had an extraordinary man here.'" ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... the more conscious of the two engaged in such a match is bound in the end to be less happy in her discoveries, less spontaneous in her inventions, and therefore less successful in her results. For natural spontaneity is quickly felt and appreciated by a group of fellow-beings, as is also the element of vexation and overanxiousness, which Cleopatra was beginning to reveal despite all her efforts ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... in Shelby, had her spirits risen and her eyes cleared to his great merits as she had heard them extolled by people of worth and intellectual standing? Alas, no. There had been something in his look—a lack of spontaneity which had not fitted ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and people break down some established form, without any qualms about the capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order, intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be laid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the creation of order where it did not ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... culminated at Athens. Sophocles had every element of character and person to fascinate the Greeks,—beauty of face, symmetry of form, skill in gymnastics, calmness and dignity of manner, a cheerful and amiable temper, a ready wit, a meditative piety, a spontaneity of genius, an affectionate admiration for talent, and patriotic devotion to his country. His tragedies, by the universal consent of the best critics, are the perfection of the Greek drama; and they moreover maintain that he has no rival, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... constant presence of a supervisor who is adversely critical may do injury to the efficiency of a good teacher. No one can teach as well under disapprobation as he can where he feels that his hands are free; and so in some places supervision may act as a wet blanket. It may suppress spontaneity, initiative, and real life in the school. But this is only an abuse of a good thing, and probably does not occur frequently. In any event, the exception would only prove the rule. Supervision is as necessary in a system of schools as it is in a ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy |
